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Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

theapeiron.co.uk

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Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#141

Post by f38zf5vdt »

brightball wrote: post #108
dahart wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unf…

Agreed. It’s very out of the norm on HN. On Reddit though, it’s the standard.

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#143

Post by dec0dedab0de »

crazy_horse wrote: post #21

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 r…

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#144

Post by semireg »

gwking wrote: post #122
Tenoke wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#146

Post by underseacables »

crazy_horse wrote: post #21

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 r…

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#147

Post by pugets »

dahart wrote: post #89
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

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 r…

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 unf…

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#148

Post by marcosdumay »

gus_massa wrote: post #32
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

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 r…

> 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 a…

> 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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#149

Post by brightball »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #141
brightball wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It’s very out of the norm on HN. On Reddit though, it’s the standard.

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…

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.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#150

Post by dec0dedab0de »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #126
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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