[HN Gopher] Open secrets about Hacker News
___________________________________________________________________
Open secrets about Hacker News
Author : vincent_s
Score : 431 points
Date : 2021-10-28 09:26 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bengtan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bengtan.com)
| graycat wrote:
| Anomaly: How can a thread quickly get a lot of points, many more
| points than posts? So, who is voting up points but not posting?
| HunchedOver wrote:
| I'd reckon the majority of users, you see this all over the
| internet where there's ability to vote or 'like' something;
| Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc - the vote will usually outweigh
| the comment count.
|
| On HN the culture of 'nothing good to say?; say nothing' is
| fairly baked in so will create this effect even more so.
|
| Voting allows lurkers a voice, who often are the majority of
| users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker citation 11).
| cheeaun wrote:
| Actually, I would be interested to know how the comments are
| sorted.
| HNSucksAss wrote:
| You might be interested to know that sometimes they show YOU
| that your comment is posted, but it isn't. No one else can see
| it.
|
| So you're really just farting into the wind, because Hacker
| News thinks your time is free. Assholes.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's upvotes with some sort of recency bias so that newly
| posted comments get a few minutes near the top of the thread to
| be seen.
| polote wrote:
| The sum of upvotes of the comments which replied to you are
| probably also into the score
| locusofself wrote:
| and I thought dang was a bot!
| HNSucksAss wrote:
| LAME. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for
| users, expressed in its disgraceful "you're posting too fast"
| bullshit.
|
| They let you waste your time composing a question or answer, and
| THEN tell you that you can't post AFTER you press the button to
| submit it.
|
| NO EXCUSE, ASSHOLES.
| HunchedOver wrote:
| With your case it's perhaps a relief to the rest of us.
| polote wrote:
| Another open secret is that you can have the history of any
| posts' position here : http://hnrankings.info/
|
| But they don't seem to compute the ranking exactly as HN does it.
| I guess they use the same formula but HN discard some upvotes
| from 'bots' accounts
| leephillips wrote:
| This story makes no sense to me. For example, he says
|
| "Chance of escaping sandbox = upvote conversion rate x views"
|
| "Chance" must be a probability. But this formula will yield a
| chance > 1 most of the time. That makes no sense.
|
| His example is 30 page views and an upvote conversion rate of
| 13.3%, which means the "Chance of escaping sandbox" = 3.99.
|
| Reading more, I see that most of the math makes no sense. But I'd
| love to "triple" my chances of getting to the front page by
| making my probability 11.97.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| > Most stories 'fail' and have only one or two points
|
| Stories are like startups it seems :-)
| onion2k wrote:
| Far too many of them are all about JavaScript?
| xwdv wrote:
| One of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of
| downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are
| "targeted" that filter is removed and downvotes against you
| become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing
| 1000, and then one day it's like a switch got flipped and my
| karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I've been
| completely drained of karma. I might never really recover. It's a
| bad feedback loop because when you know nothing you say or do can
| make things better there is less incentive to be cordial in your
| messages.
| rolph wrote:
| if i may, some constructive feedback...
|
| try to make something like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xwdv
|
| more like this:
|
| [edit deln.] How can you want to be part of something when you
| don't even know what it's like on the inside?
|
| What happens when you are given a task you do NOT want to be
| part of? What happens when a task has moral gray area? What
| happens if you suddenly decide you really want to be part of
| something else?
|
| [edit deln] if you're hiring someone you want someone with
| valuable skills who is ready to be of service, ready to do
| whatever you ask, and will remain loyal so long as they are
| paid. You don't want people to be nice, you want them to be
| predictable. That's true value.
| dang wrote:
| You're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973. We recently
| restored the code to mostly work the way it did before that, so
| this effect should be less strong than it was. On the other
| hand, if you were to do a slightly better job of using HN in
| the intended spirit (and sticking to the site guidelines -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), we'd be
| happy to take the penalty off your account. The problem is that
| you're still posting comments like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954.
|
| It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay
| within its mandate that don't at the same time end up
| penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like
| how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a
| threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood
| cells - that would be really bad.
| xwdv wrote:
| It must be no coincidence that my karma lately has seen a
| modest boost, rising out from the negatives.
|
| Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by
| user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight
| in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and
| perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your
| downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target
| them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history
| looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent
| downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same
| person no matter what they post.
|
| A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep
| discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don't
| want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.
| vadfa wrote:
| >readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...]
| stories that were placed there randomly
|
| >HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front
| page
|
| If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music
| from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say
| "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship
| with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station,
| that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to
| listen to random songs.
| mattc15 wrote:
| You can't scroll past a song on the radio
| fragmede wrote:
| Radio is a one way medium though. HN missed an opportunity to
| sell users on it but adding it as an opt-in/invite feature
| instead.
| kergonath wrote:
| HN is not a "greatest 80s hits" radio, though. Users submit
| links and users vote on them. There is nobody making editorial
| decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme
| cases. Sure, there is some tweaking, but in the end it's all
| stories posted and upvoted by us, collectively. So it is
| entirely pointless to whine about the content: it is what the
| community wants to see.
| pvg wrote:
| _There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes
| on the front page, beyond extreme cases._
|
| HN is more actively moderated than this, you can find piles
| of moderator comments about it.
| kergonath wrote:
| There is the second chance, but stories that don't resonate
| disappear quickly even after that. I included this in the
| tweaking the mods can do. I guess I went a bit far about
| editorialising, but it's still a minor effect.
| pvg wrote:
| I don't think it's a minor effect and without quite a bit
| of active fiddling, the front page would be full of meta,
| dupes and pitchfork-fetching-exhortations. This even
| comes up in a mod comment in this very thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29028421
| kergonath wrote:
| Interesting perspective, thank you. Though it's more
| about removing things from the front page than putting
| there things that people don't want.
| dsr_ wrote:
| YC companies can put in an submission; it goes to the front
| page but sinks fairly rapidly and can't be commented on. I
| think that these are usually employment ads.
|
| I also _think_ that 's the only direct placement, but I
| can't be certain.
| arp242 wrote:
| There's more than that. Actually, this story mentions it:
|
| > Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb
| the depths of /newest looking for stories that got
| overlooked but which the community might find
| interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from
| which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the
| bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few
| minutes of attention. If they don't interest the
| community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get
| upvoted and stay on the front page.
| bborud wrote:
| So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values,
| opinions or prejudices it's OK.
| have_faith wrote:
| Playing 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging
| someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.
| bborud wrote:
| I was disagreeing with the premise that Hacker News is, or
| should be, very narrow in scope. Though I'll grant you that
| there are certainly degrees to this. There are regularly
| posts that make me wonder why they were posted to HN when I
| first see them here - and yet, these often manage to enrich
| my day.
|
| There are risks to making too many rules about who gets to
| be a member in your club.
| dang wrote:
| What I was talking about in the quoted bits of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024069 didn't have
| to do with topic scope. It had to do with article
| quality, which is orthogonal to that. I agree with you
| completely that HN should be broad rather than narrow in
| scope--that's highly desirable and we spend a lot of time
| trying to nudge and nurture things in that direction.
|
| Just for clarity, when I was talking about how users are
| emotional about the front page and react intensely when
| they see something they don't think belongs there, it was
| in the context of an experiment we'd run to randomly
| place stories from /newest on the front page. Users
| reacted disastrously, not so much because of scope but
| because the median article's quality is just really low.
| That's true about in-scope topics like programming as
| well as other topics. I hope that makes sense.
|
| As for 'who gets to be a member' - we don't restrict that
| nor want to restrict that. Everyone with intellectual
| curiosity, i.e. everyone, is welcome. The only
| requirement is actually using the site in that spirit.
| This is not so easy, of course, especially when the more
| activating topics show up.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _There are risks to making too many rules about who gets
| to be a member in your club._
|
| And no risks in being too open about who gets to be a
| member of your club?
| nuerow wrote:
| > _So as long as something doesn 't challenge our beliefs,
| values, opinions or prejudices it's OK._
|
| You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are
| more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-
| noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are
| focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.
| bborud wrote:
| I'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because it is
| healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of bias and
| denial of same.
|
| The reply you are quoting is currently at -3. Voting is
| more about about affecting visibility than whether one
| agrees or not. Or ideally should be. Does this tell us
| something? Doesn't it kind of prove my point for me?
| nuerow wrote:
| > _I 'm saying there is bias. And I'm saying it because
| it is healthy to acknowledge that we're both capable of
| bias and denial of same._
|
| I'm sorry but you're just doubling down on your baseless
| assertion. Just because you argue everyone might have
| their personal bias that does not mean that everyone
| around you is desperately trying to not challenge their
| beliefs. That's a very specific and very personal
| interpretation that you're trying to pin on everyone
| around you without any basis.
|
| Meanwhile, there are simpler and reasonable explanations
| that you somehow decided to ignore.
| bborud wrote:
| More appealing or simpler? And when you say "reasonable",
| do you really mean "reasonable" or do you mean
| "charitable"?
|
| Look at how your language suddenly grew pointy. What do
| you think that means?
| nuerow wrote:
| > _More appealing or simpler?_
|
| Occam's razor.
|
| > * And when you say "reasonable", do you really mean
| "reasonable" or do you mean "charitable"?*
|
| Reasonable.
|
| > _Look at how your language suddenly grew pointy._
|
| It seems you're more interested in trolling than actually
| discussing the issue. Consequently I won't reply any
| further.
| arp242 wrote:
| I downvoted it because it's just a boring snipe and has
| no real substance. This comment, while ever so slightly
| more substantial, is still little more just some vague
| claims and accusations.
|
| As far as I'm concerned that it's downvoted only "proves"
| that people tend to prefer more substantial conversation
| than this. If you had posted something of value I
| wouldn't have downvoted it, even though I probably would
| have disagreed with it.
| simion314 wrote:
| The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed
| by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on
| HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or
| India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project.
|
| You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO,
| some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the
| "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on
| topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is
| bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic ,
| though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want
| to learn more there is a better forum for that.
| bborud wrote:
| I don't think it is hard to pick clear examples. It is
| harder to pick clear policies for examples that end up in
| some gray area.
| simion314 wrote:
| Sure, but the parent was implying that if we reject some
| content is because we don't want our mind changed. A
| forum should have a scope/topic and it should reject off-
| topic posts.
|
| I love subreddits with clear rules, then you don't see
| articles or comments that go in tangents, memes or
| american or international politics. The moderators can
| decide the gray area after user report. So trying to post
| some COVID or politics stuff in one of the good moderated
| subreddits will be removed and it is not because we don't
| want to open our mind.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good
|
| Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?
| simion314 wrote:
| >Anyone else wondering what a "hearth pill" is?
|
| typo/bad spell, I meant heart
|
| I am not attacking Trump or americans here, is a story
| from my country where in a very religious family the
| daughter failed to convince her mother to get the
| vaccine, the reason was soem Jesus /God does not allow it
| but for some reason God allows the mother to take
| pills/medicine for her heart ... makes no sense , if God
| gifted you a bad heart then WTF do you take unnatural
| pills, why did you vaccinated your children but for COVID
| you somehow found in the Bible that this vaccine is too
| much.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Possibly, the word "health" was mis-typed on a phone and
| then wrongly auto-corrected to be "hearth".
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Probably a "horse dewormer pill", which is what all the
| Trump supporters are popping these days instead of
| getting vaccinated and wearing masks, because they don't
| trust doctors or medical science or vaccines.
| kergonath wrote:
| Entirely agree about political stories and rust projects
| _du jour_ (I'd go as far as associating out-of-topic posts
| on $random_software about how it's be much better in rust).
|
| Just ignore/downvote/flag and move on, though. Nobody is
| forcing anyone else to read anything, and it's normal that
| some people here are interested in things in which I'm not.
| None of us is the arbiter of what should or should not be
| on HN. Not us mere posters, anyway.
| simion314 wrote:
| I am not clear about flagging, I don't want to get myself
| tagged because I flag-ed someone 3rd submission of his
| weekend Rust project, or those COVID conspiracies/magic
| cures, I could offend some free-speech extremist if I
| have the opinion that the HN is not the correct place for
| that.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yeah flagging is the most extreme, for things that
| _really_ don't have anything to do here. It's rare that a
| flag-able story ends up on the front page, to be fair,
| but a COVID magical cure or a propaganda piece for the
| usual quacks would fit all the criteria to be flagged to
| oblivion.
|
| I don't flag random projects, just ignore them (I know
| some people here like them, it's not my thing but it is
| harmless). I downvote obnoxious comments about how
| something needs to be rewritten in rust in unrelated
| threads, though.
| rolph wrote:
| there are times when a very good post contains discussion
| that quickly goes "lord of the flies" with controversy
| polarity and off topicality.
|
| this is a case where i would flag the post rather than
| spend hours flagging comments, that would result in jail
| time if said IRL.
| implements wrote:
| > You can try to change my mind that I should never use
| GOTO ...
|
| It's handy for jumping to the bottom of a control loop if
| the language lacks a CONTINUE statement - the sin being
| outweighed by cleaner and easier to maintain code.
| simion314 wrote:
| Sure, but even if you have continue some languages give
| you the GOTO so you can exit out from nested loops,
| useful when you need to work say with pixel colors in a
| big image, you need all the performance you can get.
| irrational wrote:
| Is the sandbox the same thing as "new"? I've literally never
| visited there and had no idea that it had any role in things
| moving to the front page.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I
| believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point.
|
| This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam,
| anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user
| point of view it is not - at least for me.
|
| When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare
| my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the
| time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that
| would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a
| complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is
| often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP).
|
| EDIT:
|
| 1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might
| well have changed.
|
| 2. As _lordnacho_ points out below this seems to be true only for
| stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less
| points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all
| posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a
| decent comment.
| AshleysBrain wrote:
| Just this week I had a submission hit the front page and end up
| with ~80 votes, but I only got ~40 karma, so I think this is
| still true.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't
| give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear
| 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Think the first 5 upvotes are ignored on submissions wrt
| karma.
| [deleted]
| weinzierl wrote:
| Yes, I observed it on stories. I don't remember if I ever
| looked into comments. Also my observation is from more than a
| year ago, so things might well have changed.
| metafunctor wrote:
| I think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the
| number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story
| which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from
| the front page.
|
| Both modulo moderation, of course.
| weinzierl wrote:
| This is an interesting idea and another rabbit hole to fall
| into. There are this uninteresting posts that never get any
| attention (no upvotes, no comments) and there are the
| popular posts that get a ton of upvotes and comments. That
| much is understood.
|
| Occasionally, though, I have this post that gets a decent
| amount of upvotes but not a single comment. I never
| understood why. I post for the comments and not for the
| upvotes. It is very frustrating, especially since it is a
| miracle to me what distinguishes these posts from the
| popular ones.
|
| Capping the points on these makes a lot of sense though. In
| the end they don't contribute much.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| If you want comments, just post something wrong!
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
|
| >Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right
| answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to
| post the wrong answer."
| dalmo3 wrote:
| What are stories?
| mkl wrote:
| Submissions, which are often news stories or other stories.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| my observation is that when you are starting out your stories
| generate more than .5 per comment, not sure if it is 1 per
| comment, but at a certain point you get capped to .5 per
| comment on story. Have not noticed any capping on favorites
| for comments though.
| polote wrote:
| My bet is that some upvotes don't count either for your karma
| nor the karma of the post. And the upvotes that don't count are
| from account which HN considers as bots.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Something I've never seen anyone mention:
|
| You can use the "hide" link to hide a thread, so that you wont
| see it and comments will not show up under the "comments" link.
| However this appears broken for Ask HN links.
| peter_retief wrote:
| Sometimes my rank/points go up or down without any vote change?
| blauditore wrote:
| I'm really curious about voting ring detection. Oftentimes I've
| seen posts from the same company hitting the front page over and
| over again, and none of them was particularly interesting, nor
| was the company any of HN's "love children" such as Stripe. I
| can't recall any specific example, but when looking a bit closer
| it was usually some small- to medium-sized startup with maybe
| 10-100 people, which would technically be enough to make a big
| dent into a post's score.
|
| On the one hand I'd love to know more about the detection
| algorithm, on the other hand that information would be inevitably
| abused by those shitposters to game it.
| polote wrote:
| Ring detection works for people who don't know it exists. And
| thus works well a lot of times. But is very easy to bypass, and
| I won't tell you how.
|
| And if I recall well, dang has already said several times that
| he will not disclose the algorithm
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| blauditore wrote:
| > But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how.
|
| That really depends on how it works, and _whether_ you know
| how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal
| distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also
| easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph
| of user associations based on votes and comments in the past,
| you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively.
| This is way harder to circumvent in the long run, but also
| extremely difficult to implement accurately.
| asdff wrote:
| It's pretty easy to generate new accounts here
| rsync wrote:
| "I'm really curious about voting ring detection."
|
| I am curious about this as well.
|
| When I read "voting ring" I think of accounts trading votes - a
| group of accounts votes for each others' stories.
|
| But your description (possibly accurate) is that asking people
| to vote for a story is a "voting ring".
|
| Once in a while my company makes an announcement of some kind
| and emails that announcement to some portion of our customer
| base. Sometimes that announcement includes a link to an HN
| story that I create with an invitation for discussion. _We
| never make any mention of voting or scoring_.
|
| This makes good sense because we don't have a forum and
| everyone prefers the HN user interface anyway.
|
| Is this a voting ring ?
|
| If this is _not_ a voting ring, per se, is it likely this still
| trips the voting ring detection ?
|
| Is this poor HN etiquette ?
| detaro wrote:
| You can email dang and ask that he looks into a specific case
| in more detail (although usually the answer is "looks natural")
| [deleted]
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I wish some of this information was in the FAQ.
| dang wrote:
| What specifically?
| jfernandez wrote:
| Without getting to robotic: given how I also think dang is
| awesome, has anyone ever tried to compile of list of tactics dang
| employs to receive such high praise by almost everyone on the
| site? Meaning, like some sort of case studies that map back to
| higher order principles/values he's acting on.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Where's the source code assholes?
| oauea wrote:
| Add to the list, users can also be shitlisted instead of
| shadowbanned. If dang doesn't like your account, you will start
| getting rate limited with extreme prejudice with the message "You
| are posting too much".
| capableweb wrote:
| A collaborative resource with more information about
| undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-
| news-undocumented
|
| > Personally, I'd stay at 3. I'd also wait at least a day between
| re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
|
| Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If
| I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission
| with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older
| than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the
| same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
|
| > Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle
| (pronounced 'Gackley'). He's not of asian descent
|
| ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason?
| What a strange paragraph to include...
| WithinReason wrote:
| Something not mentioned in either article is how karma is
| handled on submissions. 1 comment upvote = 1 karma point, but 1
| submission upvote isn't. E.g. this [0] post got 286 points but
| the submitter only has 118 karma. Also, what's the deal with
| the "prev" and "next" buttons that just appeared in the last
| few minutes?
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28996500
| saagarjha wrote:
| These were added sometime in the last day or so, I believe.
| gostsamo wrote:
| I suspect that I might be part of the reason for the prev and
| next buttons. HN has bad accessibility when it comes to
| screen readers and following the parent/child relationship
| between comments. Some time ago I answered to the wrong
| person for the wrong reason and a commenter said that they
| will ask the HN staff for a solution. If my case was not
| unique, those comments might be the answer. In terms of
| accessibility, those buttons are not as good as using the
| semantic html <li> tag, but they help somewhat.
| Bayart wrote:
| > ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some
| reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
|
| Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he _wasn
| 't_. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of
| Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to
| ancient standards of virtue.
|
| I might come across as reading far too much _xianxia_ , and
| that would be accurate.
| math-dev wrote:
| I thought he was asian lol, cause dang is an asian name
| ketzu wrote:
| > ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some
| reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
|
| Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads
| accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china
| related discussions.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be
| in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought
| into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist.
| I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and
| ignorance.
| dang wrote:
| I don't know if you're talking about HN, but what you're
| describing there is not the dynamic here.
| throwawayapples wrote:
| That is true; I remember, early on, the lab leak theory
| (of which I am a proponent) received substantial and fair
| discussion with significant technical detail, long before
| it became a partisan thing.
| newbamboo wrote:
| I just assumed he had some intense business interests
| involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation
| hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what
| was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs
| likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little
| bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.
| dang wrote:
| It's true that I/we come down heavily on nationalistic
| flamewar, slurs, and groundless insinuations about spies
| and shills and bots and manipulators and all that kind of
| thing. But this isn't related to China--it follows clearly
| from the site guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is
| the same whichever country or group is at issue.
|
| Guidelines-breaking comments do frequently appear about
| China, but that is a function of geopolitical and media
| trends, not HN moderation. The way we moderate such
| comments has nothing to do with my/our personal views about
| China or any other country. If you stop and think about it
| _and_ you know the HN guidelines well, this shouldn 't be
| that hard to believe. The vast majority of these moderation
| calls are not borderline.
|
| From a moderation perspective, everything in the above
| paragraph is obvious. From a user perspective, it's often
| impossible to communicate, because whenever someone has a
| strong feeling about $topic, their view about moderation is
| determined by their feeling about $topic. If they see us
| moderating something they agree with, they jump to the
| conclusion that we're secretly in cahoots with the opposing
| side. Of course the opposing side does the same thing.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| OT pretty much -- but not completely: My daughter had a
| wonderful first grade teacher of English descent named Emily
| Chewning. The kids called her "Miss Chew." On the first Parent-
| Teacher night many parents were surprised to learn that "Miss
| Chew"/[Chu] wasn't Chinese.
| simsla wrote:
| Dang is a Vietnamese surname (I know more than one "Dang"),
| which is why I also assumed he was Asian.
| dang wrote:
| > _my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago
| before I 'd submit it again_
|
| That's indeed the rule, but only when the story has had
| significant attention
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
|
| When a story _hasn 't_ had significant attention in the last
| year (or a bit longer), it's ok to repost a small number of
| times.
|
| Past explanations here:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| stelonix wrote:
| I always thought he was of Vietnamese descent. Today I learned.
| I'm kinda glad that bit of information was added to an
| otherwise very mathematical post.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some
| reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
|
| I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I
| care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't
| matter at all to my HN user experience.
| claviska wrote:
| This would be quite fascinating, as pineapples don't grow on
| trees. Your point is well-stated, nevertheless.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I always assumed he was from the Far Side, not the Far East.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026166
| nuerow wrote:
| > _??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some
| reason? What a strange paragraph to include..._
|
| I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-
| sequitur.
|
| Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the
| word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and
| appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dang
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the
| word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and
| appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
|
| Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G"
| and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have
| mixed case, so he _could_ have picked "DanG" (which... I
| still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word
| but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he
| predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically
| I can totally see preferring lowercase.
| polote wrote:
| > Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules.
|
| Some posts get reposted a lot see this website for example
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lihaoyi.com some were
| posted 7 times.
|
| This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much
| technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4
| people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first
| 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of
| content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
| C19is20 wrote:
| I always read it as dang! the exclamation! There should have
| been a spoiler alert. Oh, well -
| agustif wrote:
| China has not many surnames I think? A little google search
| showed that dang is one of them. ``` Chinese : The surname Dang
| comes from a branch of the ruling family of the Zhou dynasty
| (1122-221 bc) that spread to the state of Jin and the state of
| Lu. The character now also means 'political party'. German:
| from an old personal name Tanco, a cognate of modern German
| denken 'to think', Gedanke 'thoughts'.
|
| ```
|
| So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a
| regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG,
| so yeah I guess that happens
| MadeThisToReply wrote:
| I don't know about China, but in Vietnam there are 14 family
| names which account for about 90% of the entire population.
|
| Roughly 40% of all Vietnamese people are called "Nguyen",
| which makes it one of the most common family names in the
| world.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name#Family_name
| agustif wrote:
| I remember a developer blog that had that lastname!
|
| Also Diane in Bojack Horseman surname! Guessing she's of
| Vietnamese ascent!
| scrollaway wrote:
| She is. There are two whole episodes dedicated to her
| vietnamese heritage.
| mellosouls wrote:
| it took me ages to realise dang was actually his first
| name/surname initial tho i get the handle's other meaning is
| intentional.
| mkl wrote:
| > > Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle
| (pronounced 'Gackley'). He's not of asian descent
|
| > ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some
| reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
|
| "Dang" is a surname in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere [1], which
| has led to subthreads like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643150 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25053380 in which, yes,
| people thought he was Asian.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname)
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Cue the "You're not Chinese?!?" joke from Seinfeld...
| belter wrote:
| https://youtu.be/CsKpShq2X6s
| [deleted]
| asicsp wrote:
| > _Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days
| seems a bit too much._
|
| The article is talking about stories that haven't got much
| attention. You can infer it from the quoted text mentioned just
| before the 3 rule:
|
| > _If a story has not had significant attention in the last
| year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury
| reposts as duplicates._
| causi wrote:
| Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too
| many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll
| get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several
| hours, possibly a day.
| ModernMech wrote:
| You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly
| posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4
| and still got told to settle down lol.
| causi wrote:
| Mine were spaced over an entire day. They just happened to
| be consecutively downvoted.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have found when your account goes into this "you're
| posting too fast" purgatory, you can't post more than (I
| think) five times in some time period (12 hours?? not
| sure). My account somehow always ends up in this
| purgatory. It seems like something automatic triggers it
| and then you have to always E-mail them to get out of it,
| so I don't even bother anymore.
| dang wrote:
| It's not automatic, it's manual. We rate limit accounts
| when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly
| and/or get involved in flamewars. If you keep
| experiencing this after you emailed us to remove the
| limit, it must mean that you reverted to posting low-
| quality comments or (more likely) getting involved in
| flamewars. Or at least a mod saw it that way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the explanation. I'd argue that
| since there is no notice and no feedback as to which
| particular comment(s) triggered the action, then it may
| as well be automatic. I've kind of just learned to live
| with the limit, as I find it a little distasteful to have
| to keep E-mailing to justify myself, when I don't know
| what, in particular, got me into the state I need to
| justify myself out of.
|
| Perhaps the purgatory state could expire after some fixed
| (weeks, months) cool-down period, I don't know. Just a
| suggestion.
| causi wrote:
| I got good results from paying attention to what topics
| are particularly sensitive in the HN community and just
| not commenting on them.
| rimliu wrote:
| Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast"
| feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on
| something you can be restricted from commenting on another,
| unrelated topic.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| It's beyond annoying. It's disrespectful as hell. Hacker News
| lets users waste time composing a question or answer, and
| THEN says they can't post when they try to submit it.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication
| how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how
| long you need to wait until you can post normally again.
|
| What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this
| feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two
| things are oversights.
|
| Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this
| feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution
| was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
|
| I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you
| want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as
| HN, you should treat your users as adults and _tell them_
| what you don 't want them to do. Simply locking them out for
| an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going
| to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning.
| Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result
| one wants a significant portion of the time.
| arp242 wrote:
| Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it
| before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of
| comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but
| somehow I've never hit any limit on this.
|
| This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not
| all) cases people are probably posting short comments.
| Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the
| sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn't a bad
| thing IMHO.
| [deleted]
| gneray wrote:
| Where did you sort all this stuff out?
| novaleaf wrote:
| one thing not mentioned:
|
| new accounts are heavily penalized when posting.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| > In other words, the story must persuade 13.3% or more of
| readers to up-vote. That's a pretty high conversion rate.
|
| This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a
| good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm
| for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over
| time.
|
| The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the
| choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no
| system that can replace that yet.
| devilduck wrote:
| I love the content posted on HN, but I deeply loathe the comments
| section. As well, HN is extremely bad at accepting criticism and
| is completely humorless.
| dannyw wrote:
| Similar article from 2013 but with much more numbers and analysis
| / reverse-engineering:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854
|
| Fun fact: there are manual keyword penalties, such as for
| bitcoin, and back around 2013 there used to be a penalty for
| "NSA".
|
| Explanation by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9097596
| kuu wrote:
| If pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator,
| does it mean that pool is actually dang selection?
|
| :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool,
| and I'll do this periodically.
|
| Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as
| TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a
| discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some
| tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment,
| most often.
|
| I don't nominate my own posts, of course.
|
| It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd
| say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted.
|
| TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.
| dang wrote:
| It's nicest when people don't nominate their own posts, but
| plenty of users do that as well.
| dang wrote:
| I'm not the only moderator, and there are a few non-moderators
| who also contribute to pool selection.
|
| I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but
| it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of
| doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already
| have one of those.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| i don't get it. This looks like seo spam and is well below the
| usual high standards of hn. I agree about dang though, this place
| would fall to pieces without him. I would add that the guidelines
| are incredibly well written. Dang gave me the link once and i
| read it 5 times to understand what he wanted from me
| lelelelelel1el wrote:
| Open secret: dang encourages using archive links to bypass
| paywalls on a site where people complain that content creators
| should get their fair share
| [deleted]
| geoduck14 wrote:
| BRB. Going to go learn about gut hub branching
| anaganisk wrote:
| You got them some more guts?
| blamazon wrote:
| Startup idea - GutHub - facilitate peer-to-peer microbiome
| sharing!
| pansa2 wrote:
| > _A story needs to accumulate 5 points to appear in the Live
| List._
|
| I don't think this is right. During quiet times, I've definitely
| seen stories in the "live list", and even on the front page, with
| only 3 points.
| etskinner wrote:
| Was it on the bottom half of the front page? If so, it might
| fall under the moderator-curated group that the author
| mentions. Or, if it was lower, it might have been there
| earlier.
| pansa2 wrote:
| This story is currently at position 5 with only 3 points:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572
| freddyym wrote:
| From my experience, its the speed that a post gets
| points/comments that matters. If you get three quick enough you
| should get on the front page.
| dang wrote:
| You're correct. It's 3, not 5.
| [deleted]
| dougmwne wrote:
| > he is the best moderator in the world
|
| Yes he is. Dang, you are amazing. Thank you for tending this
| beautiful garden in the middle of a sad and boggy Internet.
| davidbarker wrote:
| I'm always amazed by how attentive dang is. I think he's a huge
| part of why this community is somewhere I visit multiple times
| per day. Thank you, dang!
| brianzelip wrote:
| I've often wondered if dang is more than one person!
| blamazon wrote:
| One thing I really appreciate about dang is how he links to
| previous related discussions on similar articles. This has
| helped me to find many interesting discussions!
| arp242 wrote:
| You could almost say he's a dang good moderator.
|
| Okay, I'll get my coat.
| CalChris wrote:
| Having been dinged by dang I'd agree.
| [deleted]
| kossTKR wrote:
| Dang is amazing because he's got a weirdly razor sharp ability
| to keep a relatively huge overton window without removing much,
| but still keep the discussion going without entering chaos.
|
| Compared to the strictly moderated Reddit forums that are
| completely useless for perspectives outside of the status quo,
| often to a frightening degree in all directions.
|
| Thanks dang!
| rolph wrote:
| dang seems to be fairly cool headed, despite the deflagration
| often directed at him, for being, a bouncer, babysitter,
| teacher, help manual, advocate etc.
|
| i hope it all stays at work most of the time.
| klyrs wrote:
| librarian, too
| vincent_s wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415
| croutonwagon wrote:
| Thanks for this. The article was a nice read, and one I hadnt
| seen, though I'm relatively new to participating here.
| Interestingly I noticed this comment [1], which was basically
| what happened to me when i emigrated to reddit back in 2006
| from Digg.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049415
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Reposting my tribute to Dang (with archive.org links when
| possible) from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513120 :
|
| As a tribute to Dang, whose name you say when you make a
| mistake, here are some of my favorite Far Side cartoons:
|
| Some Weirdo:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190901100845/https://i.pinimg....
|
| Monster Jobs:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134713/https://i.pinimg....
|
| Vultures:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134854/https://i.pinimg....
|
| Construction Birds at Lunch: [missing]
| https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3b/c5/fd/3bc5fd323e791b6879529e6a5...
|
| Blizard's A-Comin':
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200509234955/https://i.pinimg....
|
| The Creeps:
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/1c/5e/5a1c5ef2e9ab19d27970...
|
| Superman In His Later Years:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134903/https://i.pinimg....
|
| Before Paper and Scissors:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211028134904/https://i.pinimg....
|
| Sorry, Buddy: [missing]
| https://i.pinimg.com/564x/49/6b/3a/496b3a234ddeca894887b249e...
|
| Nerd! ...:
| https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/08/a0/c908a02a8dfa42db9973f743b...
|
| The Thanksgiving themed one that I googled and googled and
| googled for but couldn't find, which was taped to my mom's
| refrigerator, was the disappointed bird standing in front of
| the open refrigerator, lamenting: "Dang, somebody ate the
| middle out of the daddy longlegs!"
| klyrs wrote:
| http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index.php?date=092405
| [deleted]
| daaang wrote:
| We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and
| using HN primarily for ideological battle. Those things are
| against the site guidelines because (a) they are not what
| this site is for, and (b) they destroy what it is for--
| regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > he is the best moderator in
| [the](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25051566) world.
|
| Oh, hey. This is my moment of glory, I guess!
|
| The number of people I moderate has only increased since then.
| I still stand by those words.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I can't emphasize this enough. When I see dang gently remind
| folks to not engage in ad hominem, or post thoughtful
| explanations of why controversial comments or articles were
| left up or taken down, _I_ am encouraged to be a more
| thoughtful contributor on the internet.
| ddevault wrote:
| >HN's anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main
| thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good
| enough
|
| A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more
| direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if
| their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was
| not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias
| introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship.
|
| Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by
| small groups of users to remove content which does not actually
| run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote:
| it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a
| much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue
| a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged
| - only after.
| wink wrote:
| >HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front
| page
|
| this is interesting if you only see it like once per year or
| less, when logging in on a new device. I'm not a daily user, but
| I exclusively come in via RSS and a direct link to a post.
| theHIDninja wrote:
| There are also a ton of ongoing news stories and stories in that
| past which were completely censored off HN. I cannot talk about
| them or link them here, but please know that they exist.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| What if you create an article listing all of them, submit it to
| HN and post a link here in the comment? I routinely check dead
| links to see why a few people found it so controversial to
| censor it. I'd say 80% are true positives - spam, SEO junk, or
| some utter nonsense. The remaining 20% is content that is
| controversial to some people for some reasons. I learned quite
| a lot from it. There are days when this censored content is
| more interesting than top submissions.
|
| I also happened to submit one such article somehow. I found an
| article on BBC saying things that are controversial today. It
| was flagged very quickly. It was interesting to me because BBC
| is a relatively reputable source and they don't publish junk.
| dang wrote:
| Why not? I'd like to see them. I also think that if you're
| going to make grand claims like that, you should include links
| so that readers can make up their own minds.
| theHIDninja wrote:
| Just in recent memory:
|
| Anything relating to the scam MMO known as Dreamworld that Y
| combinator funded, and how its funding was possibly due to
| nepotism.
|
| Anything relating to the admin of KiwiFarm's rebuttal [1] of
| Byuu's attacks on his forum or how her suicide was proven
| fake.
|
| [1] https://kiwifarms.net/threads/my-response-regarding-byuu-
| nea...
|
| There are others but either I can't remember them right now
| or I don't have adequate sources to them.
| dang wrote:
| You're off on the first one. There was a lot of discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457 - May 2021
| (238 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021
| (195 comments)
|
| Not only did we not censor that, I recall holding back on
| moderating it. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a
| YC-funded startup is involved (https://hn.algolia.com/?date
| Range=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
|
| You're right about the second case - we moderated that as
| not on-topic for HN.
| detritus wrote:
| > He's not of asian descent.
|
| What?
| lordnacho wrote:
| I thought he was a Chinese guy until I read an article about
| him. I'm sure a lot of people thought similarly, that it was
| one syllable "dang!" rather than Dan-G.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| "Dang" is still a common word in English though. It sounds
| like the article implies it's a common name or something, but
| Asia is a pretty big place
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >"Dang" is still a common word in English though
|
| Dang is a common euphemism for the swear word damn,
| https://mashable.com/article/origin-of-swear-words - the
| euphemism "dang" was first used around 1780.
|
| I believe it is also regional and somewhat archaic in use
| now unless you are real religious and probably also rural.
|
| >but Asia is a pretty big place
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname)
|
| surname in China, Vietnam, Korea, and India.
|
| Also apparently in Germany.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Lame. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for
| users, and their disgraceful "You're posting too fast" bullshit.
|
| They let people waste their time composing questions or answers,
| and THEN tell them they can't post when they press the "add
| comment" button. And we're talking two or three posts in a matter
| of HOURS being flagged as "too fast."
|
| ASSHOLES.
| supperburg wrote:
| Reddit is that way ->
| [deleted]
| legrande wrote:
| > Hacker News has software to detect vote manipulation (ie.
| asking friends to upvote)
|
| Putting on my conspiracy robe, I imagine it's not just about
| 'friends upvoting friends', but the relative ease at which new
| accounts are created (No SMS one-time-tokens, not even email
| required to register etc); and then using those accounts to
| artificially inflate certain stories.
|
| If there are accounts being created for the purposes of
| artificially inflating stories, and their 'score value' then I
| would hope it's about interesting content, and not some
| politically tainted fluff piece used to persuade and
| misinform/dis-inform.
|
| Largely HN seems to work in favor of interesting content, and I
| agree with this article when it says: "If you get past the voting
| ring detector, you won't get past the readers."
|
| I mean, if you somehow developed a voting ring, you would have to
| jump even more hoops to get that article/link the respect it
| deserves. And the HN audience are very articulate in pointing out
| flaws in services/articles/sites in general.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Impressive how this has managed to get to #1 right in the middle
| of the temporal 'dead zone.'
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's quite possible meta stories are the most upvoted category
| of all. I posted an article about how HN was moderated and it
| netted more karma than anything else I've ever done on this
| site, by a wide margin.
| dang wrote:
| Meta is the crack of internet forums, so mostly* a bad thing.
| We downweight it pretty proactively. There would be a lot
| more of it if we didn't.
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxuvOs0NkM#t=210s
| infogulch wrote:
| Exactly, the "self analysis" bias is very strong and probably
| has its roots in psychology. HN's psychologically mature
| audience and mods (comparatively) probably tones down that
| tendency a bit, but many platforms need a separate meta
| category to prevent the community from spiraling around
| itself.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Europe's been awake for several hours already.
| zahma wrote:
| One thing I've never understood is I can only upvote, but some
| comments are greyed out as if they've been downvoted. How does
| this work?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| You need a higher level of karma to downvote.
| mkl wrote:
| Specifically > 500: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented
| C19is20 wrote:
| Why would you downvote something? 'You weren't invited, just
| move along', exists. Happy to say, I only ever upvote.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Why would you downvote something?_
|
| Sometimes people are mean about React and they must be
| punished.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| And sometimes people say things that are unsubstantial,
| deliberately obtuse, and don't really contribute to a
| useful discussion.
| zahma wrote:
| When I disagree as a matter of opinion, I don't have an urge
| to downvote. Sometimes I respond when I'm moved to,
| otherwise, like you, I just keep perusing.
|
| Fortunately I don't see many comments that are so wrong that
| I can say they are in fact false, but it does happen. In
| those cases, I think a downvote is valuable.
| bredren wrote:
| Silly replies (like you might get on many Reddit subs) get
| downvotes. But so do comments that contain factually wrong
| information. Particularly if the author uses the falsehoods
| to attempt to convince.
|
| These posts typically have a top reply comment correcting the
| parent.
|
| The downs help people reduce or avoid being influenced by
| even glancing at information that is no good.
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