8 ms·

Tell HN: Downmodding needs to die

33 points by robgibbons 12y ago

Dear HN, I have always considered HN, as a community, to be a place of great insight, interesting viewpoints, and otherwise extremely relevant information. I have enjoyed many conversations, and had even more educational moments, thanks to its users. But we seriously need to talk about the downmods. Downmodding, on its own, is harmless. Allowing users to downmod each other, as a means of curbing abuse, is an invaluable tool: self-policing of users has obvious merits which should be rightly acknowledged. However, downmodding as a means of pure disagreement should be unconditionally banned on Hacker News. The fact that downmodding is an acceptable means of expressing disagreement is a disservice to public commentary. If a comment is relevant and non-abusive, there is no reason it should ever be downmodded. In other words: If you are downmodding out of disagreement, you should not have downmod privileges. If you don't agree with a message, use your words. Don't try to prevent others from reading it. Downmodding only serves to promote resentment among users with unique viewpoints. The ability to express relevant but controversial opinions is fatally hindered when those opinions are suppressed due to unpopularity. Downmodding is a form of communal censorship, and it should be treated as such. For a community which bills itself as for hackers, and by hackers, "popular opinion" should be the least of all factors -- it should be scoffed at by any self-respecting hacker. Dissenting opinions, especially unpopular ones, should be championed -- not downmodded.

angersock 12y ago
Quite agreed. Suggesting that downvotes were appropriate for signalling disagreement instead of civility is one of the few mistakes pg has made on an otherwise excellent site. In the meantime, though, post fearlessly, argue soundly, and hope for the best.
adamnemecek 12y ago
internet: srs bsns
- mg1982 12y ago
  Don't agree; downvoted.
geofft 12y ago
Downvotes for disagreement and downvotes for non-constructiveness are sometimes hard to distinguish. At the most obvious, a comment saying justt "I think you're wrong" clearly expresses a position that at least one person disagrees with, but is also almost certainly non-constructive, and potentially abusive in the form of being disrespectful. If you have arguments, make them. If the person you're arguing with made an argument, give the phrasing of the argument the benefit of the doubt, and engage with it as if it is a serious argument. (And if there's no way to do that, then their comment should be downvoted, because it's non-constructive.) To do otherwise is disrespectful of the person you're replying to, as well as to the community of people reading comments. A lot of times I see people making repetitive and poorly-informed comments that also happen to be disagreeable on the merits. They're relevant, they toe the line of "non-abusive", but they don't belong. For instance, a recent comment thread had someone asking about whether Microsoft accepts pull requests on GitHub. It got two replies: one person explaining that they were aiming to, and one person saying that, of course MS would never do such a thing. The latter comment got downvoted a fair bit. I'd imagine most of the people downvoting disagreed on the facts, since the comment happened to be wrong. But it also did not contribute to the discussion, since it was made out of ignorance and assumption, and rightly got downvoted on those grounds.
- robgibbons 12y ago
  In this circumstance, downmodding may indeed have been the proper course of action -- although a simple link to the source would have been just as effective, and much more informative.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > A lot of times I see people making repetitive and poorly-informed comments that also happen to be disagreeable on the merits. They're relevant, they toe the line of "non-abusive", but they don't belong. This is a great example of where downvotes should be used. People should flag, not just downvote, abusive posts. Anyone can flag a post (click the timestamp to reveal the link). This deliberate design choice by the HN programmers leaves downvoting free for posts that are not outright abuse but which do not add value.
mod 12y ago
PG thinks downvoting out of disagreement is fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - stephenr 12y ago
    As do I. So I've upvoted, your down vote. Literally.
- stephenr 12y ago
  Just because one person thinks/says something, doesn't make it true.
  - mod 12y ago
    Agreed--which goes for the OP as well. I think my point is this place is more PG's than it is OP's, and more than that, it's unlikely this post will enact any change given the stance of PG on the issue. He's not involved now, but certainly his opinion still carries weight.
    - stephenr 12y ago
      Nothing ever changes if people just blindly accept the status quo. I've yet to see anyone explain how down votes can be a valid response to both alternative/different ideas AND abusive/argumentative/etc comments.
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        Rules for a valid downvote: Someone clicked the button and it wasn't part of a blatant pattern (so abuse happens when someone tries to downvote every comment by someone else, or something like that). Rules for a valid upvote: Someone clicked the button and it wasn't part of a blatant pattern. How do you know why someone voted? You read their mind. This is just as easy for users to do as it is for the site. Out of this horrifying ambiguity, you end up in situations where you might disagree with a comment and consider downvoting it because of that, but end up upvoting it because you step back from that feeling and decide that it is an interesting contribution to the discussion. Or you might not decide and thus not click either button. If you think of the voting as a way to improve the ordering of the comments on the page and not as a way of doling out punishments and rewards, the lack of a precise specification makes more sense (because you hope a preponderance of users want the comments to appear in an interesting order, not to click and clack to suit their worldview).
chrisbennet 12y ago
I agree. I almost never downvote. I try to read commentS that I disagree with in a charitable fashion. It seems rather small minded to not be able to consider views outside your own. It would be nice to see some metrics associated with members such as their up vote to down vote ratio. I suspect that a very few members do most of the down voting.
zamalek 12y ago
> If you are downmodding out of disagreement Regarding the downmod: I completely agree with your post. Users are generally incapable of using downmods correctly. No matter which community. The UX of HN tends towards moderation usage of the arrow - heavily downvoted comments get grayed out and disappear from the discussion: they have become moderated. Regarding the downvote (disagreement): Indicating that the arrow can be used for disagreement means that the downmod argument becomes irrelevant (ignoring the UX concerns). The truth is: your disagreement is completely worthless if you cannot vocalize that disagreement. Bad arguments will fall below the good arguments by virtue of the votes the good arguments receive. One of the greatest memes on the internet is possibly: "can someone tell me why my comment has been downvoted?" Either remove the arrow, only show it after you have responded to a comment, and/or make it cost 1 karma to downvote.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > your disagreement is completely worthless if you cannot vocalize that disagreement. I would far rather see pedants downvoting than leaving comments. I would far rather see two people who dislike each other just downvote each other than carry out a tiresome argument. > Bad arguments will fall below the good arguments by virtue of the votes the good arguments receive. A bad argument that recieves comments that are upvoted is pushed higher up the page. Do young the top comments on an article to be someone saying something dumb, with replies telling them why they're dumb?
  - zamalek 12y ago
    > just downvote each other than carry out a tiresome argument. You can't currently downvote a reply. > I would far rather see two people who dislike each other just downvote each other than carry out a tiresome argument. HN seems to limit the depth you can go to within your own comment line, I'm not sure what the exact rules are but once you reach a certain depth the reply option disappears. > A bad argument that recieves comments that are upvoted is pushed higher up the page. Which means that those upvoted comments hold value - so, yes, I'd still like to see them.
    - 12y ago
DanBC 12y ago
People who complain about downvote for disagreement all say the same thing: "downvotes turn comments grey and thus hide the conversation". No. Downvoting will only turn a comment grey if none of the ten thousand logged in users thinks your post is good enough to upvote, and if someone downvotes it. Greyed comments are not the result of one or two down-vote abusing people but the result of very many people thinking your comment doesn't add enough to get an upvote. And this is true even after the comment is grey. In that case none of the people with upvote privs (anyone with an account) thinks the downvote was wrong enough to need correcting. The only reason to stop downvoting for disagreemet is to stop people posting these meta threads. People will downvote to disagree. You need to work on methods to fix the result rather than changing behaviour -- upvote those comments that you think are incorrectly downvoted. EDIT: if anything we need more downvoting and flagging. Here's a comment that had one or two downvotes and went at least thirty days live. (It got more flags when I pointed out that someone was talking to a holocaust denying troll) HN is not a free for all - there are other places for that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200905
- stephenr 12y ago
  So let me see if I understand your suggestion: I see Billy has posted a comment. Jane has replied to Billy's comment, with a dissenting viewpoint, and her comment has subsequently been down voted because people disagree. I happen to agree with Billy's point of view and disagree with Jane, but if I want to support a truly open discussion about the topic, I have to upvote a comment I disagree with? How does that make any sense?
  - DanBC 12y ago
    You upvote comments that add to the conversation. When you see a comment that adds value you upvote it even if you disagree with it, especially if you think it has been unfairly downvoted. There are people on HN who do this. Edit: I mean, there are so many people saying "don't downvote to disagree" that the problem of greyed but constructive comments would be fixed if they just upvoted more often. Why don't they take this burden upon themselves, changing their own behaviour, rather than calling for other people to change theirs?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
avalaunch 12y ago
Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say. A simple solution which I doubt will ever be enacted would be to increase the options from 2 (3 if you count clicking the time stamp then flagging) to 5: useful, not useful, agree, disagree, flag. Then those votes could be used more intelligently to determine the best display order for comments.
- stephenr 12y ago
  Something modelled after the /. mod system would be best frankly - up/down with generic reasons, and limited to +5:-1.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say. If you wish to say something more than up/down votes, that's what the "reply" function is for.
  - avalaunch 12y ago
    No, the reply function is for when you have something meaningful to add. If all you have to say is "I agree/disagree" or "your comment was useful/not useful", the reply function is not the right function to use. But unfortunately, the up/down functionality isn't quite right either because you can't determine why the vote was cast.
- DanBC 12y ago
  But then we'd have endless threads complainig about people misusing those buttons too. People who currently have a single downvote for disagree would have two downvotes.
  - avalaunch 12y ago
    Yes but at least everyone, for the most part, would be in agreement to what constitutes proper use and misuse of the buttons, which we don't have now. More importantly, the votes could be used differently in calculating the comment display order. People could still feel they have an outlet to easily disagree without replying while not having their votes bury useful comments.
brudgers 12y ago
Any person who wants to express their "unique viewpoints" or "relevant but controversial opinions" runs the risk of being taken for a troll. That risk can be mitigated but not eliminated with thoughtful writing and careful exposition supported by examples, rationales, and sound logic. If it's not worth the risk, then I don't write it. Upon realizing what I am writing is crap, I delete it. If I realize what I have written is crap, I delete it if it's not to late. And when I've decided to risk it, I live with the downvotes. I don't expect everyone to be as brilliant as I like to imagine myself to be...including myself. Write good comments and downvotes aren't much of an issue.
- bjourne 12y ago
  That's the whole point! I don't give a flying fuck if my comments are downvoted to -inf. I have enough useless internet points as it is. However, when people like you moderates your comments and sees it as a risk whether to post it or not, then that reduces the amount of good comments on hn making my hacker news reading experience worse. Now I just glanced through your comment history, but you don't appear to be an asshole, troll or write inflammatory stuff so if your comments are frequently getting downvoted then downvote-to-disagree has gotten out of hand. IMHO
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > Now I just glanced through your comment history, but you don't appear to be an asshole, troll or write inflammatory stuff so if your comments are frequently getting downvoted then downvote-to-disagree has gotten out of hand. IMHO Parent poster talks about how downvoting makes them carefully with wording. You read their post history and say that they appear to write good posts. Downvoting works, even for people who are not downvoted?
    - bjourne 12y ago
      No, parent poster talks about how downvoting makes them careful with what they comment on: "If it's not worth the risk, then I don't write it." From personal experience I can say (and you can too, I bet) there is a much stronger correlation between downvotes and disagreement than between downvotes and not being eloquent enough.

33 points by robgibbons 12y ago

angersock 12y ago

Quite agreed. Suggesting that downvotes were appropriate for signalling disagreement instead of civility is one of the few mistakes pg has made on an otherwise excellent site. In the meantime, though, post fearlessly, argue soundly, and hope for the best.

adamnemecek 12y ago

internet: srs bsns

mg1982 12y ago
Don't agree; downvoted.

geofft 12y ago

Downvotes for disagreement and downvotes for non-constructiveness are sometimes hard to distinguish. At the most obvious, a comment saying justt "I think you're wrong" clearly expresses a position that at least one person disagrees with, but is also almost certainly non-constructive, and potentially abusive in the form of being disrespectful. If you have arguments, make them. If the person you're arguing with made an argument, give the phrasing of the argument the benefit of the doubt, and engage with it as if it is a serious argument. (And if there's no way to do that, then their comment should be downvoted, because it's non-constructive.) To do otherwise is disrespectful of the person you're replying to, as well as to the community of people reading comments. A lot of times I see people making repetitive and poorly-informed comments that also happen to be disagreeable on the merits. They're relevant, they toe the line of "non-abusive", but they don't belong. For instance, a recent comment thread had someone asking about whether Microsoft accepts pull requests on GitHub. It got two replies: one person explaining that they were aiming to, and one person saying that, of course MS would never do such a thing. The latter comment got downvoted a fair bit. I'd imagine most of the people downvoting disagreed on the facts, since the comment happened to be wrong. But it also did not contribute to the discussion, since it was made out of ignorance and assumption, and rightly got downvoted on those grounds.

robgibbons 12y ago
In this circumstance, downmodding may indeed have been the proper course of action -- although a simple link to the source would have been just as effective, and much more informative.
DanBC 12y ago
> A lot of times I see people making repetitive and poorly-informed comments that also happen to be disagreeable on the merits. They're relevant, they toe the line of "non-abusive", but they don't belong. This is a great example of where downvotes should be used. People should flag, not just downvote, abusive posts. Anyone can flag a post (click the timestamp to reveal the link). This deliberate design choice by the HN programmers leaves downvoting free for posts that are not outright abuse but which do not add value.

mod 12y ago

PG thinks downvoting out of disagreement is fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- stephenr 12y ago
  As do I. So I've upvoted, your down vote. Literally.
stephenr 12y ago
Just because one person thinks/says something, doesn't make it true.
- mod 12y ago
  Agreed--which goes for the OP as well. I think my point is this place is more PG's than it is OP's, and more than that, it's unlikely this post will enact any change given the stance of PG on the issue. He's not involved now, but certainly his opinion still carries weight.
  - stephenr 12y ago
    Nothing ever changes if people just blindly accept the status quo. I've yet to see anyone explain how down votes can be a valid response to both alternative/different ideas AND abusive/argumentative/etc comments.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Rules for a valid downvote: Someone clicked the button and it wasn't part of a blatant pattern (so abuse happens when someone tries to downvote every comment by someone else, or something like that). Rules for a valid upvote: Someone clicked the button and it wasn't part of a blatant pattern. How do you know why someone voted? You read their mind. This is just as easy for users to do as it is for the site. Out of this horrifying ambiguity, you end up in situations where you might disagree with a comment and consider downvoting it because of that, but end up upvoting it because you step back from that feeling and decide that it is an interesting contribution to the discussion. Or you might not decide and thus not click either button. If you think of the voting as a way to improve the ordering of the comments on the page and not as a way of doling out punishments and rewards, the lack of a precise specification makes more sense (because you hope a preponderance of users want the comments to appear in an interesting order, not to click and clack to suit their worldview).

chrisbennet 12y ago

I agree. I almost never downvote. I try to read commentS that I disagree with in a charitable fashion. It seems rather small minded to not be able to consider views outside your own. It would be nice to see some metrics associated with members such as their up vote to down vote ratio. I suspect that a very few members do most of the down voting.

zamalek 12y ago

> If you are downmodding out of disagreement Regarding the downmod: I completely agree with your post. Users are generally incapable of using downmods correctly. No matter which community. The UX of HN tends towards moderation usage of the arrow - heavily downvoted comments get grayed out and disappear from the discussion: they have become moderated. Regarding the downvote (disagreement): Indicating that the arrow can be used for disagreement means that the downmod argument becomes irrelevant (ignoring the UX concerns). The truth is: your disagreement is completely worthless if you cannot vocalize that disagreement. Bad arguments will fall below the good arguments by virtue of the votes the good arguments receive. One of the greatest memes on the internet is possibly: "can someone tell me why my comment has been downvoted?" Either remove the arrow, only show it after you have responded to a comment, and/or make it cost 1 karma to downvote.

DanBC 12y ago
> your disagreement is completely worthless if you cannot vocalize that disagreement. I would far rather see pedants downvoting than leaving comments. I would far rather see two people who dislike each other just downvote each other than carry out a tiresome argument. > Bad arguments will fall below the good arguments by virtue of the votes the good arguments receive. A bad argument that recieves comments that are upvoted is pushed higher up the page. Do young the top comments on an article to be someone saying something dumb, with replies telling them why they're dumb?
- zamalek 12y ago
  > just downvote each other than carry out a tiresome argument. You can't currently downvote a reply. > I would far rather see two people who dislike each other just downvote each other than carry out a tiresome argument. HN seems to limit the depth you can go to within your own comment line, I'm not sure what the exact rules are but once you reach a certain depth the reply option disappears. > A bad argument that recieves comments that are upvoted is pushed higher up the page. Which means that those upvoted comments hold value - so, yes, I'd still like to see them.
  - 12y ago

DanBC 12y ago

People who complain about downvote for disagreement all say the same thing: "downvotes turn comments grey and thus hide the conversation". No. Downvoting will only turn a comment grey if none of the ten thousand logged in users thinks your post is good enough to upvote, and if someone downvotes it. Greyed comments are not the result of one or two down-vote abusing people but the result of very many people thinking your comment doesn't add enough to get an upvote. And this is true even after the comment is grey. In that case none of the people with upvote privs (anyone with an account) thinks the downvote was wrong enough to need correcting. The only reason to stop downvoting for disagreemet is to stop people posting these meta threads. People will downvote to disagree. You need to work on methods to fix the result rather than changing behaviour -- upvote those comments that you think are incorrectly downvoted. EDIT: if anything we need more downvoting and flagging. Here's a comment that had one or two downvotes and went at least thirty days live. (It got more flags when I pointed out that someone was talking to a holocaust denying troll) HN is not a free for all - there are other places for that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200905

stephenr 12y ago
So let me see if I understand your suggestion: I see Billy has posted a comment. Jane has replied to Billy's comment, with a dissenting viewpoint, and her comment has subsequently been down voted because people disagree. I happen to agree with Billy's point of view and disagree with Jane, but if I want to support a truly open discussion about the topic, I have to upvote a comment I disagree with? How does that make any sense?
- DanBC 12y ago
  You upvote comments that add to the conversation. When you see a comment that adds value you upvote it even if you disagree with it, especially if you think it has been unfairly downvoted. There are people on HN who do this. Edit: I mean, there are so many people saying "don't downvote to disagree" that the problem of greyed but constructive comments would be fixed if they just upvoted more often. Why don't they take this burden upon themselves, changing their own behaviour, rather than calling for other people to change theirs?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

avalaunch 12y ago

Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say. A simple solution which I doubt will ever be enacted would be to increase the options from 2 (3 if you count clicking the time stamp then flagging) to 5: useful, not useful, agree, disagree, flag. Then those votes could be used more intelligently to determine the best display order for comments.

stephenr 12y ago
Something modelled after the /. mod system would be best frankly - up/down with generic reasons, and limited to +5:-1.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say. If you wish to say something more than up/down votes, that's what the "reply" function is for.
- avalaunch 12y ago
  No, the reply function is for when you have something meaningful to add. If all you have to say is "I agree/disagree" or "your comment was useful/not useful", the reply function is not the right function to use. But unfortunately, the up/down functionality isn't quite right either because you can't determine why the vote was cast.
DanBC 12y ago
But then we'd have endless threads complainig about people misusing those buttons too. People who currently have a single downvote for disagree would have two downvotes.
- avalaunch 12y ago
  Yes but at least everyone, for the most part, would be in agreement to what constitutes proper use and misuse of the buttons, which we don't have now. More importantly, the votes could be used differently in calculating the comment display order. People could still feel they have an outlet to easily disagree without replying while not having their votes bury useful comments.

brudgers 12y ago

Any person who wants to express their "unique viewpoints" or "relevant but controversial opinions" runs the risk of being taken for a troll. That risk can be mitigated but not eliminated with thoughtful writing and careful exposition supported by examples, rationales, and sound logic. If it's not worth the risk, then I don't write it. Upon realizing what I am writing is crap, I delete it. If I realize what I have written is crap, I delete it if it's not to late. And when I've decided to risk it, I live with the downvotes. I don't expect everyone to be as brilliant as I like to imagine myself to be...including myself. Write good comments and downvotes aren't much of an issue.

bjourne 12y ago
That's the whole point! I don't give a flying fuck if my comments are downvoted to -inf. I have enough useless internet points as it is. However, when people like you moderates your comments and sees it as a risk whether to post it or not, then that reduces the amount of good comments on hn making my hacker news reading experience worse. Now I just glanced through your comment history, but you don't appear to be an asshole, troll or write inflammatory stuff so if your comments are frequently getting downvoted then downvote-to-disagree has gotten out of hand. IMHO
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Now I just glanced through your comment history, but you don't appear to be an asshole, troll or write inflammatory stuff so if your comments are frequently getting downvoted then downvote-to-disagree has gotten out of hand. IMHO Parent poster talks about how downvoting makes them carefully with wording. You read their post history and say that they appear to write good posts. Downvoting works, even for people who are not downvoted?
  - bjourne 12y ago
    No, parent poster talks about how downvoting makes them careful with what they comment on: "If it's not worth the risk, then I don't write it." From personal experience I can say (and you can too, I bet) there is a much stronger correlation between downvotes and disagreement than between downvotes and not being eloquent enough.