The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
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The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
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Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#2The title should say that this was 2009.
And I think that HN has held up pretty well over the years.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#3(2009), by Jeff Atwood. I would have been very surprised to hear today's Stack Overflow staff talking about the value of downvoting.
Atwood's experience with downvoting on Hacker News is definitely a bit dated as well:
> (update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. It is buried in the faq)
> (I apologize for my misunderstanding, but there’s no visible UI for downvoting, and I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News! Also, I put these comments in parens to make them extra-LISPy so Paul Graham would see my corrections.)
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#4>It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous.
The success of "broken windows" policing is not supported by much evidence, so the rest of article based on this concept is suspect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#5[deleted]
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#6Stack Overflow is certainly one to talk about this.
Last time I tried (a few years ago), voting in either direction required a minimum number of points there also.
These days, I accept the votes on S.O. for what they are, and hit the "End" key to read the least-upvoted answer first.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#7>I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News
That's interesting. I wonder how that could be the case.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#8The glaring issue in this article (which I couldn't bring myself to finish) is that he equates downvoting to "evil or incorrect post(s)". Which would be true in an ideal world, but the reality becomes downvotes are equivalent to "I disagree with you".
If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for appropriate situations.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#9>It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. The success of "brok…
Most of the criticism appears to come from misguided CRT roots. Thus the criticism itself is suspect.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#10Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system. Though downvotes seem to work pretty well as-is for HN, I rarely see dead comments that were killed by downvotes rather than anti-spam features.
If we take HN as reddit 2.0, what would be HN 2.0 I wonder? If I were the one to make it I'd create a system to promote the comments of people with professional expertise on the subject being discussed. HN has mostly solved the politeness and flamewar issues but IMO one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about.