I bet some anti-spam measure was inadvertently tripped that dampened the submission popularity, while a bug failed to conceal it.
A HN post with negative points – how?
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#32OP should have archived the page when the count was negative.
Here's a snapshot from when the count was 0 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycom...
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#33As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected!
I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4)
But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#34As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected! I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4) But someone with s…
the interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment.
there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#35On HN I almost never downvote. On reddit this was different. Not sure why but I feel that on HN karma is so much harder to get that I don't want to be an obstacle. On reddit I could more easily downvote. It also was easier to get karma. (Reddit is annoying with regards to its censorship though. That is one arbitrary censorship over there ...)
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvotes on comments need a little bit of karma. Now downvotes on submissions, those are not normally doable by random users.
Perhaps some kind of auto-downranking system used for moderation of specific topics or thigns (without explicitly removing them) that accidentally targeted said post? Just idle speculation.
Seeing as how HN normally automatically strips "how" out of a title such that "How I Journal" becomes "I Journal", having both "how" and "why" in the title may have been just too much for the modbot to handle on a Tuesday morning.
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#37When I click on 'A HN post with negative points – how?' from the HN homepage (currently ranked 12 for me), it goes to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 instead of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 (I found the latter via google search for the title string) I suspect the same is happening for some others too, based on the comments on that article. Bizarre! Update: 2 minutes later and the link f…
This post you are commenting on (*6316) is a link post that points to the other one (*4663) The normal behavior for link posts in HN is that the title takes you to the link address, not to the post address. To enter the post address, you need to hit the "discuss"/"x comments" button. So, what you describe is HN working as expected AFAICT, it's just a bit counterintuitive because it's an HN post linking to another, wh…
Here is a self referencing HN post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33130986
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#38As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected! I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4) But someone with s…
the interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment. there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.
I always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
the interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment. there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.
I always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.
I have not hit it yet, if there is one. Only options are upvoting, flagging, etc.
Re: A HN post with negative points – how?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.
I have not hit it yet, if there is one. Only options are upvoting, flagging, etc.
Same. Maybe flags count as -1 after enough?