Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#21

Post by pedalpete »

Nicksil wrote: post #9
sfgweilr4f wrote: post #6

The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting. People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg…

>The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. Absolutely. I agree with everything else you bring up as well. I would love to see down-voting vanish completely and the flagged/dead threshold increased dramatically. It is too easy to drown out otherwise thoughtful, quality contributions to discussion. Instead we see two to three word witty quips float by unscathed. It is the antithesis of the type of discussi…

I think downvote could be more valuable if it required a comment explaining why it as downvoted. I sometimes find I read comments that have been downvoted, and I'm wondering why, potentially the downvoter had a good reason I wasn't understanding.

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#22

Post by pedalpete »

I've actually been considering this over the last week. I've been a user since the beginning, but I find that I am maybe clicking on one or two links from the first two pages. Seems the value of the content is feeling very bland these days. Which is surprising seeing as we are in such an amazing time technologically. Where has the quality interesting content gone?

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#24

Post by quickthrower2 »

I don’t think you’ll move anyone away with a simple feature such as profile pics or whatever.

There is so much goodwill and history and HN attracts great people. Also say you built something better than HN - people won’t leave HN for that they’ll probably use both.

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#25

Post by stephenr »

pedalpete wrote: post #21
Nicksil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. Absolutely. I agree with everything else you bring up as well. I would love to see down-voting vanish completely and the flagged/dead threshold increased dramatically. It is too easy to drown out otherwise thoughtful, quality contributions to discussion. Instead we see two to three word witty quips float by unscathed. It is the antithesis of the type of discussi…

I think downvote could be more valuable if it required a comment explaining why it as downvoted. I sometimes find I read comments that have been downvoted, and I'm wondering why, potentially the downvoter had a good reason I wasn't understanding.

I used to think this too.

/. had this back in the day (I guess still does?). Lobste.rs has this too.

The problem is people just substitute "downvote without a reason" with "downvote as 'trolling'" for any opinion they disagree with.

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#27

Post by unraveller »

Feed filtering is the must have feature for our times. All this subscribing and no built-in fine grain negative control is absurd. Right now the number of sites I block per page on HN hovers around 15% to 30%. The front page is always much lower (3%-8%) which tells me the mods actions align with mine about what shouldn't be on the HN front page.

I'm settled in to ride out the inevitable decline as I've done for all feed based aggregators like twitter, medium, reddit et al. From experience, when it reaches ~50% block worthy I will stop trying to upvote solid posts and prolong the suffering of others.

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#28

Post by zodiakzz »

stephenr wrote: post #25
pedalpete wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think downvote could be more valuable if it required a comment explaining why it as downvoted. I sometimes find I read comments that have been downvoted, and I'm wondering why, potentially the downvoter had a good reason I wasn't understanding.

I used to think this too. /. had this back in the day (I guess still does?). Lobste.rs has this too. The problem is people just substitute "downvote without a reason" with "downvote as 'trolling'" for any opinion they disagree with.

StackOverflow solved this by charging karma for each downvote you make.

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#29

Post by mikewarot »

The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on.

The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse.

There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality

  true / false
  funny / serious
  insightful / wrong
  kind / hurtful
  agree / disagree  (useful for votes)
I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.

Re: Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

#30

Post by stephenr »

zodiakzz wrote: post #28
stephenr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this too. /. had this back in the day (I guess still does?). Lobste.rs has this too. The problem is people just substitute "downvote without a reason" with "downvote as 'trolling'" for any opinion they disagree with.

StackOverflow solved this by charging karma for each downvote you make.

Charging "internet points" doesn't really solve the problem. I am apparently in the top 2% of SO, largely based on four answers provided a decade ago.
Post reply on HN