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The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Dow
by pg 18y ago
The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.
We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners.
- codinghorror 18y ago> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. Honest question, and I do not mean this as a flame, because generally I quite enjoy Hacker News. How, exactly, is the current top-rated story on HN, "How to Stop the Drug Wars" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507509 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507509 ) related to.. news of hacking?
- wfarr 18y agoHacker News isn't so much just about programming, but things that are interesting to programmers. It's entirely possible that the programmers that visit HN are interested in that topic.
- codinghorror 18y agoRegardless, I think it's a terrible story for a site about programming topics, and I would absolutely vote it down. But I can't.
- johns 18y agoFlag it if you believe it to be off-topic.
- codinghorror 18y agoWhere's the UI to flag a story as off-topic? I don't see anything on the article page itself, and the FAQ ( http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ) doesn't mention anything about flagging?
- johns 18y agoOn the article page, this is what I see: http://screencast.com/t/Wqa1zmMJ http://screencast.com/t/Wqa1zmMJ I don't know if there is a rep threshold for flagging, but I wouldn't be surprised.
- kylec 18y agoYou apparently need at least 51 karma to flag a post. (The number may not be exact, it's not an official source. Also, it says "comments" not "posts", so there may be a different threshold for that) source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396
- codinghorror 18y agoShouldn't these rep limits, and the information about them, be codified into the FAQ?
- allenbrunson 18y agokarma limits change all the time, due to "inflation." it used to be pretty difficult to get to 100 points. these days you could get there in a day or two, if you're determined.
- lacker 18y agoNo. Hacker News doesn't have to work the same way as Stack Overflow. Not only are these limits fluctuating and not really public, HN relies on human editors a lot. That's okay; the models are really different. Stack Overflow needs to scale more because to be useful, there need to be thousands of questions asked every day, and every question needs to be able to get a response. Hacker News can be useful to me even if it only gets a hundred new stories a day, and it's not really a problem if many stories get axed for a bad reason.
- gruseom 18y agoThis isn't "a site about programming topics". Read the guidelines. Or even just the comment you were replying to.
- codinghorror 18y agoAre you and I reading the same guidelines? http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, Isn't "How to stop the drug wars" about politics? I know it is exactly the kind of article I expect to find on Reddit. I was surprised to see it on the front page here. From the linked article: > That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled. This is not an article about politics?
- rms 18y ago"most" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507890 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507890
- codinghorror 18y agoIsn't this exactly why downvoting should be a bit more prevalent than it is now? For marginally topical (and in my opinion completely off-topic) political stories like that? Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 18y agoRight now only the people who upvote it get to have a say. Not so. The people who flag it also get to have a say. And if you observed the site more closely you would notice that their say is quite effective.
- axod 18y agoYou're free to flag it, and downvote everyone who commented on it :/ I agree with you, stories about drugs aren't what I come to HN for.
- ars 18y agoAnd that is EXACTLY the point! You can't vote it down, and that's a very good thing. I've been friended by some people on digg - and they constantly shout battles at me: bury this, digg that. The bury brigades have gone to work on this, etc, etc. You can't do that here, someone who hates a topic simply can not affect it. All you can do is say there are X number of people who are interested in something. It doesn't matter that some people hate the topic, or are opposed to it. They have no voice. Example: If you have a very controversial topic that 50% of people agree with, and 50% of people disagree with. You will never see it if you have downvoting. But since there is only upvoting, you will. And I think that that is very very important, and it's one of the reasons this site is so much better than digg and reddit. I've always thought that digg should frontpage also controversial stories, not just upvoted ones, but ones that have an almost even ratio of down/up votes. And BTW you don't loose half of the information about votes for a topic - the algorithm here is that stories fall down over time, so time itself basically acts as a constant down vote. You have upvoting to counter that, and ignoring a topic to assist that. Bill Gates once said something like: if I only read the stories that I am interested in, I'll never learn anything new - so I make a point of reading the entire newspaper. (I hope I remembered the quote correctly, it was from before the internet.)
- whughes 18y agoIt's a valid point, though. At what point is the line drawn? Political issues often result in uncivil discussion. There is also probably significant audience crossover with reddit that caused that post to rise up. Hackers may have an interest in libertarianism or economics, but does that mean that this site should become one about Ron Paul if people feel that way? Editor control should be used to put a stop to that, IMO. Democracy is great, but it went too far with Reddit. HN would become much less useful to me if it went in that direction.
- wfarr 18y ago> It's a valid point, though. At what point is the line drawn? That wasn't really his point so much as yours. ;) > Political issues often result in uncivil discussion. There is also probably significant audience crossover with reddit that caused that post to rise up. Hackers may have an interest in libertarianism or economics, but does that mean that this site should become one about Ron Paul if people feel that way? That is in fact a good question to ask, and I wasn't precluding it from being asked, but rather reiterating the stated goals for Hacker News. Such questions ought to be asked.
- jhancock 18y agoThe reason political issues often result in uncivil discussion, me thinks, is we have not spent enough time in a forum (online or off) that demands civility in such discussions. If HN can provide both (1) topics members want to discuss along with (2) its approach of keeping the discussion civil, this seems a very good thing. I am a big fan of hacking social and economic problems. If a topic is not of interest I ignore it. A thread rarely stays on the front page more than a day or two. I originally came to HN for Web 2.0 news. But things have evolved.
- trominos 18y agoI don't think it's even that anymore. Hacker News is now pretty much, "Interesting things, plus a lot of programmers use the site." Which is good for everybody who uses HN as something other than a place to get tips about programming, which I expect is the vast majority of the HN user population.
- tptacek 18y agoNews for hackers doesn't mean news about hackers.
- pg 18y ago"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting. What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be." http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- potatolicious 18y agoThat seems almost reddit-like. Reddit is also (ostensibly) for news items of intellectual value... but look how that turned out :)
- whughes 18y agoThe comment implementation, however, does not appear to be substantially different from Reddit's aside from greater editor control. That means that lame downvoting is possible. If people start to downvote those they disagree with then we begin to see enforced groupthink. (Funny sidenote: In forums with alleged [real or fake] groupthink tendencies, like Reddit, it appears that referring to and criticizing the groupthink is very often voted up by the community. This is why I believe that groupthink emerges naturally as a result of the availability of the downvote. No one notices what's going on and attempts to correct their own behavior.) Killing articles and comments solves the problem of lame articles and comments. However, it does not solve the problem of lame voting hiding useful comments. I suspect that this problem will require a solution soon; I myself have noticed an increasing trend toward Redditism here. Additionally, I believe that the comment system is probably even more important than the article system. In some sites sites, including Hacker News, I get more from the comments than I do from the articles. Thus, ensuring that comments are good and fairly balanced is just as important to me as ensuring that stories are good.
- DarkShikari 18y agoI don't think Hacker News' system kills lame articles. I have seen obvious troll blog posts and such reach the top of HN repeatedly. The reason this happens is because of the following. Let us say that an ordinary story that is completely relevant to Reddit and is worth reading is upvoted by 50 people and downvoted by 10. This gets the story +40. Now, let us take a very controversial story, say, a blog post on how much git sucks that is obviously fishing for links. This story gets upvoted by many more people, say, 100 people... and downvoted by 300. It doesn't get near the front page. Now, take the same on HN. The first story gets +50, the second gets +100, despite the majority of people believing it should not be on the front page. This is not to say that the Reddit system is better, but rather that the HN system is not perfect.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoUsually lame articles are gone within a day. You can tell when all the comments object and eventually people flag and editors go "okay, we'll remove it."
- DarkShikari 18y agoMost articles are gone within a day as they fall off the front page.
- redrobot5050 18y agoYeah, that is correct, but lame articles usually only make it to the "new" page, and never the "real frontpage". I've submitted to HN 2 or 3 times now, and my articles have been killed for lameness. (In my defense I thought they were good articles. But the system appears to work from my experience.)
- Xichekolas 18y agoExcept in the second case, even if only a third of the people take the trouble to flag the article, it would have 100 points and 100 flaggings. Hopefully something getting flagged that much would be killed pretty quickly. I like making a distinction between something that I simply don't find insightful and something that is actually trolling/spammy/false. In HN's case, my lack of an upvote is equivalent of not finding something insightful... my flagging is an indication of the latter.
- jlouis 18y agoAnother thing worthy of mention is that if you only have upvotes the ranking of articles turn out to be considerably simpler. Ranking with both up and down votes is a lot harder.
- e40 18y agoI agree. Reddit started to get really messed up when the "silly pictures" posts were allowed to dominate the front page. Those posts attracted more of the same, and the change in the comments that followed should not have been a shock to anyone--the same people upvoting the picture of the "jesus toast" were the same ones making stupid comments. However, all of this is missing the main point: for a site to be popular (lots of eye balls) and be able to sell itself to a large media company for a large sum of cash, it needs to appeal to more than a small, coherent community. Reddit changed because their founders wanted to cash out. HN isn't changing because you have no (apparent) goal of cashing out, and are thus willing to keep HN as it is.