Counterpoint: downvoting is how Hacker News has maintained a comparatively high quality focused discussion while having only one full time moderator. It's not without its disadvantages - certain things will get instaflagged off the front page, especially "sexism in tech" stories. But it's like a firewall. If you don't have one, you get pwned eventually.
Occasionally you get "Boston Bomber" moments, and something true gets downvoted. That is on the poster to figure out why and how to present it in a way that will be accepted.
(I have 60k karma, so I know how to play ranked competitive HN, but even I still get downvoted occasionally if I'm lazy about sourcing or needlessly confrontational)
(edit: first downvote received in less than thirty seconds. Walked into that one, I suppose. Now leaving the edit window at +3. Sorry, +8. You're not really supposed to threadsit your own comments like this, but since we're talking about the voting system I thought I'd mention it)
If you go against the grain of HN on Elon Musk, Tesla, India or the US (and many other topics) then your comment, like this one, is tanking. Which also shows as many regulars from 5 years ago have left, I seldom see someones comments I recognize.
So I do object your argument.
Comments are good to get some opinions on a topic if you dont know about the topic of the linked post. I still read topics therefor.
I was not around for the early days of HN, and I recognize certain posters by their usernames. Here's a few off the top of my head (I am able to give a short description of each, but that's more work than I want to put into this comment). Also note I may misspell since this is from memory: Bytecode-dev, DoreenMichelle, ChrisMarshallNyc, Arathorn. This tends to happen when the person focuses on one topic in their posts, like bytecode-dev and python (and I hope at some point, myself and funding FLOSS, but maybe I comment too widely for that). There's more people; the point is not necessarily that I can regurgitate their names, but that I'd recognize them if I saw them (for example, I'm blanking right now on Drew from SourceHut's username, but I'd absolutely recognize it on sight.
Every now and again I wonder whether something like "reddit enhancement suite" would be useful for HN. It probably already exists. The ability to tag usernames with your personal opinion of them and reminders of their place in the community.
I recommend validating your perceived bias. Look through the archive for posts about Elon for example. You'll find people arguing HN is biased both ways. It's even more common for articles about Apple. (And it's quite funny to find in different comments on the same story)
The true comment "This is not contradicting what I have said." making an argument to a comment about discussions is voted down. What more do I need to say?
> If you go against the grain of HN on Elon Musk, Tesla, India or the US (and many other topics)
I'm not even sure which direction the grain is on India. I've even seen Indians arguing vigourously among themselves on this, which is not surprising given how contentious Indian politics is.
I think downvoting should remain available but more strongly dis-incentivized, maybe for instance by rationing the number of downvotes that one user can issue in a day.
But in the end I don't know if it'll make much of a difference, a bad community will always manage to push bad content to the top, a good one will manage to reward insightful content. Technical solutions can only go so far to fix what is essentially a social problem.
Depends on how many points. It should scale with the amount of points the user has. A percentage based scheme seems fine to me. 0.1% your points for every downvote.
I'm not sure I'd like to spend six hundred points dealing with a single idiot; I'd have to develop a better battery of cut-and-paste denouncements instead. I'm not sure this would improve the overall signal-to-noise ratio.
Downvotes are already rate limited. I know because I run out of them within 10 minutes of browsing the site nowadays.
I couldn’t disagree with you more, by the way. The amount of throwaway comments, puns, etc. are out of control. We need stronger downvoting, or weakened upvoting for new users.
I prefer upvoting good comments to downvoting mediocre ones. I keep my downvotes for trolls/insults and reddit-tier "meme" comments for which I apparently have a higher tolerance threshold than you because I don't find them all that common. Maybe we just tend to read different stories though.
People are bizarrely attached to their magical internet points and such consequences would perhaps have most think twice before flippantly greying out a comment they only read the first sentence of.
With the rampant vote inflation I think the limits should be at least quadrupled.
That is how you kill a site. It should be easier to remove bad content than to create more crap. The table is already tilted towards those creating misinformation and spam, making it more costly to prune this is an incredibly bad idea.
Side A: 1000+ voted story, with Apple’s recent App Store sentiments, emotionally engaging. This is the mob.
Side B: A lone fact checker. The comment posted by this fact checker was not ambiguous. It literally said that this whole thread is false. That kind of gravity in a comment is different from your usual discourse.
Side B is overrun by Side A. I am seeing this in our society, not just on this forum.
I feel like it’s different than you and I discussing whether tabs or spaces are better. It’s being overrun by emotions. We need to allow criticisms to surface and counterpoints to be heard when they’re devoid of attacks/trolling. Downvoting is creating a rather reinforcing mechanism for the mob the feel good about their stance. Further fueling it.
I am spooked by the current atmosphere on the internet. And I’m spooked by many instances of mob mentality in our society. Note: I am not talking about US protests.
What makes side B a "fact checker"? How can you identify them as such?
The real problem is that for pretty much any claim I can find you a tweet saying it was false. That doesn't help. We're into relative assessments of credibility by origin here. It looks like the original tweet author has retracted, which is pretty convincing.
> Apple takes back from the developer exactly what they gave the developer. This has been verified by a number of people, and this submission is just farcically wrong.
How is this nonsense front page on HN? Is this community this clueless?
This is a pretty harsh opposition. Not a small thing to gloss over. Why was it downvoted?
Here is what I fundamentally don’t understand. You have one guy make an unfounded, yet emotionally strong claims (every developer hates the appstore) and now his word in written in stone.
To refute him, you need multiple people to show that he’s wrong, a written statement from Apple and consignment from the Queen of England. This seems broken
When an account calling itself "hn_check" posts a series of comments like these they're going to get downvotes across most of their comments:
"Every clown who repeated this and argued the unfairness of it, like rattray here -- delete your accounts."
"rattray is intentionally spreading hilariously dumb misinformation to make HN look like a bunch of stupid assholes."
"This place is a den of absolute idiots, time and time again. And when it is realized it goes to auto-dead time. Absolutely fucking embarrassing for anyone who is proud of their association with this shithole of stupidity."
"Don't ever change your adorable ignorance, HN. It's such a laugh.
And this will be auto-dead. I was spot on and completely right and got pummeled down by the imbeciles of this cesspool. Hilarious. "
Haha, so would I. I think I'd instantly suspect I've fucked up in some dramatic way. But HN is usually civility > truth. The community values politeness over correctness.
Useful to know that characteristic. I use a personal user-moderation tool built by a friend to remove these people from comments. I actually really like these threads since it lets me identify people with lower thresholds for truth and lower thresholds for what they'll amplify as truth.
Looking at his comments I see insults coming 3 hours after his original comments were voted down. Apparently, being civil did not worked out for him either.
That you are being downvoted to oblivion is another indication that something is wrong.
Slashdot had a better moderation system ca. 20 years ago - you needed a reason along with the downvote and people would think twice about downvoting for "comment says something that may be factually right but somehow hurts my feelings or aligns with orange man". Meta-moderation also helped.
The moderator here is doing a good job, but perhaps he's being overwhelmed lately by the polarization and extreme groupthink on many issues.
I would love to see some academic research on the topic of forum moderation. The problem is probably as difficult as fixing democracy, but it would be nice to see what progress we have made in this area.
Community moderation has been a problem for a long time. There's a paper on Lucasarts "Habitat" MMO from the mid-80s! (can't find it at the moment). There's also JC Hertz's somewhat sensationalised anthropology of online culture from the 90s, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2284572.Surfing_on_the_I...
A number of experiments were made and abandoned; Slashdot's different types of up/down vote that users could weight themselves, Advogato's trust network, and so on.
But I don't like the word "reputation" as it goes against the idea that people who are new might have good input too. Using reputation as a discriminator is very much like committing an ad-hominem fallacy. But perhaps that's the best we can do.
A big problem is that an apparent new contributor may not actually be either new, or even a person. Only then can you determine that they're not somebody you've previously assigned a negative reputation value to.
(mind you, this is not at all sufficient; a major problem of the present day is people tweeting abuse from positions of power under their real names)
> Downvoting has 13 years of work and stress testing by 10,000s of people, you don't just turn it off.
This may be an argument for its correct functioning in the technical sense but is blatantly ignorant on changes in society and communication. If a mechanism becomes misused and exploited after a community grows and welcomes people from other communities, it has to be reconsidered. Social interaction definitely doesn't scale smoothly.
I think this guy downvoted for being rude, not necessarily for being wrong, although probably everyone who downvoted him thought he was wrong as well, when he was correct.
This whole "cancel culture" thing is a 2020 thing, while HN has operated like this since when? 2005? HN has been "cancelling" comments since forever, and it's suddenly a problem? It's part of the rules of the game here :-) You play or you don't.
ok when I said he was correct I meant his main point was correct, which I did not see as the cancel culture thing but rather that Apple does not keep the 30% commission. The cancel culture thing I saw as more of the rudeness.
I've been downvoted for stating a simple sourced fact last week. It happens all the time, when there are echo chamber or when the truth hurt some fanatics feelings they downvote in order to hide the truth, truth which hurt their ridiculously high sensitivity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23977461&goto=item%3Fi...
Such people should be accountable and loose their ability to downvote (and to a lesser extent to upvote)
As they actively hurt the epistomological quality of HN comments
So here's the idea: we should be able to call a moderator/contributor, explain to him why you think the downvoting is unfair and he will give retroactions.
I don't see how that would be irrelevant.
I talked about async stack trace and the original blog post talked about it.
BTW a guy thanked me because he found my comment useful.
I disagree with this (tho I acknowledge the dissent points and I'm one of those who moans occasionally - with the corresponding downvote hit about unreasonable downvoting). I've also never (yet) downvoted anybody despite severe provocation :)
I think some limits on downvoting might be useful (some of which might already be in place, I can't remember).
e.g.
You can't downvote replies to your comment. (Already in place).
A limit to downvotes to a particular comment. (I thought this was in place but can't find a reference)
Time limit on downvotes. (I think this is already in place).
X downvotes use up Y karma.
I would also like a guideline that you should only upvote or downvote based on the quality of the comment rather than whether you don't like what you think of the commenter...
The point is a serious one and really shouldn't be downvoted.
On balance, I disagree, but social bubbles are a systemic risk in our online communities, and the way downvote buttons are often used can promote a groupthink tendency,
That a profile where half the comments are rude gets downvoted? If I want to get called an asshole and read rude, barely intelligible comments I'll go to 4chan. You can disagree and present well-reasoned arguments without devolving to "LOL WAT? U IDIOTS"
> We need to remove downvoting temporarily for next 6 months.
"Need" is an overstatement if I've ever heard one, wow. Sort of an arbitrary timeline, too.
> Cancel culture.
Equating downvoting and community moderation with "cancel culture" is pretty far off base.
> Dissent and attack on free speech.
You have absolutely no right to free speech on HN, nor should you, nor did you ever, nor is that what free speech actually means.
The number of people who equate "the government shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" with "I can be an asshole in a private forum and you're not allowed to call me an asshole" is astounding, and that is the real problem here.
> Smearing of truth.
By downvoting rude comments?
> People are afraid to speak up.
They're demonstrably not.
> Chilling effect.
Word salad.
> @dang - this is urgently needed.
It's not.
> It’s raising alarm bells like no other to me.
By most news accounts the US is careening toward a totalitarian apocalypse, China is literally sending train loads of Uighur muslims to re-education camps, and we're in the middle (or start, in the US) of a global pandemic, but HN's community moderation standards and practices are what's got your spidey sense tingling?
We need to remove downvoting temporarily for next 6 months. See how things pan out.
Cancel culture. Dissent and attack on free speech. Smearing of truth. People are afraid to speak up. Chilling effect.
@dang - this is urgently needed. It’s raising alarm bells like no other to me.