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Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down
What's the main difference on the quality of itens classification using a voting system that allow only up votes versus up and down votes (digg vs. reddit)? YC.news changed from up and down to only up. Why?
- Alex3917 19y agoOne thing I noticed from K5 is that having both options leads to lobbying and information cascades. That is, if one or two early voters post comments saying the article is really good or really bad then that hugely affects whether later voters hit +1 or -1. With only the option to vote up, people might point out flaws in the article or praise it, but the comments are more intellectual and less designed to influence the voting of others. Of course K5 is much worse because the design strongly encourages people to vote one way or another, whereas on this site the bad articles will quickly disappear if people just ignore them.
- pg 19y agoI noticed that on reddit the voting on my essays always had a higher proportion of downvotes after 10 minutes than 10 hours. I know there are reflexive upvoters as well as reflexive downvoters, but from the way the ratio changed over time it seemed that a higher percentage of downvoters were reflexive than upvoters. If so then the downarrow injects more stupidity into the system than the uparrow. Shorter version: downvotes are more likely to be thoughtless.
- axod 19y agoCould always have a downvote, but weight it as far less than an upvote. Personally I miss having the option of a downvote. Yes I agree downvotes can be an uninformed reflex, but removing any voice of disagreement seems overly harsh. I'd say have upvotes that count as 10 points, and downvotes that count as 1 point or something like that.
- pg 19y agoThat's not a bad idea.
- dood 19y agoAn alternative would be using flags, like reddit's 'report', the idea being you only use them for stuff that is really unsuitable, like spam, trolls and stupid stuff.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- oditogre 19y agoI disagree, as noted further up the thread. Preventing downvotes doesn't remove the dissenting opinion. In fact, it allows and encourages it. Downvotes allow groupthink to silence disagreement. If you disagree with something, instead of downvoting, post a comment explaining your position.
- derefr 19y agoLikewise if you agree with something--then posts can just be sorted by comment count. Of course, it could be said that the upvote button is just a collapsed and made-convenient form of replying "Me too!" Wouldn't it be interesting, then, if instead of editing a metadatum, clicking the arrow made a duplicate of the post (or, rather, a Post object with the votee as its prototype), which then stacked under the original... "'A stacked comment' posted by bob, joe, fred"
- axod 19y agoSo what happens if something stupid or banal gets voted up to the front page. What if it's something that I don't think is relevant or useful. Should I upvote every other article to express my opinion? :) People who agree with an article/think it's important/useful have an immediate way to express that in a useful way - an upvote. You don't have the same capability if you strongly disagree with an article, see it as unimportant, not relevant, or off-topic. I still think that's a shame.
- kirubakaran 19y agoWon't it be better for ycnews to allow downvotes and silently not count them against a submission but use them for other purposes like measuring thoughtlessness of a user / analyzing the impulse-response of the crowd here etc?
- jgrahamc 19y agoThe entire up vote/down vote thing needs to go away. Voting on a story should be related to an action that the user is taking which implies an up/down vote. For example, in my Facebook application Wildfire stories are up voted only if you pass then on to your friends. As you mentioned to me yesterday, delicious/popular is interesting because it's based on pages people bookmarked for themselves. John.
- Goladus 19y agoI think the hardest part is finding what behavior to track. Click-through is obviously bad. Bookmarking and passing to friends will also slant the stories in a way that isn't necessarily good. I have a lot of friends that don't really care about hacker news, and tend to bookmark more reference-type material. Comments are useful, but that slants towards controversial topics.
- derefr 19y agoSimple idea someone might want to found something on: provide a little highlighter extension for browsers/in a wraparound frame/as a bookmarklet. Track pages people highlight; title and describe them as the few most highlighted words.
- Xichekolas 19y agoNot sure if I'm the exception to the rule, but I definitely highlight random crap while I read a page (just something for my mouse hand to do)... so I'd ruin your stats in a mean way.
- waleedka 19y agoI do the same. Mostly as a way to quickly find where I was reading after a distraction.
- dood 19y agoIn a small, smart community like this, an explicit upvote is a hard quality metric to beat.
- imsteve 19y agoThe best reason is because downvotes piss people off. They have been the cause of more flamewars on reddit than anything else. When you know you are right but everyone is downvoting you and upvoting the "wrong" guy, I know very few people who won't react aggressively.
- oditogre 19y ago+1 (Insightful) This is why democracy + free speech (in theory, at least) works. No matter how unpopular, a voice cannot be silenced. If you don't like a person's viewpoints, you can't shut them down by downvoting them; you can only upvote the viewpoint you do like, and / or present your own position yourself, if no one else has done it.
- benhoyt 19y agoRelatedly, I've submitted quite a few of my blog posts both here and on programming.reddit.com, and they'll often get a good number of points here, but on reddit someone will almost instantly downvote them to zero, and they of course never come back up. So I like News.YC's system. Do other people find the same thing?
- aswanson 19y agoYou could make down votes more expensive by forcing someone to type a rationale of why, or, if the dot product of their down vote to the community vote on a post is way off, discard. Finally, maybe have an up vote/down vote bank that can be exhausted for a given time period. Since you have so much free time, anyway.
- german 19y agoI rarely downvote on something but I think that having that option does no harm. Maybe on reddit downvoters are more likely to be thoughtless, I don't think that is a problem with news.ycombinator readers. It would help a lot to have the same statistics for downvoters on Y combinator.
- fauigerzigerk 19y agoIf you rarely downvote and others allways downvote items they don't like, your opinion is going to be underrepresented. I think that is a harm. As I said elsewhere, downvotes are too ambiguous in meaning.
- allenbrunson 19y agorelated question: i've seen comments here that have, say, -2 points. if you can only vote up, how is it possible for a comment to ever go below one point? my guess is maybe you get a down-vote button once your karma goes above a certain score?
- kcl 19y agoI wanted to downvote 'funny linux command lines'. When I couldn't find the downvote arrow my first instinct was to upvote everything else.
- bluemoo 19y agoPerhaps you could start a news.yc Vote Exchange website. I liked the funny linux command line story, so in exchange for me not upvoting it, you can not upvote something else!
- auferstehung 19y agoI think a method of ranking news based on the number and quality of comments would be better than voting up and down. This method would be somewhat analogous to page rank in that the rank of a story (webpage) is indirectly determined by the comments (links) and quality of the comments. Writing a comment is arguable less reflexive than clicking an arrow. Also interesting news that was generating a good discussion could tend to persist and stay near the top. This would encourge thoughtful comments as you are not penalized for taking some time to think about the matter rather than hastily shooting from the hip.
- thomasptacek 19y agoClearly neither system works reliably, but just to put that suggestion in context: http://reddit.com/info/2r8d8/comments http://reddit.com/info/2r8d8/comments vs. http://programming.reddit.com/info/2qbye/comments http://programming.reddit.com/info/2qbye/comments "Quality" sounds like a good metric until you realize that upvotes mean "I agree!", not "Good comment".
- auferstehung 19y agoI agree. That is why I purposely did not equate quality with up and down voting, but left it undefined. Perhaps a solution could be that the quality of a comment was ranked by the number and quality of sub-comments. We would have the beginning of a highly ranked comment thread, for example.
- bct 19y agoAnother alternative is a two-axis system. Up-down for agree-disagree, left-right for quality.
- cyggie 19y agoI believe the problem with the down voting button is it often reflect more on the opinion of the voter rather than how well the article was written or its usefulness. Good article that agree with the user = comment/up vote Bad article that agree with the user = ignore Good article that disagree with user = comment/down vote Bad article that disagree with the user = down vote Unless everyone actually vote up/down purely base on how good the article is and not their opinion, removing the down vote button is not a bad idea... The voting button is a good idea if it's a poll, but the "hotness" of something is probably better tracked by the comments and other actions a user take...
- whacked_new 19y agoI think the up/down voting system is intrinsically flawed. A better system would be something like a monetary system.
- eru 19y agoAn information market?
- whacked_new 19y agoI've thought of doing that; I assume when you mean "market" it implies trade. So one way is to invest in shares of a piece of information and get returns to fluctuate based on the demand for that piece of information. But that would die given enough users, so implemented something simpler, but similar.
- eru 19y agoA prediction market like http://us.newsfutures.com/ http://us.newsfutures.com/ works by having an ultimate arbiter of value: Either the event in question happens or it does not happen. I wonder how one would implement a market based system for recommending articles. Could you elaborate on your ideas?
- whacked_new 19y agoSure. If all information was traded like stocks, then, the person who speaks with the most authority would get the most investment. If they become senile, then they lose value. In terms of the recommendation system, then, it would simply recommend whatever/whoever has the highest market value, plus whatever metrics you added in. You don't have an arbiter though, because information keeps increasing, and at very little cost, and is not limited by resources in the actual economy. Also, you aren't making a yes/no prediction, so you are not measuring something like accuracy (which is measurable). You are measuring a subjective valuation. Steve Jobs might be only 60% correct that the iPod is the best music player in the world, but a fan would think he's 120% correct. Even though the prediction market says he's 60% correct, in the actual market, he earns lots of money. Something like that. It's not so far from the karma system, but the karma system is inherently flawed because it's based on democratic principles. When you see a likeable merchandise, you don't think in terms of "buy" or "not buy." You think in terms of value, relative to some baseline. A better system would give users the power to express this.
- fauigerzigerk 19y agoI don't like downvoting because downvotes are so ambiguous in meaning. An upvote clearly means "read this!". A downvote could mean disagreement on the subject, dislike of the author or just disinterest. I might want to read a story with wich many people disagree, but I might not want to read one that everybody finds completely irrelevant or shallow. The trouble is that the meanings of up and downvotes are different for news stories and comments respectively. For a comment, the votes almost exclusively mean agreement/disagreement. Only in rare cases do I disagree with a comment but still find it so important that I vote it up. This is different from, say, a scientific paper where this happens frequently. Overall I think downvotes are unnecessary and cause a lot of bad blood.
- Goladus 19y agoI don't use downvotes to mean "I disagree." If I disagree and am too lazy to say why, I don't give a downvote. Downvotes mean: "I find this especially uninteresting"
- JulianMorrison 19y agoI wrote a reddit post on this http://reddit.com/info/gg2w/comments http://reddit.com/info/gg2w/comments ... although most other commenters didn't agree. Summary: up only voting measures personal interest. It tends to promote anything that has a constituency. Up and down voting measures community approval. It tends to promote group-think.
- yters 19y agoOn a hacker site, why not make all the important tools only accessible to hackers?