An Update on Hacker News

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately.

At first I was appalled at hearing this until I realized I misunderstood the change. I was mistaking down voting for flagging.

Flagging and down voting are two different things. Also, most everyone can [now] flag comments but you have to take one additional step (extra friction, perhaps for the better and to also prevent accidental flagging) which is you first must click on 'link' next the the comment and then 'flag'.

Your reading is correct...unfortunately, my early posts actually did better than expected, and I seem to have become the mask, so to speak.

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

That's the nicest thing anybody's said about me all week. :)

Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable.

We don't ban people because they "critiqued a YC backed company".

Edit: Some of the replies have made good points, and I realize that I overreacted. Sorry about that. Please shoot us an email at hn@ycombinator.com if you feel your account was banned unfairly. We're always happy to look into this—there's no question that we make mistakes; the most I can claim is that we're eager to, and do, correct them when they're brought to our attention.

I obviously can't speak to whether MOC is experiencing it, but I can say that with my first HN account, before I understood the context and spirit of HN, I made a very Reddit-esque comment that got me banned. The first part of that was the so-called slowban, as the site was all but unusable when I was logged in.

This was years ago and I have no idea if the mods still use this tactic, but I imagine so in certain cases.

Flagging seems like the solution to toxic comments, and should be more encouraged. At the same time, this means it overlaps with downvoting—but only one use of downvoting. Really, the meaning of downvoting on HN is somewhat confused and muddled: is it a "flag lite"? Is it a way of disagreeing? Is it a way to push worse content to the bottom? Is it just the opposite of an upvote?

Any one of these would be reasonable, but having all at the same time is not great. But that's exactly what we have now, both in the design of the feature and in how it gets used in practice.

Personally, I think downvoting should move away from being an alternate form of flagging (with flagging, perhaps, taking a slightly more prominent role for dealing with actual abuse) and more towards just being the opposite of an upvote. This still makes it a bit of a hybrid (both for moving bad content down and disagreeing), but one that makes a lot more sense because it works just like upvotes do.

For one, this is what the interface already implies. The downvote button looks just like the upvote button upside down. Seeing the two as exact opposites is entirely natural, and that's how it plays out in terms of karma too. But in terms of social conventions and, importantly, greying out comments, this doesn't quite hold.

I also think that some symmetric way to counterbalance upvotes is actually useful in and of itself: downvotes can offset comments that gain a lot of upvotes before getting a strong rebuttal or comments stuck at the top of a discussion because of other quirks in the system. But people now seem pretty hesitant to use them this way. Which makes sense: if downvotes are, in part, mini-flags, they are too strong just to indicate that you think something has been upvoted too much or is not a particularly good comment (without being bad or abusive).

So what would I do? Well, from the site's perspective, the main tweak is greying out comments after more than one downvote. Still have the votes change the order, but only have a really visible effect after a few have accumulated. More importantly, from a social perspective, it would be good to reach consensus on what a downvote actually entails, namely that it's just the opposite of an upvote, neither more nor less.

Disentangling flags and downvotes like this will improve the utility of both features by making them more focused. Downvotes can be a symmetric force in shaping discussion while flags could be pushed a bit more as means of pruning actively harmful comments.