The solution is not any sort of downvote mechanism, by any name. The solution is simply restraint :)

(An "irrelevant" flag that didn't even display a vote total would be purely a placebo. If it weren't for the fact that the users here would immediately figure out the trick, I'd semi-seriously propose the placebo idea. Restraint is easy to preach, but sometimes difficult to practice, and one way to make it easier is to offer a displacement behavior. Instead of getting angry, you can forcefully click a button and depart. ;)

And I wouldn't have even brought up the idea of a formal Cold Shoulder system if I hadn't seen so many users -- including myself -- doing it anyway, using comments. Perhaps this ad hoc comment method that we currently use is actually better than a formal system for feedback. I'm not sure. But I figured I'd at least discuss the idea for a minute.

Why don't people show more restraint and just have faith in the force of gravity? I just discussed the irrational reason: they could use a better displacement behavior. The rational reason is that, as the number of off-topic submissions becomes a greater and greater percentage of the submitted stories, one fears that new submitters are increasingly unable to tell the difference between a story that dies because it is offtopic and a story that dies because it's lost in a sea of other submissions. So, they keep trying. I'm not sure I blame them. Why shouldn't users submit the kind of highly-crafted linkbait that works so well on sites like Reddit and Digg? The answer is that many such links don't work well with the culture we're trying to foster on HN, but users aren't born knowing how HN culture works. Experienced folks have to teach them. And one good way to teach people is to have a means of providing subtle corrections: One that's more gentle than a stiff-arm to the face, more polite than a cutting insult, and less work to create than a well-crafted post.

Anyway, perhaps you are right and I just needed further encouragement. I will return to the "restraint" tactic, and we'll give the whole thing another three months and see what transpires.

One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end. Given some of his previous work in bayesian spam filtering techniques, I am inclined to believe (hopefully not in vain) that the HN algorithm will continue to be adjusted over time to weight down the useless stuff and add buoyancy to the interesting stuff. Because it is still very hard for a program to gauge the nature of comments, the best approach is likely to assume that comments and active discussions == good, while lack of comments == bad.

So, I might have too much faith in "the system" (which is a rarity for me), but for now I am trusting that this issue is being managed transparently, and we can all do our part by acting intelligently. I'll also add for good measure, that there are times I have to remind myself to take my own advice ;)

Yes, I agree that this is the secret advantage [1] of the site: It's being gardened, using hoes and rakes built out of Lisp.

[1] Well, okay, technically it's a secret only in the Purloined Letter sense.

Recently, there was a thread both on reddit and HN about Danish energy policy. Though I favor environmentalist policy (I drive a car on Biodiesel, and I'm switching to a pure solar/wind/hydro electricity provider) I was downvoted on reddit because I mentioned that Denmark is a lot smaller than the US, and everyone assumed that I am anti-environmental. By contrast, there was a very well reasoned discussion on HN where I actually learned something. It seems obvious to me that something is happening right here. No need to change right now.

Well said. I will endeavor to keep the faith.

There's no question that we must be careful not to break things that seem to be working. I haven't been to Reddit or Digg in over a year, so I have no idea how bad it is out there, but it sounds like HN is still an unusually sane place.

If you see something you like, upvote it! Also, if you're not happy with the stuff you see.. by all means, submit some links that you think are interesting.

A couple of times I've submitted stuff that was perhaps a little off topic or not explained very well.

The frustrating thing was that when a submission got upvoted by other people who obviously found it interesting as well, all the comments were from people who just wanted to point out that the article was not interesting to them.

I'd much rather people just ignore stuff they don't like. Leave it for other people who do find it interesting to discuss.

That was the impulse for this suggestion of mine: I was trying to think of a system that acknowledges the existence of these dissenters without encouraging them to occupy too much space on the comments page.

But I think in general it's better just to be mindful that different people have different interests. I'm glad that I'm exposed to a broad range of topics on this site, even if I don't find all of it interesting.

Although, that said.. the obvious link bait type articles "Top 10 ways to blah blah" are pretty annoying. :P

Therefore, a feature request: If a large fraction of HN's users hit the "Not Hacker News" button, then the site should use some clustering technique (k-means or whatever) to identify groups of users who agreed[2] on what was on- or off-topic and filter accordingly (for those users). The idea is that if enough of the users to whom I'm similar decide that something is off-topic, then HN auto-flags it for me. What I'd really like is these articles filtered out automatically; then, if we wanted to get fancy, provide a "Show 4 probably NHN articles" link that turns the feature off temporarily.

[edit:] In particular, people who didn't use the NHN button would see exactly the normal set of stories.

But then HN becomes a baby recommendation engine, which could be a nasty path. Just thinking out loud.

[1] I bear no particular ill will toward Mr. Katz; just thought most of his stuff was neither news for nerds nor stuff that mattered.

[2] "Users mostly agreed" means the overlap between the sets of NHN-flagged articles is similar.

The problem is that there can't be any universal consensus on what stories belong on News.YC. I've posted "doesn't belong" comments to some stories, while simultaneously being annoyed by the same type of comment for other stories. This inconsistency will never go away.

Yes, "universal consensus" is way, way too much to expect of the universe. But I'd claim that the current contents of the News.YC front page represents a broad, fuzzy consensus, plus a few outliers, and that's what we're trying to signal here.

I actually expect that, were we to implement this idea, the "X users have pressed the Fake Traffic Light button" widget would always register a certain number of clicks for the average front-page article. You're right -- the median submission will always seem annoyingly offtopic to somebody. That's why I think it's important that the "Cold Shoulder" widget be very small and unobtrusive, since it will always be there, registering something.

And, of course, for the median submission the widget might well have no value, since it will always register some background noise. But my hypothesis is that the design might pay off by keeping the objections small and inconspicuous, rather than having them eat up space on the main page the way curmudgeonly comments currently do. Meanwhile, for the non-median submission, the feature will come into its own: If you submit a link that recruits people to the Hare Krishnas, and it gets zero upvotes plus 75 "Cold Shoulders", you can't pretend that your article has merely slipped through the cracks. Nope, we're actively ignoring you and hoping you will go away.

Of course, perhaps my idea would just end up encouraging rebellious users to compete to rack up the largest possible tally of Cold Shoulder clicks. If that turns into the game of choice I might have to concede that my idea is terrible. ;)

dhotson said: "My personal mantra on this is to focus on upvoting." Mine too, but unfortunately it only takes a few people whose focus is instead being community police to annoy the hell out of a lot of other people.

An "off-topic" button might go a little way toward solving this.