Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't "political".
Me taking a shit? :)
If only there wasn't a political party who though legislating who can use what bathroom. Now your shit is political too.
Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
301–310 of 553 posts
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 oppo…
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 o…
> 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.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#303Earlier 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…
>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…
> 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.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#304I 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 the…
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.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#305I 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 t…
So like...codify cancel culture?
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#306I'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…
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 e…
They ARE meant to be a disagree button
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#307I'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…
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 e…
> 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.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
> 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.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#309I 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…
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 se…
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 :-)
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
One problem on HN is, that downvotes aren't limited to the comment but include the commenter.
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.