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> 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

> 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 ago
Hacker 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 ago
  Regardless, 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 ago
    Flag it if you believe it to be off-topic.
    - codinghorror 18y ago
      Where'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 ago
        On 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 ago
        You 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 ago
        Shouldn't these rep limits, and the information about them, be codified into the FAQ?
        allenbrunson 18y ago
        karma 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 ago
        No. 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.
      - kajecounterhack 18y ago
        Yeah, I think it's karma. oh well, just get some karma and then talk a little more about it, eh? I think I've flagged something....once. Yup. Most everything on the front page is interesting, the most interesting of which I upvote, and the few things that aren't I just don't read and let die. the front page changes enough to allow me to do that anyway.
  - gruseom 18y ago
    This isn't "a site about programming topics". Read the guidelines. Or even just the comment you were replying to.
    - codinghorror 18y ago
      Are 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 ago
        Isn'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 ago
        Right 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 ago
    You'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 ago
    And 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    News 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 ago
  That seems almost reddit-like. Reddit is also (ostensibly) for news items of intellectual value... but look how that turned out :)

wfarr 18y ago

Hacker 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 ago
Regardless, 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 ago
  Flag it if you believe it to be off-topic.
  - codinghorror 18y ago
    Where'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 ago
      On 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 ago
      You 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 ago
        Shouldn't these rep limits, and the information about them, be codified into the FAQ?
        allenbrunson 18y ago
        karma 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 ago
        No. 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.
    - kajecounterhack 18y ago
      Yeah, I think it's karma. oh well, just get some karma and then talk a little more about it, eh? I think I've flagged something....once. Yup. Most everything on the front page is interesting, the most interesting of which I upvote, and the few things that aren't I just don't read and let die. the front page changes enough to allow me to do that anyway.
- gruseom 18y ago
  This isn't "a site about programming topics". Read the guidelines. Or even just the comment you were replying to.
  - codinghorror 18y ago
    Are 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 ago
        Isn'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 ago
        Right 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 ago
  You'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 ago
  And 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 ago
It'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 ago
  The 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 ago
I 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 ago
  News 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 ago
That seems almost reddit-like. Reddit is also (ostensibly) for news items of intellectual value... but look how that turned out :)