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More downvoted comments over the past couple months?
I've been using HN for over 5 years. Over the past month or two, I've started noticing that many more valid comments are grayed out from having negative scores.
I notice this because these comments are valid and useful, and clearly show some interest and effort on the part of the commenter. They're not rants or trolls, but contribute to the conversation. (Random example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423442)
Considering the recent post by Sam Altman about avoiding negativity on HN [1], I'm curious to understand what shift happened in the community. Has there been a memo that I missed about keeping things fiercely on-topic? Have more people been given downvote power and we're seeing the random result?
[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline
Edit: I see this post is getting more comments than upvotes, which will lead to it being flagged as "controversial" [2] and penalized :(
[2] see the always awesome Ken Shirriff's analysis: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html
- DiabloD3 12y agoI've noticed a shift to where people downvote if they don't agree with a comment instead of using at it was intended to downvote bad comments. I wonder if comment downvoting needs further restrictions; I'm tired of having to make "I don't know why parent is getting downvoted" type comments to get people to reconsider downvoting.
- BorisMelnik 12y agoFully agree with this. I've responded and disagreed with a number of active discussions, all backed up with data or sound reasoning & eloquently written only to find that my responses were downvoted. I was always of the understanding that down voting was to discourage things that were against HN policy, comments that lacked content, etc.
- zxcvcxz 12y agoMaybe if people were given a set amount of downvotes they could use per day it might make them think more before using them? And maybe they could "earn" more downvote power by receiving upvotes, this could create incentive for downvoters to reply to the people they're downvoting in an attempt to get upvotes to use for further downvoting.
- krapp 12y agoUnfortunately, pg said downvoting for disagreement is perfectly acceptable, so it's probably not going away. However, complaining about being downvoted is against the rules, so you're just expected to swallow it. If you're using Firefox and are a bit tired of unpopular comments being blotted out to spare you the indigity of reading them, here is a small userscript that fixes this "feature." https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/5b5e413220afb93c9c93 https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/5b5e413220afb93c9c93
- tzs 12y ago> Unfortunately, pg said downvoting for disagreement is perfectly acceptable, so it's probably not going away Even Homer nods. Pg blew that one. He said: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. If the down arrows merely did the opposite of the up arrows on comments, and so moved the comment farther down the page, then he'd have a good point. However, as soon as a comment goes non-positive (which will happen if the very first person to vote on it votes down), the color is changed to make it harder to read, and the more it goes down, the harder it gets to read. If down votes are used for mere expression of disagreement, this means that if a topic is at all controversial it only takes a bit of bad luck to have your comment seen first by a few people who disagree, and then it is so sunk that people can't read it, and the people who would have up voted and brought it back to visibility never see it. When I read HN on mobile, sometimes I cannot follow the conversation on controversial but interesting topics because so many of the comments are greyed out. When I get back to my desktop (where I override the HN stylesheet to mark those comments in a different way that doesn't make them hard to read), I invariably find that a large fraction of the greyed out comments were well written and valuable contributions to the discussion. Because of that, several times I've refrained from participating in threads that I thought were going to be controversial.
- krapp 12y ago>Several times I've refrained from participating in threads that I thought were going to be controversial. I kind of suspect that's the intended effect.
- DanBC 12y ago> I've noticed a shift to where people downvote if they don't agree with a comment instead of using at it was intended to downvote bad comments. It's not a shift. It was accepted practice for a thousand days before you had this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- krapp 12y agoTo be fair, that's an opinion stated by pg, not necessarily a statement of site policy. The opinion of the site's administrator and creator matters, but it isn't incontrovertible.
- yellowapple 12y agoAnd it's still a practice with rather disturbing implications, seeing as how downvoting causes a comment to fade further and further; it implies that dissenting comments (regardless of their validity) are worthy of being silenced.
- DanBC 12y agoLimited numbers of people have the ability to downvote. Everyone with an account has the ability to upvote. When you see a comment that has a single downvote for disagreement you're also seeing a comment that has several thousand logged-in views that didn't want to supply a corrective upvote.
- fsk 12y agoDownvote = "I disagree" is harmful. Over time, it leads to a circlejerk. Downvote should only be for spam or offtopic. Alternatively, have 2 types of downvotes.
- minimaxir 12y agoNote that be average score for comments has been trending downward though 2014, up to Oct 2014: http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/monthly_average_points.png http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/monthly_average_points.... (via http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ ) Unfortunately, I can't get more up-to-date data on comment scores because HN closed the loophole I used to get comment scores immediately after that post, which is disappointing.
- thaumaturgy 12y agoAs an aside, I'm disappointed too that comment scores are no longer available. I stopped crawling HN comments altogether when that happened; they became roughly as valuable as Reddit comments, since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones.
- krapp 12y ago>since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. Granted, it's harder to automate, but if the tradeoff is having to engage with more of the narrative of a thread then I don't know that that's a bad trade. So many variables can go into a comment score that the actual number becomes less meaningful than the sort order of the threads themselves.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago> You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. The snark isn't necessary. It's probably safe to assume I had set up a thing which would inject into my news feed comments above a certain threshold for certain users in threads I might not come across otherwise -- since that's exactly what I was doing. I don't read HN threads very often anymore. Something about too many people trying to out-snark other people without breaking the rules of decorum here made it feel too skeezy. Damn, now I'm doing it too. That's the other thing -- my mood in general has improved a lot ever since I stopped being a very active HN user a year and a half or so ago.
- adwf 12y agoI've taken to mostly using my upvote as a means of reverting other peoples bad downvotes. I think they should just take downvoting away entirely.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoTwo potential effects, one is that as more people reach the cutoff level to down vote they do, and two as people grow the community, opinions about what should merit a down vote evolves. Some services use up/down votes strictly for 'like it'/'didn't like it' others are more nuanced. Might be nice to add an interstitial for 'new' downvoters to check their understanding of the intent but I don't imagine it will change.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago> Some services use up/down votes strictly for 'like it'/'didn't like it' Yeah, this is what I really hope HN can avoid, which is why I brought the topic up. Such a trend can only lead to an echo chamber effect and a community that refuses to be challenged.
- brudgers 12y agoThere are healthy ways the HN community can be challenged. Given that it is a community rather than an individual the domain of challenges are those appropriate for communities in general and the unique aspects of HN in particular. What is and isn't appropriate is a variation of HN's community sentiment toward political topics. Some opinions are meant to foster discussion. Others are meant to invite disagreement or structured with a disregard for that potential. Cargo culting is less if an issue than trolling behavior, in my opinion, and the diversity of ideas I see on HN has increased from the days when mentioning Microsoft in a positive light or Apple in a negative one invited downvotes to grey.
- DanBC 12y ago1) That post appears to be factually incorrect, so people downvote it. 2) Did you upvote it? Why not? You've said you think it was unfairly downvoted. A few people have downvotes but everyone with an account can upvote. One or two people downvoted that comment. How many people didn't upvote it?
- ojbyrne 12y agoMy impression is there's a lot more moderation going on.