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Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

• ErrantX 17y ago
  IMO All the comments on those threads seem fairly downvoted; either for knee jerk inaccuracy, flogging a point or just generally ranting. EDIT: the FF3.5 one I might agree with - did that get edited in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721314 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721314 I didnt see it the first time? I think it's wrong to call it rude to downvote them...... EDIT: according to the rules comments like "why was that post downvoted" are discouraged. Just FYI.
  • DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Somehow this comment seems related to the recent recursion post. BTW, I think it's fine to complain in a new post. I guess it's annoying in the body of a long string of comments, but the entire point of the posting system is to allow group moderated discussion. If people don't like your question, they'll downvote it. This is a much better response than ignoring idiotic behavior and/or spamming a good comment thread with whining.
    • ErrantX 17y ago
      > Somehow this comment seems related to the recent recursion post. oops not intentional... Im not sure how that got in there (fail copy/paste) > BTW, I think it's fine to complain in a new post. Fair enough ofc. I just thought I would raise it in case people had missed the guidelines :)
      • DanielBMarkham 17y ago
        Cool. Agreed. But just like the pirates say, it's not a code. More like guidelines. I think that's what makes HN so frustrating sometimes to people (including myself). There is quite a bit of flex involved. For instance, I just submitted a blog entry I have on arguing which looks at religious-type arguments. It's probably over the line (perhaps not?) but I'm not completely sure, so I just threw it out there to let the community decide. Posting, to me, has a much looser set of rules/guidelines than commenting. But that's just my interpretation of the community mores.
• plinkplonk 17y ago
  It would be nice if you linked to the actual comments that were down voted instead of to article pages with dozens of comments, where, presumably, the reader has to guess which comment you were referring to.
  • Torn 17y ago
    Fairly easy to scan the comments the OP is talking about -- they're light-grey with negative scores, and it's clear they've had effort put into them.
    • plinkplonk 17y ago
      "Fairly easy to scan the comments the OP is talking about -- they're light-grey with negative scores, " not necessarily true at the time of reading (vs at the time of posting) . You forget that comment scores are dynamic and even very old comments can be upvoted past zero (downvotes have a time window) and maybe no longer "light-grey with negative scores" by the time someone reads this submission and looks for the comments.
      • Torn 17y ago
        noted, thanks.
  • andreyf 17y ago
    I thought there were too many comments to link to: Create's and bitdiddle's responses here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720924 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720924 This response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720909 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720909 Is identical to this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720766 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720766 My comments in this entire conversation, also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720569 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720569 (at one point, each of mine was <0, now upvoted out of nagativity, thanks! :))
    • jeroen 17y ago
• gaius 17y ago
  Thoughtful comments that are factually wrong should be downvoted. Seriously. If your code doesn't compile, the compiler doesn't care how much effort it took you to write it...
  • edw519 17y ago
    "Thoughtful comments that are factually wrong should be downvoted." Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing's for sure. It you think something is "factually wrong", your reply provides much more feedback than a vote. I'd like to think that judgment based upon data is what separates hackers from posers. Let's see that data please.
    • bendotc 17y ago
      Let me pose a hypothetical: I'm reading HN while I'm waiting for a particularly long compile or backup or whatever. I've got about 5 minutes and about 4 minutes in, I find a comment that honestly and eloquently makes a claim based on the perceived fact that the world is flat. This comment is highly rated. Should I: 1) Withhold my down-vote because I don't have time to explain it? 2) Withhold my down-vote unless someone else has taken the time to explain it? 3) Down-vote and hope someone else explains it or at least hope that this helps other comments percolate to the top? I honestly think 3 is the best option and I can see the point in 2, though I think it's withholding signal from the system. Related question: is it relevant what the comment's score was? If it was -7, should I make it -8? If it was +200, does it decrease the burden to comment?
      • delano 17y ago
        A comment like that requires a reply. If you don't have the time, that's okay b/c someone probably will (but you could check back later to make sure someone has). Don't punish (downvote) someone for earnestly taking part in the conversation. Other people probably have similar beliefs so this person did everyone a service by bringing the question out into the open so it can be discussed. Votes encourage discussion, not correctness.
      • edw519 17y ago
• Quarrelsome 17y ago
  Kudos is not about etiquette it's about what motivates people to upvote or downvote and this differs from person to person. Personally I value truth, humour and interesting information. You will note that etiquette isn't part of my up/down voting practice. Other people have different rules. Kudos is a reflection of the community which means that the community is (if we follow your theory) slightly rude. I don't have a problem with this. I do however have a problem with NOT downvoting thoughtful comments I disagree with. I think it's rude to tell people that they should think like you. I would downvote you for this but etiquette isn't part of my kudos practice and I think this discussion is interesting.
  • scott_s 17y ago
    The purpose of karma on HN is to promote civil discussion, not to show agreement or disagreement. Hence, downmodding comments that you disagree with, yet are still valid, runs counter to the system's intended use.
    • Quarrelsome 17y ago
      Aye but purpose ain't always what implementation becomes, people game systems. So the utopian ideal is civil discussion but the reality of it is whatever people decide and you can't control the people.
      • scott_s 17y ago
        This is true, which is why it's worthwhile discussion what the karma system here is supposed to be. If you deliberately don't use it that way, then I find that sad because I like PG's goal. As he explicitly states, this site is partially an experiment. I hope it's not a negative result.
    • mhb 17y ago
      Maybe that's not the purpose of karma on HN. Maybe the purpose is to assist its users in making judgments about various issues. If a bunch of smart people read a thoughtful comment and indicate their agreement or disagreement via voting, why isn't that useful to someone when forming their own opinion? As an analogy, consider the issue of global warming. Very few people can invest the time to decide the issue based on primary research. Instead they rely on secondary or tertiary reports, consensus of the scientists involved and their reputations. This is the comment karma system made large.
• froo 17y ago
  As someone who has received a string of downvoted commented recently (admittedly they were warranted given the nature of some of them) I really don't see the problem. Someone disagrees with you and does the initial downvoting, then groupthink kicks in and your score hits the floor. It's a simple fact of life in social media sites (it occurs on many sites with differing communities), this is why PG put in the -8 limit, to combat the detrimental effect of this kind of groupthink. Honestly, deal with it, it's just online Karma, a simple numerical value... what effect does it really have after you've unlocked various features on HN.
  • wynand 17y ago
    I worry that when so many comments have negative votes, readers will be more inclined to downvote future comments. While I agree with you that it's really human nature, I still think it needs to be discouraged, if only to keep HN the kind of place where debate is encouraged.
    • froo 17y ago
      "While I agree with you that it's really human nature, I still think it needs to be discouraged, if only to keep HN the kind of place where debate is encouraged." I agree with you, absolutely. I think we're mostly adults here and hearty debate should be encouraged. I think that if you really want to counteract the douchebag effect (the groupthink downvote pileon on thoughtful comments) then make who has downvoted you public to everyone but the downvotee - transparency would be one way to help combat it. Think about it for a second, if you have a legitimate gripe with someone's comment, then whether you downvote them or not shouldn't matter. Those comments are easy to single out. However, if you're piling on just because of groupthink, then why not let other's know. I'm sure someone could come up with an algorithm for working out who's being a dick with the downvoting consistently. I think there should be a clear distinction between legitimately disagreeing/downvoting someone's comment and being a dick, so why not try and expose the latter. We've seen in many, many cases that anonymity on the web has given rise to the kinds of behaviours that many of us dislike. Why not bring it back a little towards people being responsible for their actions.
  • 17y ago
• indiejade 17y ago
  It would be very interesting to see a list of the top 50 or so downmodding offenders next to a list of their "karma score" (or whatever it's called here). Even anonymous statistics would be interesting. Some people are just mean because they can be.
  • ghiotion 17y ago
    I'll second this with one minor caveat. They're not necessarily "downmodding offenders" until proven as such by the data you're requesting. They're just the top 50 downvoters.
    • gaius 17y ago
      That data's not meaningful without also considering upvotes - they could just be prolific modders.
      • indiejade 17y ago
        Maybe. But some people tend to see the good in things, and some tend to focus on the bad. I think it could be reasonably hypothesized that persons who downvote a lot focus more on the negatives. It's hard to read contextualization or to infer what we refer to as vocal inflections through writing; I am as guilty as anyone of the occasional "posting while drinking" (which I've noticed does tend to make my writing seem a little bit more hostile than intended); however, some attempts at humor here just end up falling pretty flat.
      • frossie 17y ago
        I too am curious to see the downmod/upmode ratio (anonymously of course). I think mine is probably 10-20 upmods to 1 downmods, and I mod sparsely (maybe 1 comment in 20? depends on the thread). I downmod "noise", not signal I disagree with. While we're geeking out, I'd be more interested in some kind of karma/comment metric than absolute karma.
    • indiejade 17y ago
      Down-modding is not what brings the interesting conversations out of the woodwork; up-modding does. So they are "downmodding offenders", especially if the comment was previously up-modded from its original default score.
• shizcakes 17y ago
  Ultimately, it's a culture thing. I've been here for the better part of a year, and I've noticed that comments which I feel are worth lots of merit (I wrote a script that makes your life noticeably better! here!) and ones of less merit (It's the same as a link 30 pixels away!) are voted to almost the same karma. This was not always the case - historically, things seemed to be voted far more consistently. The reason for this, as I ponder it in my head, might be that the threshold for downvoting on comments is too low relative to the amount of people granted that power. In my sole opinion, as the number of people able to downvote goes up, the worth of the comment voting system goes down. Perhaps, instead - a small economy based upon earning karma with good comments, and spending it when you make negative votes - might be a good idea.
• growt 17y ago
  Quick: can someone create a proxy to hn which does the regexp s/\d+ points? by//g I wonder what it would "feel" like to read hn without the quantification of quality. After all the most interesting stuff would be still on top. Edit: I've done a quick bookmarklet, it seems to break links, but it gives an impression (so enter in in the urlbar at any hn site and press enter): javascript:document.documentElement.innerHTML = document.documentElement.innerHTML.replace(/\d+ points?| by |/g,"");
  • ErrantX 17y ago
    I was toying with suggesting this "improvement" the other day - i.e. remove comment scores. I think it makes things better; but I suspect there would be a lot of opposition.
    • growt 17y ago
      Maybe one could make that a user setting so that everybody who likes it that way could switch points off. I think I could be more objective when I wouldn't see the exact points but just the relative order of stories and comments. Another interesting idea would be that a reply to a comment would count as +1 (or maybe +0.5) for the parent. Because I think that if a comment is interesting or controversial enough to justify a reply it deserves a point or a half for that fact alone.
      • philwelch 17y ago
        There are too many replies that correct factual errors or explain/reinforce HN social norms to assume reply == upvote. Though you could downvote and reply.
• daleharvey 17y ago
  I think the people that downvoted you in the amazon threads were doing so because they thought you were trolling. You seem to be smart, any rational person knows why jeff bezos was apologizing, so it seemed to me like you were saying something controversial to illicit a responce, and that should be discouraged imo. (there is obviously a line betweens devils advocate and troll which I dont think you crossed, and so didnt downvote you).
• designtofly 17y ago
  In the same vain, we should also discourage upvoting simply for agreement. There is no reason why one-liners should get upvoted to very high scores. Upvotes should reward content and thoughtful discussion.
• nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  I downvote when people post short comments that are basically "you're wrong" without any helpful criticism. When someone criticizes me in a thoughtful way I respond instead of downvoting (and often vote up if it brings up an interesting point). A good metric that will keep conversation constructive is this: the purpose of your debate isn't to convince the person you're arguing with, it's for the benefit of the bystanders. you'll find yourself constructing much more professional arguments if you keep this in mind, the temptation to engage in "status plays" diminishes. your goal isn't to prove that you're right. your goal is for there to exist at the end a string of intelligent back and forth that display both sides of an issue in a useful way.
• josefresco 17y ago
  Sometimes a reply to a down-voted comment is more insightful than the original. The only comments I down-vote and don't reply to are the "hey this is great" or the one-liner joke comments. If I think the commenter is wrong or a douche, I'll down-vote and reply with my own side of the debate.
• graywh 17y ago
  Does this not apply anymore? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
  • Batsu 17y ago
    Though buried in the pile, I think more people need to notice this link.
  • allenbrunson 17y ago
    I suspect most of us have seen that. I am mostly in agreement with the way pg runs this place, but in this one case, I think he's wrong. I must not be the only one, since this topic comes up every so often.
    • andreyf 17y ago
      Yeah, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I imagine PG meant that in a different context than I'm putting it here - I'm saying that reflexive downvoting of thought-out challenges to your opinions is impolite, and asking people to please think twice before doing it.
• jrockway 17y ago
  I have noticed this effect as well. Many of my comments fluctuate massively; up to +10, down to -8, back to 2, down to -5, ... I think this basically means that we are a few months away from being Reddit. Pretty soon, any comment containing $HILARIOUS_MEME will be upmodded regardless of its applicability or actual humor value. (We are already Reddit with respect to downmods; say something bad about the iPhone or something good about the GPL, and the downmods start almost instantly. Also, I think there used to be articles about programming here, but I haven't seen any in a while. Maybe today I can read about how programmers are smarter than everyone else, or how to sell a $35,000 watch. Tomorrow, I look forward to some cat pictures.) Anyway, moderation is a waste of time. Hitting "flag" will get comments and articles that you disagree with censored a lot quicker.
  • spkthed 17y ago
    Unfortunately that's something of the lifecycle of online communities. Once they reach a critical mass people that probably shouldn't belong start congregating, sooner or later there seems to be a tipping point where things start racing down to the LCD of humor and insight. People start leaving and form another community. HackerNews is surprising for the length of time it's managed to exist without turning into that. I have noticed that the quality of submissions has decreased over the past year.
• mkyc 17y ago
  This is because many people here still vote by agreement, rather than for comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on. This happens on a much larger scale with lower-rated comments. I once saw the word "no" with a score of 50~, which made up for the contributor's running streak of -5~. It wasn't that their contribution quality became better, it was that their comment hit that major "upvote when you agree" fault in our system. It reduces our quality. Seeing even a poorly-composed brute force attack on the ideas in the article is what I come to the comments for, because even reckless disagreement is often a gold mine of those little bits of information that you didn't take into consideration, but should have. (I've said all this before, and it should be repeated.) Vote for what you think others should see, not for what you agree with.
  • deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
• rbanffy 17y ago
  I am impressed by the number of votes (up and down) on this topic. A nerve was hit, obviously.
• nvn1 17y ago
  I wouldn't be happy if, say, objections to an unpopular scientific theory were simply expressed by scientists down-voting and burying it. Unless the idea's completely insane or facetious, I'd want them to respond to it with a measured discussion for many reasons, one of them being that ground-breaking ideas don't always meet with widespread acceptance as soon as they're introduced. I know from personal experience that I've slowly changed my mind after hearing someone argue against my opinion, no matter how much I wanted them to shut up and accept my views!
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• tokipin 17y ago
  i don't see what's wrong with downvoting on disagreement. does it hurt people's feelings?
  • gojomo 17y ago
    Yes, a downvote can 'sting' -- because even if the person casting it means to say "I disagree", they are sending the exact same signal as is sent when they mean "Your behavior is unacceptable". And, downvotes are a 'scarlet letter' of community disapproval, and cause comments to fade in color and sink in position. It is a status kick-in-the-groin. And that's OK, for truly unwanted behavior. But the right kind of disagreement is good, healthy, necessary and should be celebrated. One option would be to have two axes of single-click vote-reaction. One is classic up-down promote/demote, for whether a comment has quality. The other would be left-right agree/disagree, a mini poll to capture sentiments. Unless there is an easy outlet -- a click-region -- for sending a 'disagree' signal separate from the 'disapprove' downvote, it is inevitable the two will be conflated, causing angst and periodic threads like this one. For previous discussion on this 'two-axis' concept, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613112 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613112 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214521 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214521
• akamaka 17y ago
  I've had a few comments downmodded, and it sent a clear message: my comment was simply not valuable to the people who read it. I use downvotes in the same way. There's many factors that contribute to a comment being valuable: factualness is just one of them. Poor commenters defend positions without evidence; try to cast personal feelings as rational arguments; fail to properly read and understand the article; attack an imaginary slight from the parent poster. In a real conversation, I'm not going to rebut everything disagreeable that you say: sometimes I'll just frown, turn away, shrug, or interupt you. Downmodding is my way of quickly saying that I didn't get anything out of your comment.
• YuriNiyazov 17y ago
  To be frank, a lot of the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720779 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720779 that you made were not "thoughtful comments that people disagreed with". They were sophomoric. I read through most of it, and didn't vote one way or another, but my take away from it was: people kept pointing out some very obvious things, namely that even within the legal framework that is setup by our copyright laws, there's still a very wide berth of behavior that ranges from tolerable to asinine. Even taking the legal copyright framework into account, Amazon behaved asininely, and that is what Bezos was apologizing for. You stuck to your argument about legality even when it no longer made logical sense, which is just a hairline away from trolling.
• dasil003 17y ago
  It's a common conceit among engineers to believe that they can be objective in all things and cleanly separate their opinions and their knowledge. We may be a little better at it than the average person, but we are all still human, even the most socially detached savant is still subject to the influence of passion and bias. Realizing this, the original question is a fantasy, it is utterly impossible because there can be no agreement on what is even considered "thoughtful". My recommendation is to take it easy, let people be people, and stop daydreaming.
• sfphotoarts 17y ago
  I think its actually more valuable if people do vote their agreement (and disagreement), think of it a s very techie peer review process.
• alex_c 17y ago
  I don't downvote comments I disagree with. I do downvote comments that are off-topic, don't add anything constructive, or predictably rehash the same old arguments that have been used in certain online debates thousands of times over the years. Which on the surface might look like downvoting comments I disagree with... but there's a difference. Is it just me, or do the weekends tend to attract more meta threads?
• gojomo 17y ago
  The biggest problem I've seen grow recently are healthy comments quickly downvoted from 1 to 0. I immediately vote them back up but I want to reach through the monitor and throttle the voter for spinning such a sensitive-to-initial-conditions process in a negative direction. If I were the HN Sovereign, I'd consider having moderators casually review all 'first votes' on comments, especially 'first downvotes'. If a certain user is injecting a lot of 'sting' into threads with a hair-trigger down-vote, I'd put their franchise on double-secret-probation. What is double-secret-probation, you might ask? Well, they'd still see their votes take effect, but no one else would -- at least for initial votes, maybe for others too. Their negativity would be quarantined.
• mrlebowski 17y ago
  Its just a number, this is just a board where we discuss what others have written (and then people find time to VOTE on the discussions about what someone else has written!). stop taking this number so seriously people!!
• RobertL 17y ago
  Yeah. They do that to me also.
• keefe 17y ago
  I wish I had the time to read enough comments to have an intelligent opinion on this.... I generally vote things up that I strongly agree with and vote things down that I strongly disagree with, without putting much more thought into it than that.
• sayrer 17y ago
  Meta is Murder http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001282.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001282.html
• billclerico 17y ago
  A friend of mine is doing his phd research on online discussion to solve this exact problem. Digg, HN & other up/down voting sites struggle to express the viewpoint of the minority. He is working on algorithms that basically let you vote on one side of an issue. Take for instance a political debate, where Digg and many other community sites lean to the left. Once you have expressed yourself as a "leftist" on a thread, it removes your downvotes from "rightist" comments. This gives the minority a voice, resulting in pluralism as opposed to "winner takes all". An interesting approach to a common problem.
• GHFigs 17y ago
  As much as I agree that voting should be used to indicate value to the discussion and not agreement with one's own opinion, I think it is a hopeless cause. It requires that participants curtail their instincts for the sake of the greater good, an unlikely prospect in the best of circumstances, much less in a community of semi-anonymous strangers. I think it better to simply suggest that people not take scores so damn seriously. To stop interpreting them as a measure of thoughtfulness or truthfulness and start thinking of them as just a reflection of people's attention.
• gehant 17y ago
  As mentioned in many other comments - there is no good way for a commenting/voting system to determine a user's motivations for voting (in either direction). ...But there are subtle ways to provide incentives for user voting behavior. For instance, why not attach greater risk/reward to voting? Incomplete ideas that come to mind: 1)scarcity - finite votes force greater selectivity in voting 2)vote transparency - anonymity permits nastier activity 3)user transparency - highlight ornery vs constructive users As for doing away with downvotes: Zero is an artificial floor that would simply bundle mediocre comments with comments that are off-topic/spam/in poor taste etc.
• helloworld 17y ago
  N.B. The Hacker News Guidelines: Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• Semiapies 17y ago
  Honestly? I downvote comments I agree with, if they look upvoted out of proportion to their value. I also upvote things I disagree with if they've been downvoted unreasonably low. I don't think a stance on an issue that's plausible and civilly stated needs to go below 1, for instance. Different people have different approaches; if we could get everyone to vote based on one standard, we wouldn't need a karma system in the first place.
• tybris 17y ago
  I have little hope that Hacker News will not suffer the same fate as reddit and digg. Hopefully there will be a new refuge by then (on the other hand, it could save me quite some time).
• BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
  It's a number that really means nothing in the whole scope life. Why are you so concerned with it? This is a legitimate question. No one has ever answered it.