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An Update on Hacker News

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Re: An Update on Hacker News

#101

Post by kolev »

lotharbot wrote: post #66
hackuser wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment I hope downvoting has nothing to do with agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated). I want to see many more comments that are valuable and challenge the community (and challenge my thinking too). The groupthink is already well known and if not, will certa…

pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.) I generally don't unless the disagreement has another value-subtracting component (lack of substance, poor reasoning/phrasing, factual errors, unnecessary incivility.) For disagreeable but worthwhile comments, I prefer responding instead. But I recognize the value in having differences of opini…

So, users with high karma are just populists? And since when hackers are populists? Not agreeing with somebody could be highly subjective.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#102

Post by Crito »

hackuser wrote: post #93
lotharbot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.) I generally don't unless the disagreement has another value-subtracting component (lack of substance, poor reasoning/phrasing, factual errors, unnecessary incivility.) For disagreeable but worthwhile comments, I prefer responding instead. But I recognize the value in having differences of opini…

> pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.) What value does this provide to the reader? Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth, IMHO, and provides little marginal value, because I already know what it is and it's easy to find. In fact, I wouldn't read HN if all I found was the groupthink -- I gain far more from new or ch…

Downvoting because you disagree provides the exact same benefit to the reader that upvoting because you agree provides. "Downvotes aren't for disagreeing" is an absurd redditism.

> "Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth"

In strongly technical discussions, which are common on HN and which HN should be optimized for, "groupthink" and "correct" tend to correlate quite nicely. Whenever there is a concrete notion of "correct", it works well. It is only when "correct" becomes subjective (such as in political discussions) that shit gets messy.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#103

Post by tptacek »

jonnathanson wrote: post #98
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a reasonable take on what downvoting is for, but the HN take is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement.

Interesting. At first I thought, wait a minute, isn't "don't downvote to disagree" in the HN Guidelines? Then I checked, and no, it isn't. The guidelines talk about downvoting ("downmodding") very briefly, and only to say that one shouldn't complain when it happens to him or her. There are no guidelines on how or why to downvote. Maybe this is a problem, in and of itself? Seems different people have different takes o…

The "HN take on downvoting" comes directly from Paul Graham. People disagree with it, but it is what it is.

I don't downvote disagreement, but that's because I'm a compulsive (and, from what I can tell, fast) commenter.

The simple way to metabolize this system is just not to get unhappy when you get downvoted.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#104

Post by Crito »

vacri wrote: post #87
hackuser wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment I hope downvoting has nothing to do with agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated). I want to see many more comments that are valuable and challenge the community (and challenge my thinking too). The groupthink is already well known and if not, will certa…

Downvoting for mere disagreement has been blessed by the top level; it's an HN 'thing'. It would be less of a problem if it didn't also fade your comment.

I rarely see well considered dissenting opinions down-voted into the gray. That is something that I typically only see when somebody is being uncivil, committing logical fallacies, mis-characterizing the arguments of others, or is factually incorrect yet self-sure.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#105

Post by brianpan »

baddox wrote: post #63
hackuser wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment I hope downvoting has nothing to do with agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated). I want to see many more comments that are valuable and challenge the community (and challenge my thinking too). The groupthink is already well known and if not, will certa…

> I hope downvoting has nothing to do with a agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated). That's a weak distinction when there is a factual disagreement, since most people probably believe that factually incorrect statements are not valuable to the conversation.

You stated: most people probably believe that factually incorrect statements are not valuable to the conversation.

I don't think this is true at all. I disagree that 1) this is a thing most people believe and 2) that incorrect statements are not valuable.

I would hope our disagreement would cause people to refine their thinking about what they post as well as what they downvote and flag.

[*] Most, referring to most HN readers

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#106

Post by maxerickson »

logicallee wrote: post #92
maxerickson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeatedly breaking threads by deleting your comments after there are replies is worse. So is threatening to delete your comments over down votes.

I delete comments to keep the site clean and on-topic, and not too argumentative. It's not 'threatening to delete my comments over downvotes' it's 'agreeing to withdraw a comment if it's too controversial.' (i.e. downvotes, no replies.) Not every thought needs to be voiced. Also, your feedback may have been better directed to my email, I do list one. An example of where I recently deleted a comment was in response to…

Well, your reasoning doesn't come across like that to me, sorry.

And I have to say, you do delete comments with replies.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#107

Post by privong »

dang wrote: post #88
sciurus wrote: post #62

"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately." When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusin…

> comment flagging privileges disappeared Comment flagging privileges don't disappear (edit: alone). Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585939 .

Would you mind clarifying? The blog post (quoted by parent) seems to explicity say that flagging privs can be revoked, which directly contradicts what you are saying in the comments. Or was the quote from the blog post only meant to refer to flagging of articles?

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#108

Post by axlprose »

readerrrr wrote: post #33
mblevin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving comments down completely can break the threading - e.g. you could have a highly upvoted parent comment with a single child comment that was heavily downvoted. You can't move the child any further down the tree. You CAN indicative that the comment has been downvoted - the fading accomplishes that objective.

That sounds like an incorrect fix. Since the comments are separated by trees, they should be positioned and compared to comments relative to that tree, not relative to the master tree. Being at the bottom of a sub-tree marks the comment automatically as the most downvoted in that tree. Applying fading to all the comments just because a downvoted comment has a parent that happens to be at the top, seems wrong.

Agreed. If they're this adamant about keeping the fading functionality tied to downvoting, they should just do away with downvoting all together, because fading just seems to worsen the discussion.

I've lost count of how many times I've seen perfectly good insightful comments around here that get ignored because some people decided to downvote them for some arbitrary reason. In fact, it's so bad, that I'd say I've barely seen any good instances of fading for the past year; they just seems to encourage group-think almost every time.

I'm ok with the idea of downvoting meaning disagreement, since that's how voting systems always end up being used anyway (not to mention pg approves of that interpretation as well), but penalizing comments to become practically non-existent based on a few downvotes (last time I noticed, a score of -1 started the fading) is just not conducive to interesting discussion.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#109

Post by logicallee »

jacquesm wrote: post #97
logicallee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your name is bad for the site and you should change it. nomen est omen.

Nothing wrong with his name (or his comments).

how do you read 'angersock'? To me the plain reading is "an online persona distinct from one's usual persona; and one which has an extremely angry tone."

I agree there is nothing wrong whatsoever with his actual comments.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#110

Post by delecti »

dang wrote: post #34
btreecat wrote: post #18

> The threshold for flagging is low (only 30 karma), so everyone can help there. So I guess I am not able to help.

An earlier draft of this post that Sam sent me had "nearly everyone can help there". I'll ask him to put it back. But it's not like this is much of a barrier. Even this one comment moved you significantly (as of right now at least).

Just curious, but are you saying that because of the relative position of the parent's comment in this thread, or is there a threshold for karma that unlocks seeing the karma on comments other than your own?
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