[HN Gopher] Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately...
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Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
Author : deepfriedginger
Score : 215 points
Date : 2021-07-28 11:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theapeiron.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (theapeiron.co.uk)
| username3 wrote:
| Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left
| leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each
| other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with
| itself.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| My mental model of downvote systems is that systems without them
| allow more diverse thoughts.
|
| Imagine a topic where everyone feels compelled to vote, skewed
| about 51% to 49%. Without downvotes, your top comments are going
| to be a mix of both sides. Opinions are about 50-50 and comments
| will look like that. It will feel frustrating, like in the
| article, because you see about half of these posts from those
| evil Others, and have no way to disagree aside from commenting.
|
| With downvotes, the 51% side's score becomes 51-49=+2, and the
| 49% side's score becomes 49-51=-2; below a never-read comment at
| zero! All the top comments are from the (slim) majority, making
| it feel like a strong consensus, when it isn't. It will feel
| better to that 51%. Who knows what the 49% will do. Leave?
|
| Of course it's never exactly as straightforward as that, but
| that's the tendency. I like systems without downvotes because
| what you're likely to see more proportionally reflects the
| diversity of opinions of the others on the site.
| sebringj wrote:
| In my experience of HN and StackOverflow, at first, I did not
| like people downvoting my naive or thoughtless comments.
| Throughout the years, my reputation on StackOverflow grew and a
| little bit on HN since the bar is so much higher seems... but in
| any case, this has been a learning journey in being a more
| thoughtful and respectful contributor and without those
| downvotes, I wouldn't have had the self reflection to be better,
| as trivial as that may sound.
| rpz wrote:
| Society doesn't need a downvote or an upvote. I'd be happier with
| the removal of both buttons.
| notriddle wrote:
| Has this person even used Reddit? Or StackOverflow? Or even
| GitHub? I've used social platforms with downvote buttons; saying
| that they make you feel bad and should be removed is like saying
| that cigarettes should be removed because they smell bad.
|
| But to be specific, instead of just using metaphors:
|
| * A downvote carries less information than an upvote does. If a
| feature request gets a lot of upvotes, the voters are saying you
| should ship it. If it gets a lot of downvotes, does it mean that
| the voters don't think it solves a real problem (so you should
| just drop it)? Or does it mean that they think the solution is
| bad (so it should be tweaked)?
|
| A post usually justifies itself, so the meaning of upvotes is
| obvious, while it rarely has one, single, obvious counter
| argument, so a downvote could mean any number of things.
|
| * Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really
| think strengthening the filter bubble would help?
|
| * Downvotes get used for bullying. Their application for this is
| obvious, relatively low-effort, and if it influences a sorting
| algo, can have long-lasting effects on someone's social reach.
| There are definitely groups with vote bots on Reddit and HN.
|
| * On platforms with anonymous voting, it creates paranoia. You
| have people telling you your content is bad, but you don't know
| who and you don't know why. People _say_ that they only downvote
| content that doesn't add anything to the discussion at all, but
| what you see seems different, where informative but unorthodox
| comments get downvoted seemingly because the voters disagree.
| Who's doing that? Reddit won't tell you, so you're forced to
| guess, and that's really damaging to a community, because people
| get accused of abusing the downvote button with no way of ever
| proving it right or wrong.
|
| * On platforms with public voting, someone can lash out at you
| for downvoting them. It's very easy to take it personally (see
| point 1 on how downvoting is low-information).
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"Downvotes get used for bullying."
|
| Absolutely. This is especially noticeable on the
| state/city/town subreddits where political partisans
| consistently dogpile on posts that go against their message.
| [deleted]
| Pxtl wrote:
| > * Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really
| think strengthening the filter bubble would help?
|
| Discerning between truth and misinformation is also a "filter
| bubble". Any community-driven system that discerns between
| "this is what we like" and "this is what we hate" is also being
| used to discern between "this is what is true" and "this is
| what is false".
|
| Online communities with healthy cultures and downvotes quickly
| destroy misinformation. In those circumstances, the filter
| bubble is a _good thing_. People pushing misinformation
| _should_ be pushed either to stop posting misinfo or leave.
|
| The challenge is that the people who are doing the most work on
| this subject - like Facebook and Twitter - have chosen to make
| it invisible. We don't know how Twitter and Facebook rank their
| posts and replies. But they obviously have invisible powers as
| leadership to identify which voices on their systems are "good"
| and which aren't, and give those "good" voices outsized power
| in communication.
|
| But to me it seems obvious that something that takes Reddit's
| simple up/down interface but combines it with the kind of
| credibility ranking that Twitter does (where people who've been
| established as harmful don't actually have as much visibility
| or influence in the system) would be ideal.
|
| Give the leadership tools to establish a preference for fact,
| and you also give them tools to establish a preference for
| their particular worldview. You can't separate those.
|
| If you want a discussion system that supports fact over
| misinfo, you need to have a discussion system that enforces a
| community bias and creates a filter bubble, and then give the
| leadership the tools to control that filter bubble and bias, in
| the hopes that the leadership prefers truth over misinfo.
| Otherwise the community will organically create its own filter
| bubble on whatever biases it develops.
|
| And if you have no filtering at all, you get 4chan, where abuse
| and misinformation run rampant.
| notriddle wrote:
| That's not wrong, but you want actual proof if you're going
| to block something because it's false. That looks more like
| mod mail than like downvoting.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely
| here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of
| acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have
| nothing else to say. It's weird to me when I get a large burst of
| 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is
| pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting
| rights be taken away for any thread you're participating in.
| Reddit seems worse at this. It feels strongly like if you're in a
| 1:1 debate with someone they will downvote each response you make
| and that feels... stupid.
|
| Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility
| system. Not the mean or total votes, because they're skewed by a
| small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as
| inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly
| having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote
| count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism
| I think to not be a little shit.
|
| I don't mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted.
| Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept
| that you're dealing with a particularly moronic group of
| individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would
| assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given
| point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting
| their head against -5's. That is useful information. These people
| are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic
| obsessed ranters, or, and I'll happily tank downvotes here,
| aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first
| principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the
| detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and
| definitely don't have massive negative externalities for
| everything.
|
| People decry "Echo chamber!" but in reality most people
| consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative
| downvotes don't actually have anything valuable to add to most
| conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous
| spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.
| underseacables wrote:
| > I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is.
|
| Voting is power and people love one thing more than power, and
| that's greater power. Imagine if there were no up or down
| votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to
| silently express their opinions.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people
| might respond to having no ability to silently express their
| opinions.
|
| This is silly. None of the internet forums I grew up with had
| these.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| The trouble with up and down buttons, or like and dislike is that
| they often are only used by the lovers or haters - the 10-20% of
| people at the opposite ends of the 'likeability spectrum'.
|
| I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is good
| or that people agree with it? (the old issue of people liking
| death announcements/obituaries) On HN I tend not to downvote
| unless the person is writing like they're on Reddit, or in an
| offensive/confrontational manner.
| Vaslo wrote:
| To add to your point (kind of) the dislikes are often caused by
| brigading and a bunch of people just get onto the site to vote
| down something in a community they don't care about, ruining it
| for normal users to even see.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is
| good or that people agree with it?
|
| Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only
| supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines.
| On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily
| downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply
| don't want to hear.
|
| This is most obvious on posts about contentious topics
| (politics, police, social media, drugs) where well-written
| posts quickly accumulate downvotes if they don't agree with the
| popular sentiment on on HN.
|
| It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written,
| polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to
| -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren't welcome. That's how
| the echo chamber is propagated.
| skissane wrote:
| > Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only
| supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines.
| On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily
| downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply
| don't want to hear.
|
| On HN they aren't ignoring anything; the original HN
| guideline, set by pg himself, is that downvoting for
| disagreement is okay here. (I don't necessarily agree with
| that guideline, but I didn't start this site.)
| dahart wrote:
| > It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written,
| polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to
| -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren't welcome. That's how
| the echo chamber is propagated.
|
| While that might happen every once in a while, it is
| important to remember that politely worded comments with
| citations can (and often are) still rude, wrong, misguided,
| and/or spin. Unfair downvotes to death have even happened to
| me once or twice, but I don't think HN is going to hell in a
| handbasket yet. I think I've seen a lot more people jumping
| to conclusions about why downvotes are cast than I have of
| actually positive and helpful comments being unfairly
| downvoted purely for harmless but unpopular opinions. Unless
| the downvoter explains their reasons, we don't know why the
| downvotes were cast, so it's not safe to assume it's for
| popularity reasons just because it appears polite. HN threads
| are sometimes interesting because they can attract experts in
| the domain of the posted article, and it's common for people
| who are curious but relatively ignorant to argue with people
| who really know what they're talking about. Sometimes it's
| not easy to tell who's who.
|
| Either way, if you see comments that don't deserve to be
| gray, upvote them!
| jeppester wrote:
| I think a big part of the issue is that it's just too easy to
| downvote something.
|
| I wonder how it would change the situation if you had to
| defend/explain your downvotes.
| MMS21 wrote:
| Only allow downvotes to a post or comment after replying to
| it first perhaps
| lazyjones wrote:
| Downvotes are irrelevant, society needs to get off FB (today it
| marked a post of mine containing only a link to the CDC's website
| with no further text or emoticons as "misinformation") and
| possibly off all pure textual discussion media, since they mostly
| encourage spontaneous, irresponsible reactions instead of
| discourse. Even Tiktok's video responses are better than FB and
| Twitter...
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| I think opining on the internet should be rethought. I think that
| instead of the relatively opaque up/down, it should be a 2D grid
| of agree/disagree and good/bad argument. Allowing you to still
| commend users that you disagree with by noting they make solid
| logical arguments.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I don't have a solution but my thinking at the moment is either
| (a) get rid of the downvote or (b) keep it to rank order of
| comments but don't show it to users including the commentor. That
| also means not showing it in aggregate.
|
| I wrote an extension to hide points for myself
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-points-exorcism...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Facebook has an option to "See fewer posts like this". Select the
| three dots icon on the upper right corner of a post (mobile app)
| to see it. It doesn't notify the person that you've chosen to not
| see their posts, so there's no social risk in clicking it.
|
| I use it liberally and it works. I check Facebook maybe a couple
| times a month and almost never see anything I don't want to see
| any more.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It doesn't work at all. Once I accidentally liked some movie
| thing and then it wouldn't stop shoeing me movie quoted. If U'd
| dislike one and block ine account then it'd show me another. I
| had to block a hundred, literally, until it startef showing
| less of them. It still showd ine ocassionally.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| How does Facebook's engine score similarity between posts,
| exactly?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Obviously we don't see the inner workings of algorithms, from
| Facebook's feed to HN's upvote/downvote/flag/decay system.
|
| However, my sense is that by clicking the button I see fewer
| posts from the person who posted it, which is often quite
| effective at shaping my feed the way I want it anyway.
| Facebook does also seem to do some basic classification of
| hot topics (politics in particular) such that hiding a few
| politics posts results in fewer politics posts even from
| other people, too.
|
| Likes are upvotes, so it's also important to hit the like
| button on content you want to see more of, and to not hit the
| like button on content you don't want to see. I know it
| sounds obvious, but I know people who refuse to press Like
| buttons because they object to the concept of Likes.
|
| Using likes and the "hide post" features to curate a feed
| doesn't take much more effort than upvotes and downvotes and
| it's very effective at shaping my feed, in my experience. I
| think too many tech people simply ignore those features and
| can't understand why their feed is only showing them content
| that other people are engaging with (often arguments).
| smolder wrote:
| Part of this is their capability of processing image posts
| and giving it a text description. For example Facebook will
| look at a jpeg of an old man with some text on it and use
| image recognition to actually determine a description of
| "photo of old man saying 'top text bottom text'". I've seen
| these descriptions appear in the page and they're pretty
| impressive accuracy-wise. Beyond that, comparing posts for
| similarity is likely mundane stuff like who wrote it,
| associated words, the type of people that engage, and how.
| WillDaSilva wrote:
| > The expression to feed into an anonymous algorithm that we
| don't just not like something -- that we actually dislike it.
|
| The author seems to assume that this sort of interaction would
| lead to these algorithms recommending similar content less, but
| these algorithms tend to prioritize engagement, not enjoyment.
| Downvotes are a form of engagement, so don't be surprised if
| these algorithms use your downvote patterns to learn what to show
| you to make you angry, upset, and engaged.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Reddit had downvotes which means every thread is full of people
| agreeing with eachother. Creates an echo chamber. People don't
| want to get downvoted so they eventually stop posting.
|
| It's great for creating perception bubbles. Everyone agrees!
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is why I stopped posting on reddit and why I still feel
| somewhat comfortable posting on HN. It's been years since
| reddit crossed the line and just became a left-wing echo
| chamber like twitter (or any other mainstream media, really).
| I'm neither liberal nor conservative, but I can't stand
| participating in a community where you're expected to play
| along with the mob or else be vilified.
| drstewart wrote:
| Yeah, my experience has been that any downvote system will
| turn an audience that's divided 51-49 to one that's
| partitioned 51-0 in very short order. If anything, I've come
| to the conclusion that downvoting should be completely
| removed from most online platforms.
| irjustin wrote:
| What's happening in Hnews then? Is it bad?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm sure it happens here, too. I know that if I start
| getting voted into oblivion, I walk away for a while.
| Clearly the community disagreed with my thoughts and it's
| not worth it to continue to engage.
|
| Ironically, it doesn't affect me at all on Reddit. I have
| such low expectations for the platform that I don't even
| notice my own karma score nor do I bother to look at
| posts of mine to see how they're being received. HN makes
| your score much more prominent so it's easy to see it
| moving and you know immediately whether you've said
| something controversial somewhere.
| drstewart wrote:
| HN is a rare exception to this effect due to its more
| focused niche (though the bubble effect is definitely
| there to some degree). I'm more referencing larger
| platforms, particularly reddit.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| A subreddit tends to be more focused than HN. I'd chalk
| it up to user maturity, not that HN is without great
| fault on this either.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| It's not _as_ bad on HN in my opinion, for a few reasons:
|
| 1. Comments cannot fall below -4 points
|
| 2. Downvoted comments only get greyed out, not hidden
| entirely
|
| 3. Most topics on HN are not political (though there are
| certainly exceptions)
|
| 4. The community here is (usually) a bit more mature than
| on other sites like Reddit
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Surprisingly many topics _are_ political [1], and an
| answer the very right-wing libertarian consensus here
| disagrees with will absolutely be voted all the way down.
|
| [1] Often, the assertion "this topic is not or should not
| be political" _is political_. Because politics is how we
| organize society on a large scale and saying things
| should be exempt from that, guess what, is a political
| opinion.
| phreeza wrote:
| Dunno, I'm pretty sure I've seen calls to break up or
| even nationalize Google and similar sentiments at the top
| quite a lot. That doesn't strike me as particularly
| right-wing?
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| The groupthink here isn't straight party-line, but it
| does have a lean.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's moving the goalposts quite a bit from
| "...absolutely be voted all the way down."
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| There's an inherent account age requirement on HN though,
| tied to the number of upvotes an account has
| playguardin wrote:
| Yes it's bad. Only boring agreeable normies get the up
| vote's necessary to get downvote privs, then they do
| their school marm routine, exercising their petty
| tyranny.
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| Not all users can downvote,only few can.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Not so.
|
| Reddit's system works that if a post get 1000 upvotes and
| 500 downvotes (66% liked), it will be scored worse than a
| post than gets 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
|
| Basically what it does is penalize controversy, which is
| the perfect decision for a website that is about mining the
| most humorous and widely-liked response.
|
| Anything that is 51% liked and 49% disliked (e.g. political
| individuals mentioned in a non-political thread) gets
| bombed to the bottom almost immediately, which is exactly
| what most redditors want.
|
| The other brilliant thing it does it let the user adjust
| this prioritization if they so desire.
| khawkins wrote:
| The point is that the 49% eventually leave when their
| every contribution get bombed to the bottom immediately.
| Then the 49% of the remaining 51% get bullied out.
|
| Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially
| when the main topic of discussion is how terrible
| everyone else is.
| Pxtl wrote:
| While downvotes can drive people out of communities, I have
| to contrast what happens in no-downvote communities, where
| often the top commentary is, to be blunt, far worse because
| corrections can only exist in the form of responses (and so
| more engagement).
|
| Downvote-based systems are better at having the consensus
| viewpoint and quality content bubble to the top, at the
| expense of pummelling some of the dissenting views.
|
| Upvote-only systems seem to have worse stuff bubble to the
| top.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Upvotes and downvotes are both old tech.
|
| "Applause" reactions/flags seem promising.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| Downvote is unwelcoming for newcomer, create possibility for
| toxic environment, and useless
|
| See downvotes in stackoverflow and reddit. Why not flag instead?
| I've seen many people being afraid to get downvoted that they
| finally back off from posting question
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Ohhhh, gods it's another rebranded Medium page. Couldn't read it,
| paywalled. Flagged.
| likeafox wrote:
| > Reddit moderators who run subreddits are given the choice to
| allow the function. When it's enabled, it's used as a filter to
| sort out divisive posts from the rest but also leads to problems
| like abuse based on opinions and introducing a feeling of
| negativity into the communities.
|
| Just want to clarify this: reddit inc. doesn't really offer
| communities a way to "disable" downvoting. The subreddits
| referenced at the link in this article are using the custom CSS
| to _hide_ the downvote button. Notably this does not impact users
| who are browsing 1) via the mobile app, a substantial to majority
| percentage of traffic based on the community in question 2) with
| custom CSS disabled [which can be done via a global reddit
| setting or via popular extensions like RES 3) via the reddit
| desktop redesign [ 'r3']. In the desktop redesign, some
| communities try to continue hiding downvotes by using the
| customization tools to set the button to a transparent png - but
| this is blatantly ineffective - the downvote hitbox remains
| accessible and feedback is offered to the user on a successful
| click when they see the score change.
|
| I have some experience with this, having helped researcher Nate
| Matias test the impact of downvote behavior in a community I'm
| involved with. You can see the summary of the resulting paper _Do
| Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior?_ here
| https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus...
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| > You can see the summary of the resulting paper Do Downvote
| Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior? here
| https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus...
|
| I didn't click your link, but based on Betteridge's law of
| headlines I am going to just assume the answer is "no".
| kubb wrote:
| Has anyone yet written an article headlined "is the
| Betteridge law of headlines a reliable way to asses article
| contents"?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| There's this:
| http://calmerthanyouare.org/2015/03/19/betteridges-law.html
|
| Delightfully, the article itself seems to assess the letter
| of Betteridge's Law while ignoring, and therefore
| embodying, its spirit.
|
| And also, naturally, deliciously, walks straight into the
| obvious trap in the end.
| durbleflorp wrote:
| Glorious, thanks
| kerblang wrote:
| I'd like to propose an "informative" button and a "political"
| button so that I could ask to see things that are useful &
| intelligent but have nothing to do with politics.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Reminds me of steam reviews
| whitexn--g28h wrote:
| I don't think that the right and the left agree on what's
| informative and what's political.
| laurex wrote:
| I'm curious why downvoting feels painful or frustrating. Perhaps
| I'm majorly naive. When I post a comment in HN, I sometimes feel
| a twinge of nervousness, since I'm not attempting any level of
| anonymity and I'm aware that some people have strong opinions,
| sometimes become personal, and cancel culture is a thing, but at
| the end of the day, if I'm downvoted, it's only a comment on the
| internet, not something about which I feel personally judged.
| People are entitled to their opinions, I'm not attached to them
| agreeing.
|
| Sometimes, after I write something, I think, 'I could have
| phrased that more effectively' and sometimes I even change my
| mind based on someone else's more informed points. This is why I
| engage in discussion, not to be right, but to explore things I'm
| interested in and to learn.
|
| I appreciate downvoting in an environment like HN, where usually
| it seems to be wielded in service of better conversation, but I
| also have seen it used to push down voices that might be simply
| passionate. There is a certain hegemony that may be enforced by
| downvotes. ("Why is THIS on HN?" is a clue). Still, there's an
| amazing level of thoughtful moderation, and I prefer to notice
| the culture from a slightly sociological perspective rather than
| thinking it needs to change by fiat, and make my small
| contributions from a slightly different perspective.
|
| I don't comment on things that feel emotional to me, and
| sometimes things make me frustrated. I think downvoting is
| actually a good tool- however, I hope someone will educate me
| here.
| laurex wrote:
| Note: I love that this comment was downvoted - very meta - but
| I would have appreciated hearing more about the thinking behind
| it :)
| motohagiography wrote:
| While I don't think they are useful, I have come to relish
| downvotes because if I have provoked a snide response at least it
| is sincere, where a downvote means I have threatened the
| integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality
| writing.
|
| Downvotes are a substitute for discourse. If want something
| better, post it. It's like someone wanted to design a product for
| a braying, superstitious mob and created an electronic thumbs
| down button. I'm all for giving voice to the voiceless, but
| downvotes aren't speech or a voice, they are a manipulation tool
| that encourage and reward the absolute worst quality of thought
| and reasoning.
|
| On HN they are somewhat and relatively judicious by convention,
| but it is not an exaggeration to say there is a cadre of even
| educated people who believe their intellectual role is not to
| establish truth or find consensus, but to direct "narrative,"
| which means specifically to lie and decieve for power. Downvotes
| are not discourse, they are the exclusive tool of this so-called
| narrative control. I tolerate downvotes because they draw
| engagement, even if it is of an inferior kind, and ideally they
| will be converted from boos to discourse, perhaps even a snide
| remark.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a
| narrative - and that 's when you know it's quality writing._
|
| Neither your premise nor your conclusion are valid. A downvote
| could simply mean you stated a counterfactual or alleged a
| fallacy. Nor can any automatic inference of quality be drawn.
| By your logic, someone who just posts the equivalent of fart
| noises and is habitually downvoted for doing so is a genius.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Killfiles too. If someone says something really bad you just put
| him there and he disappears from the site for you regardless of
| what he says or what threads he'll trigger next.
| godshatter wrote:
| I greatly dislike downvoting. Fundamentally, in my opinion, it's
| an act of censorship. Especially on sites that ultimately hide
| that information after a certain threshold, as HN does. It's no
| different in my mind than turning your nose up at someone or
| trying to talk over someone in a real-life conversation (assuming
| those still happen). I would much rather upvote the good
| comments, so that they rise to the top. I probably spend half my
| upvotes on this forum and others to undo what I consider to be
| unfair downvotes. If there is a comment I don't like and it
| bothers me, then it's better for me to reply to it rather than
| just signal my disapproval at it.
|
| The only time I would downvote personally is for something like
| spam, and I rarely even do that.
|
| I just think it's better all around to be positive instead of
| negative.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Down-votes are, plain and simple, mob rule.
|
| There's ample historical evidence that the fact that many people
| believe in something absolutely does not make it correct. I'd
| even venture to go to the other extreme: if many people believe
| something to be correct there's IMO 50% chance of it being
| severely and hilariously wrong.
|
| Watch a few National Geographic documentaries on monkeys and how
| their tribes are constantly at war with each other. It's eye-
| opening. They fling poop at whomever they don't like, not only in
| the other tribe, but inside their own as well.
|
| Like @crazy_horse said, I have zero problems being wrong or
| engaging in a discussion from which I might emerge with my mind
| changed.
|
| But I don't like turning myself into target practice for poop
| flinging masters.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I've noticed a difference between downvoting and non-downvoting
| discussions systems.
|
| In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the
| consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this
| isn't "the truth" or "the consensus of the community" but of the
| people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an
| otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners
| within that community will flood in and are highly motivated on
| the subject, and so the consensus will reflect _their_ interest
| in the subject.
|
| But either way, consensus.
|
| Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or
| just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up, and
| the rest of the participants can only argue against it but not
| drive it back down... this creates the "engagement-based content"
| that aggregators crave.
|
| The problem, of course, is that bots and sockpuppets are treated
| the same as established community members and can skew the
| "consensus". Realistically, the leadership of an online community
| needs to be able to identify who are credible voices on a subject
| and give them the power to steer the conversation. Yes, it's not
| egalitarian, but these systems _never have been_.
| loceng wrote:
| So post more quality content.
| hashkb wrote:
| But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get
| visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas
| within a community.
| Pxtl wrote:
| When the unpopular opinions are things like "COVID is just
| the flu" and "climate change is fake", both of which have a
| substantial contingent that will support them, those ideas
| getting downvoted into oblivion is not a bad outcome.
| hashkb wrote:
| Sure. But it's a double edged sword. "You should wear your
| mask" is getting downvoted (edit: I'm using the term
| loosely here, I hope it tracks) across the country and
| responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. We need to
| engage with ideas we don't like, and be open to persuasion.
| Downvotes preclude that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No we don't, and no they don't. If you engage with ideas
| you don't like and debate them in good faith, and the
| promoters of said ideas keep just pumping them out
| (perhaps even using botnets or whatever) while ignoring
| all your good-faith attempts to refute them, then you are
| wasting your time.
|
| At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open
| to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your
| willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do
| serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with
| this and am not willing to waste further time on it.'
|
| Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get
| around that is to make the system fully transparent and
| then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof
| only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes
| everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up
| after a while and people can weight away those negative
| opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to
| game the system go way up, and system operators usually
| wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against
| that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Unpopular ideas _may_ be ahead of their time, but they may
| equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith.
|
| There are potential benefits to considering any given idea
| (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are
| also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).
|
| Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into
| account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not
| and will not work.
|
| Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there
| with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous
| customers tell you it turned out to be bad, then you either
| improve your product or start losing money. But if you could
| go a small market with a big sound system and a team of
| marketing people to loudly insist that your products are the
| best you would quickly wreck the whole market.
| [deleted]
| 0x_rs wrote:
| There ought to be better ways, if any is needed at all.
| Downvoting should never be free and unlimited (having
| requirements is fine, but only involves a bit more time and
| effort to the would-be disturbance), most of the time it turns
| into bashing opposition of the consensus, which is turns out to
| be wrong too often to permit it. Self-reinforcing mere beliefs
| without evidence or proofs doesn't make it any more valid, but
| hinders discussion completely. Not too long ago there was some
| drama about a fork and some harrasment allegations, and see how
| it turned out (still zero evidence about anything at all), yet
| anyone doubting was downvoted away. Also, I'd argue the ability
| to give "thumbs down" itself already is a child-cuddling system.
| I don't understand the need of such things at times,
| chronological sorting of parent replies may not be the most time-
| efficient for readers, but it's the most natural.
| Macha wrote:
| I find linking the rise in partisanship to social media doesn't
| appear to be supported by the shared graphs, which indicate
| whatever caused the state change happened in the 90s, which is
| before social media took off?
| isabelc wrote:
| I think the rise of 24-hour news networks are partly to blame.
| effingwewt wrote:
| I have never, not once been able to downvote on HN and zi
| couldn't care less. If something is egregious there's always the
| flagging option.
|
| I don't see how anyone needs downvotes
| Causality1 wrote:
| Downvotes aren't going to fix anything until algorithms stop
| segregating us into individual groups of uniform opinion. How can
| you downvote what you never even see in the first place?
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| "Society" needs neither downvoting nor upvoting; it's a false
| dichotomy. What we need is to eliminate social media entirely.
| People need to get out in the real world and talk to others; that
| way, each person has to expend real energy to state their
| opinions one way or the other.
|
| It's easy to hate someone remotely over the internet and even
| easier to click a vote button, no matter what way the thumb is
| pointing. What's much harder is participating in _physical_
| society.
| EGreg wrote:
| It's ironic that we can't downvote this article on Hacker News.
| Only upvote it.
| jokoon wrote:
| I've been arguing that websites should only allow users to
| downvote.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I wonder if only allowing downvotes would lead to the same
| result as only allowing upvotes.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I feel like the solution is to allow downvotes, but not to allow
| the total score to go below 1.
| michaelmarion wrote:
| Can we bring back the time when there was no social media
| instead? I feel like that's what society desperately needs.
| 08-15 wrote:
| What's really missing is a "meh" button, meaning "this was a
| waste of time".
|
| I'd have clicked it.
| ramoz wrote:
| side note /s: Spotify would know me a whole lot better too & we
| can deemphasize glorified "we know you best models"
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post
| or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That
| would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a
| comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was
| downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote
| a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to
| expose their own opinion and risk their own downvotes.
|
| I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be
| enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked
| downvote I learn nothing.
| twirligigue wrote:
| Sometimes people can dislike something but they are unable to
| articulate the reason. Yet the reason _may_ be valid.
|
| So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one
| point from the downvoted, let it cost the _downvoter_ one point
| also.
|
| This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my
| temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological
| cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express displeasure for
| free. Which helps keep the discourse civil.
| EGreg wrote:
| Wow, I love both of these comments. I've been on the
| receiving end of downvotes after making helpful comments
| reflecting strongly-held opinions, that are the result of
| years of battle-testing them, and even building free software
| to put them into practice. Silent downvotes are maddening,
| and I often edit my comments to invite people to just
| disagree and give me their strongest arguments as to why they
| think my comment is bad / shouldn't have been posted / etc. I
| prefer they focus on substance, and I would welcome great
| counterpoints that I haven't thought of.
|
| But it's worse than that. Every time I link to the actual
| solution that I spent years and hundreds of thousands of
| dollars building, rather than just talk about it, I get
| silent downvotes. Watch, I will do it here:
|
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
| aaron-santos wrote:
| It's pretty easy to farm karma here. Would double-edged
| downvotes incentivize more submission karma farming in order
| to spend it in downvotes?
| cutemonster wrote:
| Maybe building up and selling high carma accounts with lots
| of downvote ammo?
| dmkolobov wrote:
| Something that I've learned: nobody owes you an explanation for
| why they disagree with you, nor are they bound to care whether
| you learn something.
|
| Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why
| people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable
| experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice
| empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by
| others.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > nobody owes you an explanation for why they disagree with
| you
|
| True. But there's a Monty Python sketch all about how
| conversations tend to go when people want to simply express
| their disagreement without justifying it. It doesn't
| typically lead to a happy place.
|
| And I would argue that the particular case of anonymously
| expressing that you disagree, without having to add any
| further contribution to the conversation, via a downvote
| button, is particularly useful as a way to expose others to
| your feelings without having to fear being exposed to theirs.
|
| But, still, it's true, nobody has any obligation whatsoever
| to behave in a constructive manner. It's just the nice thing
| to do, is all.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I'm almost just on HN so I can't talk about other places. But
| the few times I get downvotes I would like to know why
| somebody voted me down.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| But why? Why do you need validation that badly?
| alach11 wrote:
| In many communities (HN, Reddit, etc.) downvotes are
| ostensibly _not_ to be used for disagreement. Forcing users
| to supply a reason could introduce enough friction to
| encourage more thoughtful usage of the downvote.
| neartheplain wrote:
| >Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why
| people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable
| experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice
| empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by
| others.
|
| It's easier to practice empathy when you're not blindly
| guessing at what bothered the downvoter.
| loceng wrote:
| What makes you think no one owes you an explanation? If
| they're downvoting you and influencing how visible your
| comment(s) are I'd argue they do need to explain.
|
| Likewise you seem to need to take your own advice to
| brainstorm to understand why it is likely to add value to
| someone else leaving a comment and not simply requiring you
| to brainstorm and make guesses, e.g. bias and blind spots a
| person may have; what other possibilities are there?
|
| Edit to add: 2 upvotes then down to -1; it's hilarious how
| bad and poorly used downvotes are.
| Asraelite wrote:
| This is a perfect example of the point. I hold your view
| too, but your comment is being downvoted and I have no idea
| what the counterarguments are. It would be enlightening to
| know.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Shouldn't they do the same if they agree with you? What if they
| are wrong, or agreeing with you for purely strategic reasons
| rather than because they sincerely thing you're right? Any
| argument about downvoting is equally applicable in the opposite
| direction.
|
| Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to
| write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and
| they are merely echoing that. Trolls exploit this because many
| of them derive amusement from stealing others' time and
| attention by deliberately posting drivel and then demanding it
| be taken seriously or that people educate the troll out their
| misconceptions (a wholly insincere request).
|
| Nobody owes you agreement, and sometimes you will be rejected
| for unfair reasons. That's life. Expecting to only get positive
| reinforcement or always be fully supplied with context will
| only lead to disappointment.
| professoretc wrote:
| That's kind of how Slashdot used to work: you couldn't just
| up/down vote, you had to pick a reason why, from a list.
| "Insightful", "Funny", "Informative", etc. for upvotes,
| "Incorrect", "Trolling", "Off topic", etc. for downvotes. Of
| course, Slashdot also had _meta_ moderation, where you could
| occasionally be given the job of up /downvoting _other peoples
| ' votes_, which in turn influenced how often they would be
| allowed to vote in the future.
| greggman3 wrote:
| downvoting to disagree is totally acceptable on HN
|
| I complained once and dang corrected me.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Downvoting to disagree is effectively a heckler's veto to
| make minority positions literally disappear. It rewards
| organized brigading from motivated parties you don't want to
| see particular criticisms be surfaced.
|
| I don't understand why that type of discourse should be
| encouraged.
| effingwewt wrote:
| It's how I use it in reverse. I see my number tank and know
| people on HN don't agree.
|
| What I would like is the ability to hide my score. If I
| notice the drop I may check a comment to see what the
| disagreement was, but I stopped after several times of seeing
| nothing just the downvotes.
|
| Anyway, I don't need my number on every page I visit on HN,
| and would prefer the ability to hide it.
|
| I'd also love the ability to mute users. Some people post on
| here way too often for my tastes and always with the same
| rhetoric. I'm sure others feel the same.
|
| But, it is what it is. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the
| forced civility reminds me to be more civil IRL and I
| appreciate that. And it's probably good to see things I don't
| agree with, echo chambers are bad.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It can be somewhat arbitrary.
|
| I remember posting a link to a BBC article which got
| downvoted and eventually flagged. Two weeks later I posted
| a link to the original research the article referred to and
| that time it was heavily upvoted.
|
| I think unless your posts are getting repeatedly downvoted
| its not worth worrying about.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Arguing with people posting in bad faith or complete ignorance
| is a waste of my time.
|
| You can come with a mountain of evidence and/or a well written
| edited thought out post and they'll just ignore it, post
| elsewhere with the same argument, or complain about
| inconsequential things. In my younger days I used to waste time
| arguing with racists, Nazis, etc but the argument comes from
| bad faith and they've already made their mind up. I just down
| vote or report them and move on.
|
| They are specifically egregious but similar people are not owed
| my time and if it's an actual good faith argument they'll
| eventually learn to word their statements better.
| pvg wrote:
| This doesn't really work because every bad comment would have
| to generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations of
| its badness. It's also worth thinking about why this logic is
| so readily applied to downvotes but not upvotes. Presumably you
| learn nothing from a plain upvote so upvotes should come with a
| note as well, right?
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| > generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations
|
| I just recently heard about a system where upvotes/downvotes
| themselves could be upvoted/downvoted. I could see a system
| like that to avoid the duplication, and if every original
| vote came with explanation, it would be nearly
| indistinguishable from regular conversation.
|
| Plus, something getting downvoted would presumably get less
| traction over time since it'd get pushed down.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Reminds me of "was this review helpful" feature at many
| websites that sell things that can get reviewed. But "was
| this up/downvote helpful" instead? (I like the idea)
| myohmy wrote:
| I totally agree. Twitter's ratio is probably the best
| upvote/downvote system. At best it results in providing context
| for the disagreement. At worst, if the person is a complete
| idiot then a constant stream of people dunking on them is more
| entertaining than a downvote.
| corobo wrote:
| The reality of this of course would be a bunch of meta comments
| "." or "dumbass" or just general low-effort insults
|
| > I have no problems with people disagreeing with me
|
| Anonymous downvotes exist in the first place because this isn't
| a common character trait. If everyone was like that then we'd
| all be giving each other feedback
| whall6 wrote:
| That would be cool. In order for a downvote to be cast you have
| to reply
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've always thought an evolution on the threaded messageboard
| system where
|
| 1) Votes are tied to comments inherently
|
| 2) People can argue with those comments
|
| 3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up
| comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to
| oblivion I guess)
|
| 4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it
| (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd like to
| summarize the thread)
|
| 5) People can go on to argue with that stub
|
| Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is
| more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could
| eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality
| argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually
| is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high
| quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting
| experiment.
|
| There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for
| example it would probably be necessary to group posts as
| "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that
| makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single
| counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving
| into two sides with horns intractably locked.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| Have you ever thought about becoming a Wikipedia contributor?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Wikipedia is cool (so is stack overflow). However I prefer
| to engage in arguments that do actually terminate at some
| point.
|
| Actually, though I think there's something to be gained by
| reading something that is explicitly phrased as a back and
| forth argument, rather than an explanation. Arguments
| between informed people usually bring up objections that I
| wouldn't have thought of, or that somebody writing an
| encyclopedia entry wouldn't want to deal with.
| Hitton wrote:
| Although I agree that downvoting alone is not very
| constructive, if the comment is obviously spam/troll or
| especially when someone else already pointed out what is wrong
| with it, I don't see a problem.
| LightG wrote:
| Isn't that what flagging is for?
| Groxx wrote:
| It can be useful to have a range of signals. Flagging is a
| rather hard-line "this is not appropriate" mark that many
| are unwilling to make on borderline things, e.g. when only
| somewhat misleading or partially incorrect.
|
| Plus it requires clicking into _the individual message_ ,
| so you are required to see the contents twice, and can't do
| it quickly. That friction alone slows down using it on any
| softer or higher volume cases.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I think it's worth distinguishing between "I disagree with this
| comment" and "This comment is not well written: it is
| superficial, makes extraordinary claims without backup, or is
| illogical." My one problem with downvotes is it's hard to know
| which is meant.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| One problem with downvotes, at least the way they are implemented
| in reddit and HN, is that they cancel out upvotes. You are not
| able to see how many upvotes a post got, only how many upvotes
| minus downvotes.
| em-bee wrote:
| very much this. i would really like to see the actual number of
| up and downvotes on a post.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| This always bothered me in some subconscious part of my brain,
| thanks for putting it into words. Reddit even lets you sort by
| controversial posts, so they clearly store both upvotes and
| downvotes, why do they have to display them as one number?
| underseacables wrote:
| It is amazing how much we have accelerated the shift towards a
| society where no one's feelings is allowed to be hurt.
| est wrote:
| Just a thought experiment, what if we can vote _against_ one
| political candidate. Does this bring better or worse democracy?
| [deleted]
| joelthelion wrote:
| Even better: rate each candidate
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment
| oconnor663 wrote:
| Downvotes on something like reddit are very different from
| downvotes on something like Facebook. Imagine being a teenager
| and getting downvoted by your own friends. These are complicated
| tradeoffs of course, but that's an important part of the story.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| Negative feedback from your peer group is normal, and provides
| conformity pressures, which is important when forming and
| maintaining a community bound together by a common culture.
| sfink wrote:
| In my opinion, that mechanism didn't survive the transition
| to online. Or rather, it survived all too well; it grew fangs
| and learned how to breathe fire.
|
| In an in-person peer group, there are a lot more subtle
| gradations in disapproval. "Dude, that's not cool!" is very
| different from looking at someone askance. Overt signals
| _require_ everyone else present to take a position on
| something. Subtle ones don 't.
|
| Being downvoted on a Facebook peer group of teens is an overt
| signal. Everyone is going to take sides. It's not that it
| doesn't happen in person, it's just that online it makes
| everything into a Big Deal. That produces bland communities
| with fear-based conformity.
|
| To do better, you'd need something that can support richer
| communication, allowing for more nuance. One possibility that
| comes to mind is emojis -- a group can (and does) form its
| own vocabulary based on emoji-only responses that may only
| have meaning within a group. But they can serve the purpose.
| If I were a teen, or more active in social forums, I might
| know if that's already happening.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| It's also a way to apply peer pressure.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| Yes. Peer pressure is a natural part of tribal or communal
| affiliation. A culture is a set of norms, customs, and
| beliefs common to a group. Maintenance and propagation of
| that culture requires a complex combination of positive and
| negative social feedback in order to keep those beliefs
| persisting, part of which is peer pressure.
|
| Extreme peer pressure can be bad, just as any social
| extreme is bad. But it isn't universally bad if used
| sparingly and for a reason.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is a silly article. Add downvotes, don't add them -- it
| doesn't address the polarization issue he identifies.
|
| Many things can be and used to be individual choices and not
| societal issues open to debate (and mutual hatred). If you refuse
| to accept that, then everyone who doesn't make your choices
| becomes your enemy.
|
| I'm not lamenting the bygone days, since they sucked in numerous
| ways. But they did contains a kernel of truth, in that shrinking
| the size of public discourse is the only way to keep it civil.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious
| criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up.
| There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to
| hurt me. I really mean it.
|
| But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because
| of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem
| being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying
| to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes
| along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got
| because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid,
| and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that
| game and then the site software decides you get less rights than
| everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would
| I participate in that?
|
| It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't
| want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals
| act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty
| people might have power.
|
| If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they
| should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological
| behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The
| world is not binary.
| acover wrote:
| Votes determine visibility. A post doesn't matter if it's not
| visible.
|
| A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get
| sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse.
|
| Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I
| think other feedback mechanisms are better.
| aaaronic wrote:
| Downvoting here on HN does seem pretty arbitrary. (Either that,
| or I just don't post quality comments/posts :D)
|
| I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting
| like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I
| don't know how successful they are.
|
| I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback
| being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are
| posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might
| have some viability.
|
| As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of
| sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Would it be better if you get down voted to hell and also get
| swamped with throwaway comments like "that's stupid"
| underseacables wrote:
| I think throwaway accounts should be banned, or at the very
| least, there should be a waiting period before you can
| comment. If you participate with thoughtful comments,
| you'll reach 500 within a month. What bothers me is people
| creating these accounts on a whim just a throw out some
| garbage, or maybe a valid opinion, and then disappear in
| the night. If you had to wait a week to post it might lead
| to massive duplicate account creation, but I think it's
| worth considering.
| cesarb wrote:
| > or at the very least, there should be a waiting period
| before you can comment.
|
| That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one
| where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one
| wants to create an account will most probably be the
| moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a
| salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the
| account was created with forethought would just lead to
| the account never being created in the first place ("I
| would create an account to reply to _this_ , but even if
| I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I believe Hell has nine levels; HN downvoteland has only 4.
| popcorncentury wrote:
| Exactly. The article reads like expressing displeasure is
| hampered. But if negative comments have increased, then that is
| a good thing, because at least the commenters have had to come
| out of the woodwork to express themselves.
|
| And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can
| upvote your point.
|
| Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse.
| They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for
| censorship (especially here). People who don't know what
| they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just
| taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without
| being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.
|
| The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows
| the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be
| him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about
| downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a
| tweet.
|
| Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all
| of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.
|
| When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we
| become.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them
|
| I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about
| actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing
| better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long
| hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > I just don't want to be involved in a community where
| supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that
| such malicious and petty people might have power.
|
| That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in
| academia?
| wchar_t wrote:
| There are a few interesting "alternatives" to the standard
| downvotes we see. For example:
|
| * "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g.,
| "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on
| e.g., Lobsters.
|
| * Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3
| downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or
| some random forum...
|
| I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel
| like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat
| alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of
| downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your
| comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that
| though.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Given that many of his public posts are devoted to ranting
| against conformity of thought, it's amusing that pg designed a
| forum that rewards exactly that behavior.
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't think I agree at all.
|
| Some of my favorite comments I've made here are the ones that
| get downvoted. They point me to places where one of several
| interesting scenarios has occurred, such as, but not limited
| to:
|
| 1) I'm right, other people have not yet realized it and the
| way I'm expressing it doesn't make it clear that there's a
| good argument there. This is a _fantastic_ opportunity.
|
| 2) I'm wrong about something, and haven't yet realized how.
| This is extremely valuable information because my own
| cognitive biases mean that it's difficult for me to discover
| through introspection.
|
| 3) lots of other possibilities too!
|
| When I stumble upon making a comment that gets unexpected
| downvotes, I have come across some of the most valuable
| information HN can give me.
|
| If I make a comment that I _know_ will get lots of downvotes,
| I 'm just wasting everybody's time. If I share something
| interesting that I think will get lots of upvotes, I may give
| some good information to others, but otherwise I'm mostly
| validating myself, which isn't a great use of my time.
|
| But most of the time I'm not commenting with any thoughts to
| votes, it's just about discussion. The votes just serves as a
| standin for body language that we'd get if we were talking
| face to face.
| Moodles wrote:
| I wonder how much downvotes are to blame for the incredible
| political bias over on Reddit (just check out /r/politics). Or
| whether it would naturally occur without the downvotes anyway.
| I suspect downvotes exacerbate the problem but probably aren't
| the only cause.
| zzzeek wrote:
| downvotes matter a lot and you should not ignore them. they are
| trying to tell you something. you dont have to agree with that
| message, as I frequently post things on HN that get downvoted,
| usually not that surprisingly, and I continue to simply
| disagree with the majority HN community on certain topics.
| downvotes are usually accompanied by a few real responses that
| will add context to why these downvotes might be coming in.
|
| If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a
| ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on
| facebook that's being spread by something like eight
| individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need
| downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business
| model.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| If you want to tell me something you need to spell it out,
| not leave me guessing and wondering whether I have said
| something untrue or that you merely dislike it.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| > but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to
| respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along
| with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got
| because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid
|
| welcome to HN, enjoy your stay!
| enriquto wrote:
| > But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit
| because of them
|
| You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of
| honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that
| finished at -4.
| kome wrote:
| I like the spirit :)
| goodlinks wrote:
| A comment disputing the post with its own upvotes seems a
| better representation.
|
| So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean
| relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative,
| adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up
| votes.
|
| Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-
| inforcement.
|
| I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe
| within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a
| comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i
| would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent
| within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one
| else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the
| masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses.
|
| I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _then someone comes along with their four accounts and
| downvotes every comment I got_
|
| In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a
| look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details
| are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).
|
| > _because I 'm not sufficiently ideological_
|
| Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other,
| and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they
| are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get
| angry and want to start downvoting everyone.
|
| Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less
| than 100 comments. You will be happier.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| > Avoid political threads.
|
| Everything is political in the cultural total war that is
| modern leftism including the weather, Google search results,
| twitter censorship, forest fires, dildos, wedding cakes, and
| the family members of journalists your side doesn't like.
| Only one outcome is tolerated and we all know what side that
| is.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very
| wrong"_
|
| Maybe there should be a separate URL to view recent comments
| with <1 points?
|
| /graycomments, or /controversial, or something like that.
|
| I'd certainly use that to sprinkle some upvotes. There are
| often high-quality comments that get downvotes early for
| whatever reason. It has a discouraging effect even if it gets
| corrected over time with more votes.
| gdsdfe wrote:
| I think you're missing the point of what the guy is saying
| ... He's not asking for tips and tricks to live happier in a
| downvote world. He's saying, I think, that downvotes are
| conversation stoppers and does not help us get to the bottom
| of things and they should not be the default were people form
| communities.
| ulucs wrote:
| > Avoid political threads.
|
| Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political",
| this is quite impossible to do.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Disagree, downvoted! /s
|
| Aside from political discussion, I see that opinion (say os
| or console X is better than Y) also bring downvotes.
|
| I find that asking questions and giving facts (not a wrong
| one) won't get downvoted and stay at 1 at worst.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I have been downvoted in technological threads, just
| expressing my past experience on docker. Should we avoid
| those as well?
| state_less wrote:
| The ground you walk on is not political. If folks learn to
| take it easy, we'll be in better shape.
| popcorncentury wrote:
| More accurately, everything is ideological at its core. I
| say this as science.
|
| Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for
| and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I
| am against censorship and for free speech.
|
| And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a
| platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being
| against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.
|
| So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone
| walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological,
| we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a
| downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had
| no practice.
|
| The platform that can handle political discourse without
| breaking will be the next great social media platform. We
| owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this
| is already it, whatever your platform of choice.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I haven't heard that new catchphrase to date.
|
| There's an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are
| layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.
|
| I think the context with things like that refer to internal
| business politics and having diplomatic conversations
| versus State or National Politics.
|
| Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid
| advice as it's too emotionally charged for most people to
| discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x
| factors and most politicians are relatively short term
| (speaking of USA here).
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _everything is political_
|
| Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere.
| People will try and justify it with walls of text about the
| oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to
| chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue
| intersects with their politics.
| minikites wrote:
| Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't
| "political".
| Veen wrote:
| My love of my partner and my nephews and nieces. My
| enjoyment of art. My appreciation of the natural world.
| You can do a political analysis of those things, but they
| are not intrinsically political. Of course, some on the
| left believe that there is nothing that isn't political.
| But I don't think they're correct.
| NeoTar wrote:
| For lots of people around the world the ability to love
| their partner is a very political thing - homosexuality
| being illegal in a majority of Africa, and punishable by
| death in parts of the world.
| Veen wrote:
| We could quibble about this, but I don't think that makes
| their love political. The repression is external to their
| love of each other, not part of it.
|
| In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to
| analyze it purely through a political framework--which is
| one reason many people don't like "everything is
| political". It diminishes many of the most important
| aspects of our lives.
| minikites wrote:
| Was the art you're enjoying created in a vacuum? Art is
| often extremely political.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You made it 4 words into your reply before using veiled
| political language regarding your relationship with
| whomever you are romantically involved with. "Partner"
| became common in the mid 80s because it was a way for gay
| people to refer to their love interests without revealing
| their gender.
|
| You say that art and love aren't political, but that's
| only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.
| dmpk2k wrote:
| Me taking a shit? :)
| shoemakersteve wrote:
| Is it right for you be taxed for using the sewer system?
| What are the environmental impacts of the massive scale
| of human shit having to be processed in treatment plants?
| Why does the government prevent me from shitting wherever
| I want, infringing on my freedom? First they take away
| your rights to shit on your neighbour's porch, then they
| take away your rights to see your kids on weekends.
| Stepping stones to tyranny.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| You're demonstrating that everything can be made
| political by those who want to take it on a political
| tangent.
| tstrimple wrote:
| If only there wasn't a political party who though
| legislating who can use what bathroom. Now your shit is
| political too.
| jowsie wrote:
| This isn't a new phrase that came out of nowhere, I've
| seen it in use for a few years now. I believe it became
| more mainstream with this Ted Talk;
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=171flckdKic
| fidesomnes wrote:
| > Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of
| nowhere.
|
| I don't know where you have been or how new you are here
| but this phrase has been around since at least the 1960's
| New Left ideological frameworks.
| Veen wrote:
| It's not new; it's a variant of the 60s feminist
| activists' pronouncement that "the personal is political"
| or "the private is political".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Avoid political threads.
|
| It's not the political threads that are a problem. There
| seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any
| way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not
| even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in
| a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you
| point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum,
| just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of
| people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only
| discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the
| comments again.)
|
| I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number
| of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent.
| I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for
| workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread
| political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a
| technical subject you care about.
|
| Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating
| downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make
| here.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| > Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each
| other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments
| if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before
| you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.
|
| I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I
| sort by controversial more often than not it just someone
| with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.
|
| Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres
| a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good
| job, for what I've seen.
|
| Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods,
| but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to
| avoid vote brigading.
|
| I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's
| basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a
| profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the
| headaches that require to moderate a community.
|
| In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the
| communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people
| who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions,
| and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else
| has the energy, I don't.
|
| From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not
| a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn
| programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle
| with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate
| moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for
| the users.
| woxko wrote:
| Getting downvoted to me is an honour because most people on the
| internet are dunces. If you get downvoted you know you struck a
| nerve or at least the other person wasted a few seconds of his
| life reading your retarded opinion. Happiness is in the little
| things.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Down votes create cultural echo chambers and social cooling.
|
| What down votes should be for is rudeness or site
| violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people
| with counter opinions.
|
| There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a
| counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be
| digitally outcast.
|
| And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up
| accumulate enough down votes and are outcast.
|
| And over time the echo chamber continues to grow....
|
| Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I suspect the original author would agree with your
| assessment on effects, but doesn't see either cultural echo
| chambers or social cooling as de-facto negatives. Lacking a
| downvote signal (i.e. a "most people who saw this disagreed"
| signal), a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo
| chambers of equal apparent strength or value, increasingly
| divided by _who_ upvotes _what_ with no downvote counter-
| signal to breed some kind of consensus.
|
| I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to
| converge in a shared space or the alternative to social
| cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to
| signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive
| for the global online community (the latter, of course, does
| drive those engagement numbers up though...).
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| > a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo
| chambers
|
| So you mean a variety of opinions?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| A variety of strongly-held opinions that are not proved
| against each other and don't intersect to build a
| coherent narrative.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes
| every comment I got
|
| I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind
| of thing now and will make those votes not count.
|
| Likewise I think they've also made it so that a single comment
| alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account
| of the person that wrote it that much any longer.
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| For stories? Yes. For comments? They don't seem to care. Also
| the reddit bot mob is a very real thing and there's folks who
| enjoy evading those sorts of attempts at control. It becomes
| a game unto itself.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I upvoted you for this.
| ohreallynow wrote:
| I'm surprised dang isn't on this like flies on shit because
| usually when we discuss downvoting brigade he links us to the
| guidelines and hem-haw's around how we shouldn't be bringing it
| up. I've seen The_Donald be handled with more decorum than this
| place - and I've been here for over a decade.
| smolder wrote:
| This discussion seems to be more about downvoting in general
| and across multiple sites, rather than specific accusations
| of certain groups downvote-brigading on HN, which dang
| usually responds to.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if
| there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of
| HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimate failure.
| Dunbar's number is every bit as real in a digital space as it
| is in a physical space.
|
| I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally
| built around small communities. So instead of a global channel,
| your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you
| would interact with more directly. This would mirror the
| concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier,
| the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day
| from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger
| "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a
| week would get posted weekly.
|
| This system would let people spend most of their time with
| like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as
| exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of
| cross pollination of thought.
|
| Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social
| media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the
| entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but
| the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more
| general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much
| bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over
| the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful
| behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those
| possibilities, but it causes problems there too.
|
| Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your
| comment?
| blacktriangle wrote:
| My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what
| people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded
| culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this
| behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But
| I think some people are offended that they might not be as
| "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.
| MMS21 wrote:
| > I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was
| totally built around small communities.
|
| joinmastodon.org may interest you
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last
| month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about
| topic based communities[1].
|
| An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is
| Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most
| communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make
| one step at a time.
|
| With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully
| affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton
| Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the
| Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo,
| it will be down-voted and thus not seen.
|
| Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a
| DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding
| and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the
| non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful
| and testable conclusions.
|
| So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused
| BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS
| that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities.
| There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going
| to be tough.
|
| I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally
| building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their
| Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were
| to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social
| media site.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious
| criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen
| up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is
| going to hurt me. I really mean it.
|
| Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people
| do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal,
| sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of
| harm means they're not experiencing any harm.
|
| Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of
| suppressing my negative emotions
| rijoja wrote:
| The scientific process leaves no room for emotions what so
| ever. Errors in the scientific process could have devastating
| results. If you can not separate your emotional well beings
| from the truth go and do something where your feelings are of
| no consequence.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| If you can't separate "separating emotional well being from
| the truth" and "acknowledging you have emotions" you should
| go and take a vacation.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| Experiencing a negative emotion is not always, or even most
| of the time, the same thing as being hurt.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I think that's going to fall into an argument of semantics.
|
| Can you give an example?
| LocalChapter wrote:
| This isn't true at all.
|
| If it is valid criticism of something you have said that is
| incorrect or have done wrong, the adult way to deal with this
| is not to get upset but take the criticism on board, improve
| and move on.
|
| If the criticism is nonsense you should disregard it as such
| and forget about it or in my case laugh at it.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| Hey, wanted to respond to your comment because mine could
| come off as unhealthy.
|
| I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough
| that there are very few people in the world that can say
| something which I haven't already been told or I haven't
| imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt.
|
| But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Respectfully I don't really agree that this is a thing.
| There is an element of discerning that a person is just a
| jerk, misguided, dumb, or just shitposting without
| consequence due to anonymity or whatever and learning to
| disregard their opinions as irrelevant. That is, a lot of
| internet randos fall into this category.
|
| But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as
| someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us,
| especially irl.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| > I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting
| serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told
| to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to
| me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.
|
| All a student has to do is call you racist or touch one and
| you are fired. Have a nice day "manning up" to that one!
| [deleted]
| jcims wrote:
| I think downvotes should require a comment as well. It's too
| limbic without that.
| dcminter wrote:
| I don't. If there was a comment I'd be tempted to argue. I'd
| prefer if I couldn't see the karma of my own posts & account
| too.
|
| Feature request if mods are reading: checkbox to hide my
| karma from me.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I don't think downvotes are the problem.
|
| I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization
| of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest
| good faith against the grain take are no longer on the
| platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That
| doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with
| these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and
| white.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > I don't think downvotes are the problem. > I think the
| problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of
| platforms
|
| Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments
| close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes,
| Overtone windows narrows over time.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| On HN in particular, I don't know how downvotes could be made
| any less psychologically impactful, short of completely hiding
| comment scores on even your own posts. Comments you posted
| never change color while you're logged in, so all you ever see
| is a little number, and the minimum score of -4 prevents
| massive pile-on situations.
|
| I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation
| mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer
| to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear
| further down, or which should fade out and become easier to
| skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment
| threads interesting to read.
| Karellen wrote:
| > If downvotes don't matter
|
| Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake
| internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.
|
| Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the
| web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway
| gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical
| explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally
| arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.
|
| Downvotes are of even less consquence.
|
| Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you
| write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out
| sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that
| doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might
| still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let
| it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.
| neogodless wrote:
| > Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they
| don't mean anything.
|
| I think this should be true to individuals, in regards to the
| ownership they feel over their online account and the content
| they create.
|
| But I do not think this is (or should be) true in regards to
| an online community. Because I think sites like Hacker News
| and Ars Technica have relatively healthy comment ecosystems,
| where the content of the comments is valuable and contributes
| immensely to the store of knowledge these sites contain.
|
| (Notably, Ars Technica has a more obvious, perceivable
| liberal political bias which I happen to agree with, so I'm
| sure the value of that community is divided, whereas I think
| Hacker News is more politically balanced.)
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Some of my most upvoted posts /comments in various fora over
| the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or
| throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced
| technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're
| totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle._
|
| This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing.
| I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway
| comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out,
| heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot
| of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote...
| that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me
| anyway.
| avel wrote:
| But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it
| frustate you? Again -- votes _don 't matter_. I absolutely
| love the parent post for making it so plain.
|
| Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why
| don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Again -- votes don 't matter. I absolutely love the
| parent post for making it so plain._
|
| The parent post made an assertion, but did not really
| justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in
| some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe
| that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense.
| But real life experience shows us that down votes _do_
| matter to people - at least some people, some times, in
| some situations. Why? I 'm not a psychologist, so I'm not
| going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of
| that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related
| to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to
| peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment,
| etc.
|
| _But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it
| frustate you?_
|
| In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely
| about the mismatch between expectations and perceived
| subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect
| random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is
| theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes
| doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a
| carefully composed response to something, to try to make
| a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody
| and then _that_ gets down voted, it triggers that
| instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or
| that's my approximate theory anyway.
|
| _Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes?_
|
| I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and
| it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to
| avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of
| others.
| avel wrote:
| I appreciate your response, even if my question was
| perhaps 50% rhetorical.
|
| Of course I can understand the psychological part of it,
| but that's what I contest here.
|
| You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000
| people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's
| say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.
|
| So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100
| downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.
|
| I can understand how people who profit from likes,
| upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care
| about their "Internet points". But for an individual
| person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to
| track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that
| rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I agree that it's irrational for the most part. But even
| understanding that on a cerebral level still doesn't stop
| it from being slightly annoying / frustrating / whatever
| at times. The vagaries of human nature, I guess...
| bmn__ wrote:
| Downvotes matter because they often tie into visibility.
| On HN, a few downvotes make the post fade out so it is
| difficult to read. On Reddit, two downvotes collapse a
| post so that its text becomes hidden.
|
| This means on these platforms downvotes are a weaponised
| tool wielded by someone who can destroy the effort that
| went into post with but a mouse click.
| avel wrote:
| Then such forums where your posts can be manipulated so
| easily are a lost cause, and there's no point in getting
| frustrated about them.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _If downvotes don 't matter..._
|
| They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems
| are more compatible with your ego, but if I _were_ to downvote
| this it would be because you don 't have a persuasive argument
| for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be
| easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible
| with your ego,
|
| This is criticism, IMO it's stupid criticism that should
| deserve a downvote, but you still wasted time to write it and
| it's ok, according to OP view of things, you responded to his
| words with some ad hominem attack, it's pointless and dumb in
| my opinion, but you put in the effort to respond and
| presented your arguments.
|
| Compare it to the blind downvoting, you get downvoted, with
| no reasoning, not knowing who did it and if you get 4 of them
| your comment gets hidden.
|
| Just 4.
|
| I much prefer your ad hominems to hypotetical perfectly valid
| downvotes.
|
| At least now people can form an opinion on what you wrote.
|
| With downvotes people just assume that the comment was
| worthless or worse.
|
| What if you had to reply to the comment before being able to
| downvote it?
|
| It would at least be a bit less anonymous.
| merpnderp wrote:
| A while back I posted that according to my local state utility,
| installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price
| of installed nat-gas per year, both for the newest
| installations. And from that I concluded nuclear power was the
| only viable alternative to CO2 producing energy.
|
| Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I
| only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful
| feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have
| involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's
| just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But
| Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious
| discussions.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest
| price of installed nat-gas per year
|
| I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a
| whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you
| can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of
| buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant."
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-
| no...
| merpnderp wrote:
| But that's my point, none of these studies ever cite a
| utility's actual costs. When I got curious and looked at
| what the actual cost to the utility (not counting any
| federal rebates) just their actual outlays, versus how much
| power was generated over the year, it was ridiculous.
|
| And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are
| still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-
| gas, they love money and profits. If wind was actually
| cheaper than fuel, they'd just be over building wind farms
| so that no new nat-gas plants were needed.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I partly disagree with your comment (HN isn't an academy) but
| you make a good point that 4 downvotes are enough to
| effectively make a comment disappear. That can be abused to
| easily wreck good comments, adn genuinely shitty comments don't
| get _enough_ negative feedback.
|
| When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious
| black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and
| is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at
| community security through obscurity, and like all STO
| approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest
| that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the
| long term than the approach outlined above.
| adventured wrote:
| > But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit
| because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got
| no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount
| of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then
| someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes
| every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological
|
| I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained
| me at doing. Comment and walk away.
|
| By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your
| opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously
| downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most
| any forum, including Reddit.
|
| Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or
| another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually
| come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion
| determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets
| offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting
| pattern, that process might be discouraging.
|
| My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even
| though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the
| highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to
| avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to
| focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying
| to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here.
| That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion
| within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and
| walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice
| up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't
| engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful
| freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give
| it a try.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Maybe you can't respond to this, but I'd like to know if
| that's not less satisfying. I don't get much pleasure from
| just having my day ("shouting into the void") what I'm really
| here for is engagement, and the high-quality responses I get
| (or sometimes just acknowledgement). Without feedback there's
| nothing in it for me.
| okareaman wrote:
| I don't mind downvotes on my comments, I just wish a downvote
| required a comment stating some kind of reason for it. Even a
| short comment "I don't like this" would be telling because it
| would indicate they don't have a reason other than emotion.
| Often I initially get a bunch of downvotes and then later
| enough upvotes to even it out.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I downvote stuff because it's either low-effort or
| inflammatory. I don't know if it would be valuable to tell
| the commenter this, because they're unlikely to agree.
|
| (I know that this isn't what everyone does, just wanted to
| offer a data point.)
| tjpnz wrote:
| >I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind
| of reason for it.
|
| Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a
| user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a
| sustained period of time for instance.
| okareaman wrote:
| Someone with honest contrarian views would not be hurt by
| this because they leave usually comments with reasons. I
| appreciate them as much as the up voters.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Agree completely.
|
| While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around,
| in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine
| used to suppress opinions.
|
| It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if
| there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted
| a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a
| minute.
|
| Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not
| very partisan so that could explain some of it.
| detaro wrote:
| I always find the assumption that quick reactions are "bots"
| a bit weird. If I click on an active discussion, some
| comments will be "0 minutes" old (like yours right now,
| although it won't be when I submit this comment, because
| typing takes time - but downvoting doesn't). If I click on
| "comments" tab on HN, _all_ comments there are new. So it 's
| not particularly surprising that many people see your comment
| very shortly after it is posted on an active site like HN and
| react to it immediately.
| bserge wrote:
| They're not bots. Bots act on logic, however simple it is.
| These are mostly people who disengaged their brain.
| detaro wrote:
| How do you figure that? Plenty cases where "would I
| downvote that" is not something you need to think a lot
| about, so "quick" != "disengaged brain".
| bserge wrote:
| Long history participating in and analyzing discussions
| on Reddit.
| bserge wrote:
| If a comment that requires at least some thinking does not
| have a simple TLDR, preferably as the first line, you're
| going to get downvotes on Reddit and Imgur.
|
| People just aren't there to think and they have this "weapon"
| that they can use to shoo away anything they don't
| immediately understand.
|
| It's even more ridiculous that simple one sentence or better
| yet, one meme comments get drives of upvotes.
|
| You can easily automate that. Just copy and paste comments in
| the same thread, mix with some meme comments, and you're
| halfway to an account with high karma.
|
| Begs the question, why bother participating in this bottom of
| the barrel mindwankery? Nothing but an addiction these days.
|
| I say Reddit, but that platform is really a lot of smaller
| forums with useful information, even if you have to wade
| through some shit.
|
| Imgur on the other hand, I finally couldn't stand the sheer
| idiocy and quit. It's amazing, and I wish I could quit this
| site and Reddit, too.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit
| because of them (and the culture associated with it)
|
| /snip
|
| > It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't
| want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals
| act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and
| petty people might have power.
|
| I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this
| pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may
| be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact,
| it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of
| participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much
| power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of
| comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of
| exposure.
|
| I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture.
| This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on
| here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't
| particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative
| density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters.
| Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general,
| downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and
| not worth complaining or even thinking much about.
|
| Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact
| of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about
| them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching
| it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".
|
| [1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve
| it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of
| the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with
| them
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to
| something in good faith and then someone comes along with their
| four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not
| sufficiently ideological,
|
| As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be
| amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to
| the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological
| motivation, your statement of the case here is with
| considerably more certainty than is really warranted.
|
| Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing
| to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance
| under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of
| negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify
| their assumptions.
|
| Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a
| variety of _projection_ , but you could simply see it as
| symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in
| knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing
| bias.
|
| Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of
| online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the
| possibility that the particular form we chose to state our
| views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't
| perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to
| improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by
| making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.
| Causality1 wrote:
| There's definitely a downvote squad. I've noticed my comments
| tend to do much better their first few hours and downvotes tend
| to come later after the submission has fallen off the front
| page.
| ttGpN5Nde3pK wrote:
| I can see this.
|
| One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a
| comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's
| correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I
| disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-
| argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in
| making people explain their position, at least copy/paste
| another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their
| own downvotes.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| Or maybe, you are just wrong and can't actually take it. Being
| professional doesn't mean people have to take your opinions
| seriously.
| loopz wrote:
| It's a good feedback system. Just because I and you don't get
| it, doesn't mean someone was indifferent to the post. It's
| meant to filter out discussions that are uninteresting. Just
| got to deal with if one isn't that interesting. Adding posts on
| top of that would be counterproductive.
|
| I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very
| rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised
| people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be
| common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens
| that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it
| with all change.
|
| Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling
| otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under
| analysis turn out to be well designed.
|
| For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what
| people expect from posts.
| city41 wrote:
| My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used
| incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an
| "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content
| that is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Disagreeing
| does _not_ mean it is irrelevant, especially if it is well
| written and in good faith. We should allow all viewpoints that
| are put forward with proper intentions.
|
| Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a
| way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to
| that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds
| good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if
| you agree with it or not.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used
| incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be
| an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out
| content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand.
|
| Says who? And why should anyone listen to them? There seems
| to be a lot of talk about how it's not being used as
| designed, but absolutely no one provides any evidence to
| support that there's "One True Way" to use voting buttons.
| city41 wrote:
| Sure, that may be technically correct and in practice
| people downvote for any reason they choose. Nothing can
| stop them. But if they were used to promote viewpoints and
| better discussion, the end result would be better
| communities.
|
| As for the "says who?", for example, that is Reddit's
| official stance on voting, which I quoted elsewhere in this
| thread.
| tstrimple wrote:
| You've said it would lead to better discussion. I'm not
| convinced that's the case. I think flagged and grey
| comments being filtered out actually helps conversations
| more often than not. Can we empirically determine which
| will lead to better communities? Based on my experience
| than nearly every single community with lax moderation
| (official moderation and community moderation) turns into
| a cesspool. There's a reason you're here for conversation
| after all and not on 4chan.
| city41 wrote:
| In my experience flagged comments are typically off topic
| or abusive. I don't recall ever seeing a flagged comment
| that was an honest attempt at discussion. As for grayed
| comments that are an honest attempt at discussion? Very
| common. I upvote heavily downvoted comments that didn't
| deserve it almost daily here. I've also been the victim
| of massive downvoting merely because I present a
| viewpoint that the hive-mind doesn't like. If you're only
| interested in a single viewpoint and don't want to see
| all sides to a topic, then sure, this system is great. I
| like seeing more viewpoints and perspectives.
| Popegaf wrote:
| Hold on, HN has downvote buttons? I don't see them. Are they
| for mods?
| mhink wrote:
| You have to have >500 karma, iirc.
| city41 wrote:
| HN's voting system is a bit complicated. They will remove
| the downvote button for various reasons. For example you
| can't downvote replies to your comments, only upvote. I
| think also if you are a newer user, you can't downvote.
| crb3 wrote:
| Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons,
| with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-
| as-QC?
| kbelder wrote:
| That would be an interesting experiment. Make it a 2D
| axis... Agree <--> Disagree, and Low Quality <--> High
| Quality. Only allow voting on one of the options.
| aqsalose wrote:
| ... left and right vote in addition to up and downvote?
|
| Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to
| vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in
| either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.
|
| If you disagree with the trend where any particular
| comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you
| should click by yourself.
|
| edit.
|
| I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this
| system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal
| votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote).
| Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a
| downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that
| attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone
| has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting
| (...except when a comment is obviously too left or
| right).
| Popegaf wrote:
| There are some opensource, reddit alternatives that might
| be willing to implement this. https://lemmy.ml/ comes to
| mind. You could suggest it there and it might fall upon
| open ears.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I would suggest you email that idea to dang. I'd like to
| see it tried here.
| asiachick wrote:
| They ARE meant to be a disagree button
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
| city41 wrote:
| I was not only referring to HN but the many communities
| that employ up/down voting. And for the record, I disagree
| with pg's take. Here is Reddit's official stance on
| downvoting:
|
| >Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure
| you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing
| to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take
| a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for
| downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional
| reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for
| good reasons.
|
| https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/205926439-Reddi...
|
| I feel following this advice leads to better communities
| with more diverse and more useful conversation.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I whole heartedly disagree.
|
| Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or
| like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch
| of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause
| flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that
| boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down
| votes the first few comments would have an even bigger
| advantage than they do now.
|
| [1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would
| have been better with just a down vote.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Downvoting to disagree is my knee-jerk reaction, too. But in
| most cases it's not as helpful as leaving a comment.
|
| Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least _some_
| thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without
| explanation doesn 't teach me anything, or persuade me to
| change my mind.
|
| If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent
| assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or
| isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm
| saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I
| guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who
| disagree with him."
|
| That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional
| information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why
| I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how
| would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me
| less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in
| my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful
| disagreement.
| [deleted]
| yKnoTho wrote:
| The world is binary, there are just a lot more binary decisions
| than we often tote around. It's a great model for academic and
| scientific work but not for society.
|
| Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being
| the "one path" to truth.
|
| The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools
| warned about using them to run society, as they are all
| designed with a certain amount of loss of precision.
|
| When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models
| to people means rounding people off to make a choice work.
| Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common
| inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of
| treating each other like rounding errors.
|
| This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a
| minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see
| here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we
| protect as being pathological.
|
| For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to
| believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy?
|
| Oh that's right; their experts who built their systems that
| train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific
| theory of biology to manufacture consent.
| underseacables wrote:
| It sounds like this is more about your ego. Not to be glib, but
| if you have written out a thoughtful statement, who cares if it
| gets downvoted? You can't control how other people are going to
| react, and getting upset that you lack that control, takes away
| from your arguments and makes it about you.
|
| How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree?
| Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense
| of superiority.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| A downvote is not "disagreeing". It doesn't require the
| downvoter to be able to justify their action, they can just
| do it, and it is closer to violence than to communication.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| I use a throwaway account and a really simple tamper monkey
| script that hides my current feedback score, this allows me to
| interact on this website without getting neurotically obsessed
| with how other people think of me.
|
| It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to
| get too psychologically involved.
| acituan wrote:
| > I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a
| significant amount of time trying to respond to something in
| good faith and then someone comes along with their four
| accounts and downvotes every comment I got
|
| It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy
| downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and
| influence.
|
| The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination
| of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing
| disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the
| salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history
| of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if
| disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its
| attention-worthiness.
|
| Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of
| disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged
| representations in the UI, but _they can 't be disagreed with_
| like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it
| by not allowing responses.
|
| Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of _at
| least_ attention and content value based on collective
| intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions.
|
| My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have
| up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require _justification_
| , which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience
| dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read
| this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on
| this idea".
| frankish wrote:
| This pretty much sums up my sentiment as well. I think people
| should comment their disagreement instead of downvote. Others
| can then upvote the response, but at least dialogue can remain
| open.
|
| I've actually considered using a screenname like
| commentdontdownvote lol.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| As an academic experiment, one could post a message here on HN
| and on Usenet to see how the interaction plays out on each
| platform. On Usenet, people can not vote or moderate your
| message. Messages are only removed from Usenet relays if they
| violate law for the most part. Anyone can reply if interested
| in doing so, with any text or content. Has anyone done this
| experiment recently?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| On Usenet, you can moderate your own incoming messages.
| Assuming you have a suitable newsreader (I know of none that
| are not suitable for use with killfiles).
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Self opt-in moderation is great. You can even do that here
| on HN with add-ons like uBlock.
|
| From _My Filters_
| ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-
| text(political) ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody >
| tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr
| ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-
| text(political)+tr+tr
| foobarbecue wrote:
| @crazy_horse, what do you have in mind when you say "we can do
| much better than downvotes"?
|
| In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good
| solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can
| only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has
| other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.
| re-al wrote:
| Shh!
|
| You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information
| on certain sites that we frequent...
| rektide wrote:
| Personally I think you're taking things too seriously, even
| though you're right. I enjoyed "The Great Online Game"[1]
| recently (1 comment), which stages this engagement as play.
| Although I would like to see my karma go up faster, that's not
| the point of the play for me. Unfortunately a lot of ludicrous,
| non-contributing, downvoting schmoes are part of the game. It's
| ok, it's still- for me- for fun, and I don't feel the need to
| adjust myself or my strategy of play because of the directed,
| biased negativity about.
|
| To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters
| don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems:
| Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we
| begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to
| stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not
| valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online,
| understand each other, and build our own defensive &
| observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, &
| growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to
| emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and
| identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece
| of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488
| dahart wrote:
| It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than
| experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is
| not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience.
| What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has
| downvoted you? Are you sure you weren't just wrong and didn't
| know it? I've been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly
| downvoted for it far, far more often than I've been unfairly
| downvoted to death for something innocuous or positive and
| helpful.
|
| I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it's just not a
| common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that
| a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets
| dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as
| many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an
| extremely high ratio of ups to downs.
|
| > Why would I participate in that?
|
| This is a good question, but you've constructed a straw man
| version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you
| come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a
| much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without
| commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the
| positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for
| the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on
| how to start and run a business, for the threads where world
| experts and relatively famous people participate and comment,
| for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer
| graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding
| comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full
| side of things. Good luck friend!
| antattack wrote:
| Ideological issues get people to use downvote. Technical
| discourse is more civilized, upvotes are more likely than
| downvotes.
| austincheney wrote:
| Weird. Saying the same thing a few comments down earned me
| several down votes:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27983945
| sharken wrote:
| Absolutely my experience too, tech is not really
| controversial.
|
| But discussions on health, religion and culture that is
| where the downvotes are used.
|
| If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to
| be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to
| thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some
| great insights.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > tech is not really controversial
|
| Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or
| worse than C++.
|
| Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to
| read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of
| downvotes.
|
| (I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this
| comment, I only present an example.)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I agree, as long as you realize that vim/emacs,
| static/dynamic, frontend/backend, etc., are all Ideological
| issues, and not technical ones. :-)
|
| ...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless
| it's Friday.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| This isn't my experience. I occasionally make pretty
| strong statements about traditionally polarizing
| technical topics, and I find that people are a lot more
| likely to respect differing opinions than when talking
| about, eg, urban planning or politics.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > is not even close to the norm here
|
| Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's
| _definitely_ the norm on Reddit.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I think the downvote brigading is getting more frequent.
|
| Just look at the recent threads where a submission was
| flagged and you will see a ton of them.
|
| Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities
| but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely
| significant amounts of downvoting occuring.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| It happens to me whenever I say something critical of any
| given specific country. USA, China, Russia, I get hammered
| with downvotes and flags. Make a positive comment, hammered
| with upvotes. It's frustrating.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| If you say anything positive or negative about something
| people hold as part of their identity you're going to get
| a response. I think it's better that you get votes,
| instead of a bunch of emotional comments.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| No, it is better to get comments, even emotional and not
| well written. Because with comments I might understand
| where I was wrong, or at least know where exactly my
| opponent disagrees with me, because it I could have
| written a wall of text, not every sentence of it is
| wrong.
|
| Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard
| hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With
| comment like that I know that the opponent is not
| interested in productive conversation, so I move on.
|
| And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this
| is not the place where I'd like to participate in
| discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful
| dispute and the extending each other world view.
|
| A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring
| and a waste of time.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring
| and a waste of time._
|
| If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or
| even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down
| vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions
| are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max
| amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I
| think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are
| out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think
| it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the
| internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.
|
| edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments
| of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if
| comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is
| automatically dropped from the front page.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to
| oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down
| throughout the day.
|
| No, they don't gang up, but they share beliefs, and they
| downvote independently.
|
| > there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down
| voting anyway
|
| Even if it is true, it is per comment. And if it is a
| long thread, like 10 messages, 3 people routinely
| scrolling down the thread and downvoting all comments
| without reading the arguments, decrease karma by 30.
|
| > It basically only affects new users who are out of
| line, or are trying to be provocative.
|
| I'm getting downvoted each time I say something
| controversial, like Amazon is good for the world, lower
| taxes for rich people is good, or it was only 19 people
| unarmed black people killed by police in the last year,
| or Rust project has these problems: 1, 2, 3.
|
| You may consider it provocative though, as any opinion
| outside of what is accepted by majority might be
| considered controversial. And this is the problem. HN
| (and generally systems with downvoting) promote
| groupthink and narrow set of allowed opinions.
|
| Edit: I saw the same effect on the other side. There was
| a thread, where each of my opponent comment was downvoted
| (by someone else). Obviously I didn't agree with the
| commenter, the comments were mostly wrong in my opinion,
| but I enjoyed the conversation, arguments were well
| presented, and that downvoting was not helpful. Just
| someone decided the commenter must be punished for
| holding their opinion.
|
| > I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best
| forum on the internet.
|
| No it's not. The best thing it is geek-friendly, only
| text without bells and whistles, so it deters common
| internet folks.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Because with comments I might understand where I was
| wrong
|
| Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If
| you think _they_ are wrong in their response...what good
| is being done? If you both have intractable positions
| then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening
| scroll bars.
|
| Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're
| wrong I don't owe you _any_ explanation of that. You don
| 't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not
| my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as
| I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You
| may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I
| don't have any requirement to do so.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC /
| Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an
| expected behavior, despite it being relevant to many "I
| thought Enterprise had more control than thins!"
| conversations.
| gruez wrote:
| >Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC
| / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as
| an expected behavior
|
| Just to be clear, you _expect_ to get downvotes when
| mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I
| also made several LTSB mentions.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Well, my comment is already at -1, so yes.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Submission flagging is the main place it happens and I
| personally wish HN will not treat flagging as downvotes, or
| would just call it downvotes, or would have some sort of
| penalty for obvious cases of mis-flagging.
| gwking wrote:
| FWIW every time I have ever flagged something on HN it's
| been a fat finger mistake on mobile. Probably a drop in
| the bucket but worth considering that the signal is still
| polluted even with perfectly good faith user behavior.
| semireg wrote:
| I'm entering grey beard territory, been on HN for years,
| and I still don't know what the [-] button does. Is it a
| downvote? Or does it just collapse the parent so I can
| read more without clutter? You'd hope downvote UI would
| be more explicit.
| soperj wrote:
| You don't have the ability to downvote. It's a down arrow
| right below the upvote (up arrow).
|
| [-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also
| unvote if you change your mind on your vote.
| NortySpock wrote:
| [-] collapses the comment and all children.
|
| When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments,
| and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a
| certain amount of karma.
| Akronymus wrote:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented/blob/m... 501 apparently
| tomjen3 wrote:
| >In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close
| to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you
| certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted
| you?
|
| If you write a comment that is against what the majority of
| the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the
| majority you probably won't have experienced this.
|
| I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin
| it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a
| few days it will get to +2 or +3.
|
| I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do
| that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much
| count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned
| more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the
| comment somewhat valuable.
|
| Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news,
| but the problem is the same.
|
| The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review
| downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement
| and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future
| voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure
| they understand the community[0].
|
| [0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right
| away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to
| get the vote.
| Akronymus wrote:
| > If you write a comment that is against what the majority
| of the site beliefs you will be downvoted.
|
| I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on
| reddit? All day every day.
|
| Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because
| it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good
| comment/discussion/disagreement.
| detaro wrote:
| > _The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review
| downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for
| disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted
| it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a
| while to be sure they understand the community[0]._
|
| Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have
| a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it
| was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed.
| (although plenty people think it should)
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I know that if I make a comment that is positive of
| bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and
| then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.
|
| This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics
| here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within
| two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as
| people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd
| have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of
| posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it,
| and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the
| conversation.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I agree with the GP commenter. It's not about everyone being
| against you. All it takes is just a couple people, or even
| one.
|
| I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the
| lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can
| tell the responder did not even read your full comment...
| Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and
| making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.
|
| Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for
| me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full
| comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because
| it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I
| don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth
| it.
|
| I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting
| this comment, haha.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I feel you on this. I rarely post online because there's
| about a 50% chance I'll run into hostile replies written in
| bad faith. Also, as I've gotten older, I've gradually grown
| into the realization that I don't need to justify my
| opinions to Internet randos. :)
|
| (Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this
| is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value
| of time has become very ruthless.)
| effingwewt wrote:
| 32 minutes in and this has enough downvotes to be greyed
| out.
|
| Way to prove his point internet rando's.
|
| I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on
| me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true
| in less than an hour.
| neogodless wrote:
| I agree with @dahart.
|
| The political threads were a special beast, where any
| comment that revealed your political leanings would get a
| deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and
| Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast
| majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've
| received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed
| and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and
| failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the
| conversation or cultivate curiosity.
|
| Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great
| deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those.
| If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll
| attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting
| the effort in.
|
| With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just
| are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort /
| failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.
|
| A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with
| spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation.
| Without individuals putting something in, something more
| than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist
| and thrive.
| xphos wrote:
| So like I think this is kind the authors point. Downvote
| isn't going to solve everything but it is a tool that let
| people signal to one another of something being a miss.
| You can have spammers that downvote everything but like
| thats also detectable and can signal biases. In response
| to spammers, there is away to cancel out those biases
| with upvotes. And if there are spammers on both sides
| you'd expect to arrive close to 50/50 in which case that
| signals something to a read. If its 80% negative that
| also signals maybe we should understand why this is bad
| or why its to be avoided. However without a balancing
| force whats the difference of +50 and +1000? Both are
| positive even if the +1000 has 1000s of negative comments
| not everyone has the time to engage on a topic completely
| and +/- give a quick way to understand the content that
| should be engaged with on a deeper level because it is
| divisive. Without the tool not only would you never know
| the difference but you can never know the difference
| without engaging every topic at max effort which no
| person can do
| croes wrote:
| One problem on HN is, that downvotes aren't limited to the
| comment but include the commenter.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is a reliable way to identify low value
| contributions this is less of an issue in a relatively
| small environment like hacker news where you can in most
| threads without grave difficulty read all the comments
| and every story on the front page if you like.
|
| In larger scoped things you will have much more content
| than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad.
| Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go
| through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half
| as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two
| tallies of several contributions. First two bad
| contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of
| being banned.
|
| Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people
| liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.
|
| With down votes: -60 Without: 10
|
| Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80
| indifferent.
|
| With down votes: 0 Without: 10
|
| Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes
| 10 for and 1 against.
|
| With down votes: 9 Without: 10
|
| Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of
| engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we
| should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980
| votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.
|
| With down votes: -960 without: 20
|
| Without down votes A B and C are identically scored
| despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even
| worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!
|
| Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has
| similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful
| information your users have given you.
| austincheney wrote:
| > In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close
| to the norm here in my ~decade of experience.
|
| My experience on HN is that it desperately hangs on the words
| you choose and the threads you visit. The lower the barrier
| to entry (social subjects for example) the more delicate and
| convergent things become.
| dahart wrote:
| Yes lower barrier to entry topics are expected to increase
| the noise, and also the number of participants, which makes
| patterns easier to see, right? Possibly lower barrier to
| entry also correlates with lower expertise too. I'm not
| sure this is unique to HN at all, and haven't noticed it
| being any different or worse here than elsewhere. I think
| we have lots of words and phrases and platitudes to
| categorize and comment on how people behave, one that comes
| to mind immediately is bike shedding, or the Law of
| Triviality.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| HN was the way you describe. But I think that it is becoming
| less so. I _feel_ the difference from, say, five years ago.
| It 's not the same. It's more strident, less thoughtful, more
| reacting by reflex.
|
| My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more
| influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and
| therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than
| just participating in it.
| brightball wrote:
| Agreed. It's very out of the norm on HN.
|
| On Reddit though, it's the standard.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting
| systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I
| would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and
| downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore
| everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would
| also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if
| I desired, or even just for some user subset.
|
| This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations
| in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of
| content, but things particularly interesting to people I
| trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of
| the content.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_
| view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust
| and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked
| filtering)._
|
| I was working on a system at least slightly like that at
| one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I
| haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't
| had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users
| vote (up and down) on content but each individual could
| set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to
| personalize how that other user's vote contributed to
| their view of the overall score.
|
| It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my
| knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually
| work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the
| thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see
| how people would react.
|
| The idea of whitelisting users to even count their
| contribution _at all_ had not occurred to me, but I might
| take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as
| well, since you brought it up.
| brightball wrote:
| It's probably not popular, but I always thought that
| Slashdot had the best voting system for comments or was
| at least on the right track.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I used to think that, but /. comments devolved into dumb
| jokes around 2003-2005. Which I think is the main reason
| that hn down votes jokes so aggressively. I do like the
| meta-moderator system. however, without holding back mod
| points to begin with there is no incentive to do it.
| smhenderson wrote:
| I know why people don't like them and I get that you are
| correct that it got pretty absurd on /. around the time
| period you mentioned.
|
| But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge
| to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > hn down votes jokes so aggressively
|
| "if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes,
| please see to it that they are _funny_. "
| Shish2k wrote:
| I haven't visited /. for years so maybe out of date, but
| IIRC this was largely helped by separating voting from
| type - so even if a comment gets a lot of upvotes for
| being funny, my personal settings of "ignore funny
| comments" means I still get a decently high-quality
| signal, which is something I've not seen anywhere else
| sumtechguy wrote:
| SD has, for lack of a better term for it, a time problem.
|
| If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late
| you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on
| what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just
| ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The
| cap SD system only works if the group of people
| posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the
| votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree
| vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But
| they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that
| board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people
| marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people
| want to punish in some way. When the real vote should
| have been a disagree 0.
|
| Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have
| mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.
| BEEdwards wrote:
| In the default subs sure, but if you're subscribed to those
| shitholes you get what you get.
| jolux wrote:
| Every sub has its sacred cows that you can't question. It
| just takes a while to figure them out sometimes.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| The default subs are really toxic, for sure, but it seems
| like the 'shithole threshold' is a sufficiently large
| subscriber count. Especially when the subreddit gets the
| attention of the admins and powermods get pulled in.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Or even small subs that are against the prevailing
| opinions of the plurality of the userbase of all of
| reddit.
|
| Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or
| "hateful". Or banned.
|
| Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit
| accounts.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| edit: this comment initially made claims that it looked like
| HN was removing climate change related content from the front
| page. I still believe this to be the case, but don't really
| have strong enough evidence to back it up. I'll wait until I
| have something more convincing before posting about this
| again.
|
| Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Things generally don't stay on the front page for long.
| Your claim sounds pretty paranoid.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Do you have any examples of downvote-bombing simple claims
| that climate change is real? I'd be beyond surprised to
| find out this phenomenon is real, even just based on the
| demographic prior of HN.
|
| No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig
| up an example.
| throw1f78aa0a80 wrote:
| Not climate change. But three days ago this is a bit
| strange. Article regarding to anti-vax and astroturfing.
| First submission flagged
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430 Lots of
| comments saying it is being artificially vote inflated.
| Second submission more objections
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951293 stating
| conspiracy voting. Not sure what to make of it. And just
| one example.
| [deleted]
| pugets wrote:
| I think it depends on the website. I used Reddit between
| 2012-2020 and I believe that website's community was ruined
| by the upvote/downvote system.
|
| For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is
| meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the
| conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to
| say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for
| agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.
|
| I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system
| because this website is a little more mature than others.
| asiachick wrote:
| The HN downvote is also for disagreement
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| It doesn't hurt that new users also can't downvote by
| default, and that it takes nontrivial contributions to get
| that ability.
| nindalf wrote:
| Look, for what it's worth I agree. In my experience, HN is
| welcoming of _my_ viewpoints. My karma is over 9000, so I 'm
| not worried if a few comments get downvoted.
|
| But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They
| _perceive_ a difficulty in contributing to the conversation
| because they 're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling
| them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still
| a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who
| lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And
| there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of
| receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of
| clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.
|
| And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote
| button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented
| in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad
| experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off
| from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll
| save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make
| fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that.
| The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing
| participation.
|
| What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist.
| It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author
| could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point,
| it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive
| exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for
| instance?
| graeme wrote:
| They're also positing a conspiracy against them, with
| people making multiple alts to downvote their comments.
| It's more than just fear: it's an empirical claim.
|
| That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more
| likely.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I've actually had someone message me on Reddit (years
| ago) with several alt accounts that a reply I posted in a
| programming-related subreddit was wrong (it wasn't), and
| they were right, and they'd be mass downvoting my
| account. This was back when reporting actually did
| something I guess, because a couple of the alt accounts
| did get banned a few weeks later. Later another new
| account messaged me a censored screenshot of their bank
| account with a few million dollars in it and saying some
| crap along the lines of "I earned this money by selling a
| software startup, so I know more about C++ than you".
|
| That's only one time I definitely know I was getting
| downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now
| how do I know it hasn't happened several times since
| except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough
| ego that they need to PM me proof of it.
| nindalf wrote:
| And I'm not endorsing this idea of them being persecuted.
|
| But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is
| widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having
| downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting
| privileges to accounts in good standing but even then
| it's not easy.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy,
| but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people
| participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The
| solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.
|
| I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is
| not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial.
| Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long
| built in safeguards against untempered application of
| democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses",
| multi-branch government, representative democracy itself:
| the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a
| stable basis for govt is practically foundational to
| democratic systems.
|
| Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that
| eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a
| double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing
| disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting
| a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by
| the standards of the community. If the community's norms
| are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from
| them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for
| defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views
| (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the
| principle behind democracy).
|
| IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in
| downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a
| healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on
| Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the
| "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational
| norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and
| rigorous enforcement.
|
| [1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits
| on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community
| quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would
| both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough
| numbers.
| nindalf wrote:
| Imagine thinking your comments are so influential that a
| mere mention from you will cause a massive influx of
| crass HN-ers into your beloved subreddits.
| milesvp wrote:
| Please be generous with your comments. You don't have to
| be crass to 'ruin a place'. I've seen it happen just from
| sheer numbers. Even if the influx measurably improves the
| signal to noise ratio, just having more signal can make a
| place exhausting to participate in. Not wanting to risk
| any advertisement can be a very prudent thing to do.
| nindalf wrote:
| I was being exactly as generous as I needed to be. This
| was a person who went out of their way to tell this
| thread "I belong to bunch of lovely subreddits and I'm
| _deliberately_ not mentioning them so 'the average HNer'
| doesn't join". It wasn't even related to their point.
| They went out of their way in a footnote (!) to rub in
| the fact that we're so terrible.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > It wasn't even related to their point.
|
| Your comment says:
|
| > If the author could use examples from reddit to
| illustrate their point, it'd be great
|
| My comment did the exact thing you had already complained
| about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the
| reason for this gap.
|
| It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly
| because you can't follow the conversation well enough to
| remember what you wrote in your previous comment.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Lol, good one. I think it's a holdover from when the
| forum was a lot tinier, and discussion (especially on the
| topics it focused on) was a lot more suppressed in most
| other internet fora. While I don't understand your
| assumption that "influence" is required to spread
| awareness, you're probably right that the impulse is
| anachronistic now.
|
| OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one
| person like you was prevented from ending up on that
| forum, it's worth it 1000x over.
| buu700 wrote:
| This is an idea I've been interested in since it came up
| last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27582145),
| but I don't personally feel strongly enough yet to land on
| either side.
|
| That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that
| reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most
| other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter
| with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments.
| /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-
| right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less
| polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on
| other platforms.
| dahart wrote:
| FWIW, I agree and I hear both what you're saying and what
| @crazy_horse said. My perspective is coming from having
| lived through that perceived difficulty and hesitancy and
| come out the other side. @crazy_horse isn't there yet. I
| was terrified of downvotes early on, and I admit sometimes
| they still bother me. One of the reasons HN gates the
| downvotes, I believe, is so that you have time to go
| through the process of introspecting and reflecting on how
| you're handling yourself before you start reacting
| negatively to others.
|
| For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access
| to the downvote button. The result is that I think more
| carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've
| never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but
| it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile
| devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and
| because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good
| stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases
| over the years where the downvote button did good things to
| a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance
| and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're
| getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be
| a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point
| where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time
| and some downvotes.
|
| Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy
| and using the downvote button every once in a while,
| because over time I can see some of the upside to the
| downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other
| people do it so I don't ever have to.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Fewer people participating is the goal.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Fewer of the wrong people, yes.
|
| This site is every bit as echo chamber, "curated", and
| intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific
| viewpoint.
|
| If anyone doesn't think so, go make steel man arguments
| against climate tax policy and let's see how that goes
| for you.
|
| The up/down vote system is the tool to implement
| ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a
| bandwagon signal.
|
| This is all known, to people on the outside of the
| "target audience".
| renewiltord wrote:
| I find it amusing but people will go downvote unrelated stuff
| once you offend them. I can tell because I'll get a flood of
| downvotes across unrelated comments when I make a
| controversial post.
|
| Of course that's all fine. I have no right to participate in
| this community and the community has a right to behave how it
| does.
|
| Or perhaps I'm just miscalibrated and I'm saying totally
| douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952366
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I'm just speculating here, I don't think your linked
| example comment was downvoted because it was douchey or
| because you offended people in other comments. In my
| experience, comments like your example are downvoted
| because they're "obviously" wrong or irrelevant, which is
| of course very subjective. Clearly you don't think your own
| comment is obviously wrong or irrelevant, but you were
| rebutting "people don't want to send cryptocurrencies in
| their messaging app" by pointing out how useful you find
| Venmo: an app that is popular for sending non-crypto legal
| tender.
|
| FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it
| days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very
| basic flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies.
| This would fall under the "downvoted because you disagree"
| category, which seems to be a somewhat controversial reason
| for downvoting but - as others have pointed out - is
| "officially" acceptable. Downvotes aren't just a tool to
| enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your
| comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I
| intended.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| The problem with "democratic" downvotes is that the vote of an
| expert is equal with the vote of an ignorant who votes while
| browsing the internets in the evening while drunk.
|
| Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.
| spinax wrote:
| It's especially bad on a site like HN - an account only gets a
| downvote capability if they've received what is it, 400
| upvotes? - so you're assured that every downvote you receive is
| someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote (or
| are a serial link poster getting link karma upvotes).
|
| There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules
| work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted
| in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which
| goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run
| at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to
| disagree with your own downvote.
| bitexploder wrote:
| HN has a certain discussion parameters and moderation system
| on purpose. The goal on HN isn't to allow open ended
| discussions on all topics. I for one appreciate that we can
| talk computers and technology here and that the moderators
| keep the average level of the discussion high. If I want
| politics and other garbage I'll go somewhere else. I have
| never experienced any issues here. Been here a looong time.
| Don't be edgy and contribute positively to discussions with
| curiosity and you will do fine.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| There are many threads here about the politics of
| technology (big tech, open source vs closed source
| software, cryptocurrency and finance, the fabrication
| industry and China, etc) and there are also plenty of
| threads about politics unrelated or tangentially related to
| computers (off the top of my head, housing and
| homelessness, the schooling system, and climate change get
| discussed here not infrequently). HN isn't for just
| computers and technology, but rather for anything that
| sparks curiosity.
|
| With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent
| and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat
| high, so I agree with your central thesis.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I agree. I guess it's just not dogmatic. Moderators and
| HNers are very strict about being constructive on more
| political topics.
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| That's the story.
|
| In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you
| shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the
| mainstream (on HN) narrative.
|
| I think it's more "conforming" than "constructive".
| godshatter wrote:
| Just for the record, the reply to this comment by
| bopbeepboop that was downvoted to "dead" status is a good
| example of the type of downvoting I disagree with.
|
| I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I
| have no control over the behavior of others on this site.
| I'm just putting that out there.
| gus_massa wrote:
| About bopbeepboop: The comment was not flagged, the
| account is banned. Look at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26735029 near the
| end of the tread the post by dang
|
| A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search
| until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's
| fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and
| enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of
| bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were
| vouched.
| jjav wrote:
| > It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are
| fine)
|
| How does one do that? Haven't seen any option to do that.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Click on the time/age of the comment (currently "3 hours
| ago") and you will get a direct link to the comment with
| more options, like "vouch" and "flag".
| godshatter wrote:
| OK, I guess I was working under the assumption that the
| comment was dead because it was downvoted enough times.
| My bad.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I was thinking that the downvote brigade (to use a reddit
| term) is actually promulgating a type of ideological
| conformity litmus test on HN users.
|
| If you post/comment in a certain manner you get upvoted and
| break into the potential downvoters. Otherwise, you stay in
| purgatory of the middlings.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| I've been using HN for a few years now, mostly lurking but
| commenting every now and then, and I'm creeping up to the
| downvote privilege threshold. (I think it's 500, not 400.) I
| wouldn't describe myself as "someone who says lots of things
| other people like to upvote," I think it's more "someone who
| says little things over many years and some people have
| upvoted them here and there." In other words, for what it's
| worth, I don't think that your description of HN matches
| everyone's experience, and not everyone with downvote ability
| is the same type of person.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > it scares me that such malicious and petty people might have
| power
|
| How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and
| petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no
| problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who
| downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal
| that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.
| bena wrote:
| Every forum, every social media site, every community
| participation vehicle rewards one thing above all: time.
|
| Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my
| votes? No. I have things to do.
|
| Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make
| my point? No. I have things to do.
|
| And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of
| people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And
| there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good
| reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.
| acover wrote:
| I've been thinking how to counter this effect. How to give
| power to the silent majority.
|
| I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added
| level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient
| by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with
| time and interest provide most is the content but moderation
| incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority.
|
| It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided market but I feel
| the need.
| bena wrote:
| It probably is.
|
| Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it _is_
| a solution on a small enough scale. But when you 're
| literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7,
| there just aren't the resources to deal with that.
|
| You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to
| the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like
| StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on
| community moderation that gets big, time beats all.
|
| It'll be fine for a while and you'll think you've solved
| the issue, but then you'll tip and become larger than you
| can socially manage. And those with the most time will skew
| your samples and votes.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Get rid of paywalls and we'll talk.
| BoardsOfCanada wrote:
| Perhaps there should be two different things to vote on: One for
| "agree/disagree with points made" and one for "constructive
| contribution to the discussion".
| kevwil wrote:
| 101% disagree. In my opinion, social media and comment sections
| are already a fire-hose of negativity without consequences. We
| don't need to enable passive-aggressive hate any further.
| deegles wrote:
| I don't want to downvote articles or posts, I want to downvote
| _people_. Especially across multiple platforms. If I downvote a
| person 's blog post, I want their Reddit comments to be less
| prioritized. I want them to show up less in my Google results. I
| want that to flow over into the results of people who have
| upvoted _me_ , creating a web of influence over good vs bad
| content. I know, tons of pitfalls and shortcomings to an approach
| like this, but please try to think of an improvement to it rather
| than shooting it down immediately :)
|
| Of course, 100% accountability rapidly becomes a Black Mirror
| episode, but I think right now we're at the opposite end of the
| accountability spectrum.
| temp0826 wrote:
| So like...codify cancel culture?
| deegles wrote:
| More like Web of Trust with reputation scores.
| rendall wrote:
| Can I read it without signing up?
| ulucs wrote:
| A person with extremely mainstream views suggests that the
| mainstream should be able to bury opinions that do not align with
| theirs. Oh my, how surprising.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| The Facebook thing shows the absurdity of trying to tie people's
| hands - in practice the "haha" reaction has become the downvote,
| only now it's spiteful mockery. Gee, that was an improvement.
|
| There are interventions you can make on the interface to improve
| civility of discourse, but they're more complicated than just
| trying to crudely stifle anger.
| yoran wrote:
| I think Americans don't give enough attention to the bi-party
| system as an important cause for the current political divide,
| and increasingly, civil divide.
|
| My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide
| because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. I've
| never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other
| side of the political spectrum as in the US. I'm from continental
| Europe and that divide there is much less present. And I think
| it's because we have so many different parties, that the "us vs
| them" feeling isn't so powerful.
|
| Sure, social media and the completely politicized media landscape
| exacerbate the issue. But I think the root cause is the two-party
| political system.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _But I think the root cause is the two-party political system._
|
| I get what you're saying, but I don't _completely_ agree.
| Firstly because, to the extent that we can say we have a "two
| party system" that itself is an effect with a deeper cause. And
| if you buy the theory behind Duverger's Law[1], the fundamental
| cause is the mechanism we use for elections, with "first past
| the post" voting in single-member districts.
|
| My second quibble concerns more of the definition of "two party
| system". Clearly we do _not_ have a "two party system" in the
| most literal sense, as there are plenty of other political
| parties in the US, and several of them routinely have
| candidates elected to office (the Libertarian and Green parties
| come to mind) albeit mostly at lower levels.
|
| So yes, we have a system where two parties are _dominant_ , but
| they are not _exclusive_ and I think that difference matters.
| Why? Because I believe talking about us having a "two party
| system" creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop further
| enforcing the Duverger's Law effect and becoming a self-
| fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
| yoran wrote:
| OK, the US doesn't strictly have a two-party system. But in
| practice it is, at least at the federal level (which
| dominates the political discussions). Sure, in theory a
| Libertarian or Green candidate could become president in
| 2024. But that will never happen, because the media landscape
| is strongly colored by either the Democrat or Republican
| party . So they have no incentive to let anyone but from
| their own party come to power.
|
| I get your point that denoting it a "two-party system" only
| makes it worse. But I don't know how to bring it up without
| mentioning it :-)
| nescioquid wrote:
| > a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages
| such a powerful "us vs them" feeling
|
| I agree, but that's just the punch-and-judy show. The real
| disaffection stems from seeing how the incentives of
| politicians are reliably not aligned with their nominal
| constituents.
|
| We have legal precedent establishing money as speech, and a
| steep hill to climb for any third party to win the prerogatives
| which the two major US parties enjoy, like automatically
| getting your candidate on the ballot in all 50 states in
| federal elections.
|
| I decided some time ago to never cast a vote for either of
| these two parties again. Even speaking with people who decry
| the bankrupt nature of these parties, they still view casting a
| vote for a third party as throwing their vote away.
| durbleflorp wrote:
| Personally, I agree both parties are severely problematic,
| don't feel they're equally problematic.
|
| I vote for third party candidates with policy I actually
| agree with when it isn't going to negatively affect me or
| others when they inevitably lose.
|
| The sad reality is that FPTP makes strategic voting necessary
| if you want to have any kind of power. In addition to the
| issues you mentioned we need score or ranked choice voting so
| we can begin a transition towards actual accountibility, and
| hopefully eventually a more diverse set of parties.
|
| Voting for a third party candidate _is_ effectively throwing
| your vote away in a protest no one will ever hear in a FPTP
| system.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Unless you are in a jurisdiction which offers ranked choice
| voting, then this is equivalent to throwing your vote away
| and then being surprised when nobody wants it. Also, and
| orthogonally, eliding the distinctions between the two main
| parties over a systemic issue that arises out of the
| constitutional structure means that a party can be
| incentivized to discourage you from voting by pandering to
| your dissatisfaction using sockpuppets.
| gruez wrote:
| >My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide
| because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling.
|
| any more than a >2 party system?
| yoran wrote:
| Yes I believe so.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Sure being on the wrong end of a downvoting is not pleasant -
| particularly when it's unexpected or undeserved. But it's not
| "sticks and stones", and without it, how can anyone tell if
| they're wasting their time preaching to the choir?
| maybe_pablo wrote:
| I would like to see justified downvoting implemented instead. For
| example users should be able to counter-argument (as in a
| different reply mode) a post/comment, in that case If the
| counter-argument gets more upvotes than the parent post/comment
| then the parent comment should start greying out like it does
| here. Of course this doesn't even try to fix sybil attacks but I
| still would prefer it.
| iamadog1029 wrote:
| I don't find that voting systems are a positive evolution,
| generally. It's a non-committal way to interface for people that
| don't contribute any tangible content to a discussion. I remember
| when Facepunch Studios integrated it, which was simulating SA. It
| was years ago and I was a youth, but I remember, in myself at
| least, attempting to cater to voters. I don't suspect I fall far
| from the average interaction in that capacity. And I think that
| breeds disingenuous user interaction. And FP was a bog-standard
| BBS forum, the only thing that decided the content stream was
| moderation and new posts/threads; using votes to promote or
| demote content streams - targeting, [at least] has been pretty
| widely discussed as a hazard and that's all I see it as. So
| between those two features, targeting and disingenuous posting
| (itself a form of targeting), I think that voting systems at
| large are a real detractor in general conversation. And if we
| consider malefactors and echo formation... I just don't see a
| whole lot in the way of good other than streamlining and
| automating moderation, which is appropriate in some
| circumstances, in general conversation I think it just
| compromises the whole thing.
|
| Of course, it's all dependent on the design of the website. If
| you're there simply to generate reams of data for marketing teams
| to sop up, that's something you can do with this sort of system.
| But if you're designing for legitimate vulnerability and honest
| to god expression 4chan is probably the best model in a sort of
| ironic twist. It's user-streamlined, no account, setup or email,
| the page is barebones, you don't need to post anything whatever
| and there's no history to haunt you. And maybe you could argue
| you can't trust anything on 4chan, but you could argue the same
| anywhere, and in fact I'd assume that the quantity of Facebook
| and Reddit are far more rife with artifice than 4chan. But FB and
| R aren't actually designed for absolute expression, they're
| designed to generate marketing feedback.
| intrasight wrote:
| What's the context of this "bring back". I only engage in public
| discussions on Reddit and HN and both have downvotes. And I'm not
| going to read the article just to try to figure out what platform
| he's referring to. Is there a platform that had downvotes and
| then subsequently the feature was removed?
| mindcrime wrote:
| Vis-a-vis HN and the discussion of down-voting here specifically:
|
| There are definitely times when the down-voting is pathetically
| petty and inane. One of the most glaring examples I've noticed is
| this: any time somebody makes a post asking for book
| recommendations in any form (eg, "What's a book that influenced
| you?" or "What books do you recommend for $REASON?", or however
| they choose to phrase it), no matter what the rest of the content
| of your response is, IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will
| get down-voted.
|
| That's it... just _mentioning_ an Ayn Rand book like _The
| Fountainhead_ or _Atlas Shrugged_ will provoke some people to
| downvote you. You could scarcely get more petty and ridiculous if
| you tried.
|
| It's not like I'm even talking about overtly political threads,
| or a comment that specifically endorses Rand or her philosophy /
| ideology / etc. That I could (almost) understand the occasional
| downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately
| controversial in some circles.
|
| But to think that merely having the audacity to include a certain
| author's books on a list is reason to downvote a comment? And it
| wouldn't matter if it were Rand or anybody, the fundamental point
| is the same. It's one thing to dislike an author, but "C'mon,
| man..." as they say.
| new_guy wrote:
| On my social site we have over 160 different reactions, it's a
| constantly evolving thing reflecting current trends and memes etc
| (we also had them long before FB).
|
| But the one thing that's really interesting is out of all the
| 'negative' reactions the 'dislike' was ALWAYS taken personally,
| people used to qualify it with a comment 'disliking the post, not
| you' etc. And if they didn't the OP would take it personally.
|
| But when we renamed it from 'dislike' to 'disagree' that problem
| just evaporated. Human nature is just weird.
| Angostura wrote:
| Dislike is more emotionally loaded. It's also ambiguous - do
| you dislike the comment, or do you dislike the _commenter_? You
| can 't "disagree the commenter"
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| What if the "New post" form required users to choose between
| "Like/Dislike" or "Other people need to see this/Other people
| don't need to see this" for their posts' rating? That way it
| separates the content's "likeability" from people's desire to
| spread it. I'm thinking of things like Tiananmen Square
| protest aftermath photos: people don't want to "like" it, but
| I'm sure they'd agree that people need to see them.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I feel like "other people should not see this" is already
| the function of a downvote. Problem is, it is used for two
| different kinds of content; spam/trolling and "things I
| have a negative ideological reaction to". And no person
| wants to admit it's the second one when they are
| downvoting.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It's my theory that we need voting systems that go in more than
| one dimension. Correctness, Humor, Politeness and other
| dimensions are somewhat orthogonal to each other, and trying to
| cram all of that into up/down just doesn't work.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Why did this article feel the need to put the political divide
| chart up there? You can clearly see the divide started long
| before the internet was a factor. The political divide has been
| caused by first past the post voting (which causes the 2 party
| system) and gerrymandering (which drastically exacerbates
| political radicalism).
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