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Since when do HN members need someone to tell them to upvote or downvote a story? In my opinion this is just herd mentality. If the people like it, they'll upv
by cool-RR 18y ago
Since when do HN members need someone to tell them to upvote or downvote a story? In my opinion this is just herd mentality.
If the people like it, they'll upvote it. If they don't, they'll downvote it. No need for anyone to direct them one way or the other.
- axod 18y agoYou're right. If you wish the natural events to unfold, and hacker news to turn into reddit, then trust the mob.
- cool-RR 18y agoNo, I don't want HN to turn into Reddit. Who are you calling "the mob" here? The readers of HN who vote by their own opinion? I agree that comments in the spirit of: "This submission should be downvoted because x, y, z" are valuable and help to preserve HN. But comments in the spirit of "This submission should be downvoted", without an explanation, are nothing but herd mentality.
- axod 18y agoThe article was killed in any event, so it doesn't really matter. The moderators agreed it was lame.
- swombat 18y agoI didn't think there was much need to explain why this submission should be flagged. I have certain expectations of the reader's ability to come to obvious conclusions :-)
- cool-RR 18y agoIf there wasn't a need to explain that it should be flagged, why was there a need to say at all that it should be flagged? If people are smart enough to understand the reason the submission should be flagged, aren't they smart enough to understand on their own that it should be flagged? Also, I personally did not understand why it was flagged.
- swombat 18y agoI didn't say it should be flagged, I merely wondered how that article could possibly have obtained 6 upvotes.
- cool-RR 18y agoOkay. You say: "I didn't think there was much need to explain why this submission should be flagged." Please explain to me why it was flagged.
- swombat 18y agoBecause it was lame and not worth reading.
- cool-RR 18y agoWhy does HN need its moderators to decide what's lame and what's not? I agree that HN needs moderators, and that they should be able to kill submissions, comments and/or users. But I understood that it's intended mostly for spam, or flame wars, or illegal content, etcetera. Whenever an authority figure bans something because it is "lame" or "wrong" or "not worth reading", it lights up a red flag for me. Do you understand the problem here?
- swombat 18y agoI'm not a moderator. I didn't kill it. I just flagged it. A number of other people did so too. And so the moderators looked at it and came to the similar conclusion that this was not worth having on the front page. So, it was not a single authority figure acting by themselves, it was a collective decision.
- cool-RR 18y agoOkay, it was collective. But it doesn't solve the problem.