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Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#71
post #48

I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content. Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from their group to promote content.

Other than "jobs" we get no help promoting content. I actually think being a YC company can hurt you because all your YC buddies vote for you and then it appears that your cohort is a voting ring. I actually have to tell people NOT to vote for my posts sometimes, lest I trigger the HN Gods' wrath.

Do you really believe it's a disadvantage?

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#72
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider.

somewhat related, you could use collaborative filtering. I've blogged about my thoughts and experiments with it in the past: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... You can show some random unrated stories at the very top of the list, and then stories sorted by collaborative filtering. In my prototyping it worked super-well.

Interesting concept. One think that popped to my mind immediately is that you need to avoid accidentally creating filter bubbles, i.e. locking everyone in their own personalized stream that shows only what they like and already agree with. It's dangerous for the mind.

Another thing is that a lot of value people like me derive from hanging out here are the random things you get to discover here - things that one wouldn't ever think about before and thus never upvote something similar. So it would be good to leave some place to splice in some random submissions that are not related to one's personal preferences.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#73
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never written a line of Go, and have only a casual acquaintance with Haskell. I'm not a Microsoft fan but spend approximately zero HN time bashing them. I would not attempt to write any sort of crypto anything in Javascript. I am not a libertarian. I am slightly interested in crypto-currency but have never owned any. I think Hayek is way overrated. My karma score is approaching 8000, and I promise it's enough…

Well congratulations on that, and I swear I'm not trying to be snide here, but you've been on HN for 6 years. If you are a new user and you actually want to communicate with people...and hold a minority opinion...you will be downvoted out of visibility.

I wasn't looking for congratulations, I was pointing out that your claim is factually incorrect. I hold plenty of the opinions you say are minority opinions. So far as I know, I was neither much more nor much less typical of the HN population when I was new here than I am now. But I did OK and continue to do so.

It's perfectly obvious that holding a minority opinion can't guarantee getting downvoted into oblivion, for the boring reason that you can hold that opinion without expressing it, and in that case no one can possibly downvote you for it.

Of course you might (very reasonably) not want to censor yourself to that extent. Very well: all you need do is have some other things you can talk interesting about besides your shortlist of pet dislikes. Then the upvotes you get from being interesting on other topics will outweigh the downvotes you allegedly get from daring not to be a libertarian. Although, I repeat: I'm not a libertarian, I've dared to express not-libertarian views more than once, and I don't recall ever getting wiped out by downvotes as a result. I've seen plenty of other not-libertarian comments that aren't invisibly light grey. So you might consider the possibility that what you got hammered for was not the mere fact of expressing an unpopular opinion, but something about how you expressed it.

Now, even the approach outlined in the previous paragraph might not be enough, if what you say about your pet dislikes gets you not merely downvoted but hellbanned. (That's the thing where your comments are invisible except to you, the moderators, and people with the "showdead" feature turned on, so you never get any karma or any replies ever again.)

But -- barring cockups and miscarriages of justice, both of which inevitably happen but are pretty rare -- that will only happen if what you say is not merely unpopular but particularly stupid, or repeatedly boring, or something else of the sort to attract the attention of a moderator and make them think "This person is not adding anything positive to HN by being there". So don't do that. Be civil. Be interesting. Don't try to turn HN into a political flamewar. It's not really that difficult.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#74
This post just motivated me to go through /newest and upvote few things. Thank you.

Everyone, let's take a minute now and go through the new submissions and move some fresh things onto the front page. Let this also become a habit, until mods tweak HN interface to reduce the effort it requires.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#75
Currently, it seems you need either a lot of good luck or upvoting friends to make it to front page. Why not use some categorization so every link makes it it's category's page and has chance of reaching front page?

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#76
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own biases are showing. I am interested in none of those things, not even the bits in your edit (and in particular, think that libertarianism is damagingly naive), yet I accrue a few votes here and there. I have plenty of karma. Seriously, the downvote mechanism is overrated anyway, and is one of the most poorly implemented features of HN - if you're using access to that as a yardstick for value on the site, I'd…

I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts. I'm not saying that I want to downvote people...I'm saying that you haven't been downvoted into oblivion because you don't disagree with people. Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about. Also..."Your own biases are showin…

> Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I've been involved in a number of highly controversial threads, often disagreeing with the dominant view expressed in the thread, don't meet most of the standards you suggest are required to gain significant positive karma [1], and yet have over 10K karma with a current avg of 2.55.

> And are you saying that I should ignore conservations that I disagree with to protect my votes...???

I would suggest that its not disagreement with your opinions that is causing you to accumulate negative karma.

> It's a self censorship that leads to this massive amount of consensus on everything from posts to comments.

I don't see this consensus you are complaining about (and its interesting that the people complaining about supposed consensus here don't agree on what that consensus is. I suspect that's because the complaints tend to come from people that are -- likely unconsciously -- overweighting the prominence of the views that they disagree with and thus seeing a hostile consensus, and a different hostile consensus that other people see.)

[1] in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7973724

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#77
post #23

I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content. Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from their group to promote content.

YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)

As a counter argument, I haven't seen any ycombinator company NOT make it on the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this? The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you ask, nothing will change.

As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope you could come up with a solution for this, really.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#78
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own biases are showing. I am interested in none of those things, not even the bits in your edit (and in particular, think that libertarianism is damagingly naive), yet I accrue a few votes here and there. I have plenty of karma. Seriously, the downvote mechanism is overrated anyway, and is one of the most poorly implemented features of HN - if you're using access to that as a yardstick for value on the site, I'd…

I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts. I'm not saying that I want to downvote people...I'm saying that you haven't been downvoted into oblivion because you don't disagree with people. Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about. Also..."Your own biases are showin…

When you are accusing other people of being biased and pandering to groupthink, it's entirely reasonable for others to point out your own biases. If you think it's hurtful to say, then you should re-examine your own commentary, because you're calling the entire community insular and biased.

And yes, your problem on your previous account was hellbanning, not downmodding per se. It is easy to get the two confused, because it's not easy to get clear info about either. Anyway, if you want to see my opinion on downmodding here, check my profile - it agrees with some of what you say about downvoting, but that is a separate issue to the stereotypes you're throwing out. The profile could probably do with updating, but it's been the same words for over two years (there used to be another section on humour, but that's loosened up a bit, so I removed it).

I loathe the downmodding system here, but it doesn't follow that this means the community is all about groupthink or the stereotypes you're promoting.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#79
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never written a line of Go, and have only a casual acquaintance with Haskell. I'm not a Microsoft fan but spend approximately zero HN time bashing them. I would not attempt to write any sort of crypto anything in Javascript. I am not a libertarian. I am slightly interested in crypto-currency but have never owned any. I think Hayek is way overrated. My karma score is approaching 8000, and I promise it's enough…

Well congratulations on that, and I swear I'm not trying to be snide here, but you've been on HN for 6 years. If you are a new user and you actually want to communicate with people...and hold a minority opinion...you will be downvoted out of visibility.

> If you are a new user and you actually want to communicate with people...and hold a minority opinion...you will be downvoted out of visibility.

I was a new user. I hold many minority opinions (including ones diametrically opposed to those you have named as critical points of HN consensus, particularly on the issue of political ideology), and have expressed them from very early in my time on HN. I haven't been downvoted out of visibility.

I suspect that you are both misattributing the cause of the karma hit your earlier account took and falsely generalizing from that misattribution.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#80

What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people. It encourages group think in the extreme. Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops. I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus…

And so now i'm being downvoted, because you know...disagreement isn't cool. How can I save this...Who wants to talk about Rust? Huh? Anybody? Bitcoin? That god damn NSA? Amirite?

In this case, disagreement isn't the problem, it's being snarky that is.
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