The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#461

Post by krapp » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

Banana699 wrote: post #454

pessimizer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1. This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.

>low-effort troll comments This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to a…

A troll isn't someone who simply holds controversial views, but who argues in bad faith, and there are many examples of that on Hacker News.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#462

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #338

FalconSensei wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to prove your point, your comment is faded with no replies, even though you didn't say anything wrong, but only expressed your opinion.

That's the horse of twenty-somethings, and their "older" cohort, who think being a jerk is funny. I've definitely done that way too much here at times, oops. Still, it falls on the creators and maintainers of HN to do something about it. I'd be interested to read any discussion in suport of down votes from the crew who run the site.

Horse. Deary me.

I meant horde.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#463

Post by kodah » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #354

dragonwriter wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies I've done that. Not been banned. > point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite Well, I mean, aside from being false, that’s also going to often be a specific labelling of something here as “white supremacist” or “hate speech”; flagging exists pretty specifically to deal with content where that descript…

All their comments start dead. People call it shadow banning or hell banning. And some other accounts have [banned] after the name but keep commenting.

They just posted a new comment that isn't dead. I really doubt HN does that kind of stuff.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#464

Post by dang » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:19 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #463

pseudalopex wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All their comments start dead. People call it shadow banning or hell banning. And some other accounts have [banned] after the name but keep commenting.

They just posted a new comment that isn't dead. I really doubt HN does that kind of stuff.

Comments by banned accounts are killed by software, but other users can vouch for them to unkill them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). That's what happened in both of those cases.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#465

Post by dang » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:21 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #461

Banana699 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>low-effort troll comments This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to a…

A troll isn't someone who simply holds controversial views, but who argues in bad faith, and there are many examples of that on Hacker News.

There are many commenters who post abusively, but in my experience it is not the case that they're posting in bad faith. I think that is actually rather rare. Users are far too quick to assume this about each other.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#466

Post by cmdrtaco » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #435

klyrs wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that. They started a really good thing with…

I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in. Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc. I think it…

Agreed.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#467

Post by dang » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #388

dang wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a problem. I'm often as much as a couple days behind in looking through flagged comments. I think if we build any more software around banning/penalties, it might be some kind of probation system, i.e. a series of temporary bans, maybe with exponential backoff, and with permanent bannage only as an end state. I can think of reasons why it might work better, including: (1) humans tend to do well with feed…

The ability to ban people from specific threads might be a good idea.

I reflected on this a bit after seeing your and tptacek's comments. It's an interesting idea but I think it would land too personally again, because it's so specific. When moderators make a specific judgment like "you can post in other threads but not this one", people feel singled out, and that's really what stings.

Also it would leave a lot of surface area for objections, and any changes we make will need to reduce the amount of argument moderators have to get into —it's both time-consuming and psychologically difficult. I think it would probably be cleaner and simpler to say "you've been breaking the site guidelines so you're temporarily banned". The innovation would be the "temporarily" part.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#468

Post by _ktx2 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

bscphil wrote: post #305

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely be downvoted for ideas here. Comments that go significantly against the political norms of the site seem particularly prone to this.

> Comments that go significantly against the political norms of the site seem particularly prone to this. Agree, but notably, the political norms of the site are not distinctively left or right wing. There are any number of opinions that will get you downvoted here (unless your comment flies under the radar), and it really does not matter how thoughtful you are about it. Example 1 (right wing): opposing gay marriage…

> It's really not that surprising; the median Hacker News user is a white American man, wealthier and younger than average, with moderate liberal political views that skew libertarian on social issues. That's a "norm" of discourse even if it doesn't fit perfectly on the American Republican / Democrat spectrum.

I doubt this is very true. Last I checked from what dang said less than 10% of HN comes from Silicon Valley and it has an increasingly global presence. Secondarily, your use of race, age, and gender are antithetical to good analysis. These categories are not monoliths and it's insulting to refer to them as such. The way you categorized the politics of this site even seem out of touch from my experience.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#469

Post by Blikkentrekker » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #365

rcurry wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you 100%, I love HN and have been here for years but the downvoting feature disgusts me. Either allow a post or don’t, but this weird “fading” of someone’s post just because some people don’t agree with what someone has to say strikes me as petty and cheap. HN should be bigger than that.

It gets faded to signal to other people "this has been downvoted" because you can't see the karma score next to the comment anymore like you could in the early days. One of the things this signal does is it provides the opportunity for corrective upvotes by people who feel "That didn't deserve to be downvoted" which is one of the cultural traditions here. I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a…

> I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a very big problem to never allow any kind of signal of disagreement or whatever and the system here is intended to keep singal-to-noise ratio high.

It certainly is not, one can verbally signal one's disagreement with a reply. I very much do not believe that it has anything to do with “signal” and “noise” which of itself are rather vague terms and I find that very often people will consider something “signal” simply because they already agreed with it before they read it.

I see no reason for comments to be “rated”, and I certainly see no reason to pœnalize users for lowly rated comments as I see plenty of them that otherwise provide an interesting perspective.

> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." to try to keep Eternal September down to a dull roar so HN can do what HN does better than any other forum I have ever seen, which is why I hang here so much even though it's never been an easy thing for me to be here.

“This is not welcome.” means “Ðo not disagree with what the nonrepræsentative portion of H.N. that votes thinks says.” and I stress that it is not repræsentative. — it yields more power to those that are willing to downvote something for mere disagreement and gives lesser to those that would not do so, in my opinion very much the type of person whom one should not yield such power to to decide what is and isn't welcome.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#470

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

ascar wrote: post #229

TheManInThePub wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I couldn't agree with this more. I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.

> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo The best thing to do here is for the community to step in and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.

Agree. I do this all the time.