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An Update on Hacker News

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: An Update on Hacker News

#111

Post by vectorpush »

How does HN's moderation staff feel about users who are dead, completely oblivious to it, but who continue to post, sometimes for years after the fact without any kind of warning that they are wasting their time.

Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the time, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly inappropriate in the comment history, but the user is still doomed to waste a considerable amount of time attempting to contribute to this board.

In the context of internet discussion boards, it seems a little harsh.

Off the top of my head, I feel like something akin to an automatic probationary resurrection period would be an interesting idea. Perhaps it occurs one year after hellbanishment, giving the community a chance to organically reevaluate the user's quality of contributions, and giving a second chance to those who have matured in a years time (or who was simply hellbanned in error).

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#112

Post by rsync »

Is this a reasonable place to plead with people to stop the practice of meta-commentary on downvotes ?

I am sick and tired of seeing the scoring system injected into the comment thread:

"let the downvotes begin" "EDIT: you can downvote all you want, but ..." "EDIT: not sure why I'm being downvoted, but ..."

... and so on. Just comment and respond, don't add all manner of meta-commentary on voting and the score system into the discussion.

Thanks.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#113

Post by minimaxir »

rsync wrote: post #112

Is this a reasonable place to plead with people to stop the practice of meta-commentary on downvotes ? I am sick and tired of seeing the scoring system injected into the comment thread: "let the downvotes begin" "EDIT: you can downvote all you want, but ..." "EDIT: not sure why I'm being downvoted, but ..." ... and so on. Just comment and respond, don't add all manner of meta-commentary on voting and the score system…

That's in the guidelines/FAQ.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#114

Post by jonnathanson »

peterwwillis wrote: post #96
jonnathanson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments." In theory, no, downvoting is not supposed to be used to disagree. It's supposed to be used to move "stupid" comments (inarticulate, illogical, poorly argued, etc.) down towards the bottom of the screen. Flagging, on the other hand, is meant to call out wildly inappropriate, offensi…

There is no particular purpose for HN downvotes other than to express dislike. It's not needed to move 'stupid' comments down, because only 'non-stupid' comments rise up. The comments which are never voted on have no intrinsic value, so they might as well be stupid anyway. I wasn't even aware of flagging on comments until someone mentioned it, and to be honest it's so inconvenient i'd probably never do it. Downvote i…

Again, interesting.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I don't approach voting from an agree/disagree axis. I approach it from a productive/unproductive axis. I upvote comments I find helpful, articulate, or informative. I downvote comments I find unhelpful, inarticulate, or uninformative. I leave alone comments that I find "meh," or that someone has already said better, or that neither add to, nor subtract from, the conversation. Basically: something either adds to the conversation (upvote), subtracts from the conversation (downvote), completely derails the conversation (flag), or is neutral.

Case in point: I didn't necessarily agree with your comment, but I found it articulate and interesting. It presented a perspective I hadn't considered. It made me think. I upvoted it.

Now, one could argue that agree/disagree and productive/unproductive are basically the same thing in practice. They both represent a desire to move the conversation in one direction or the other. (To your point about the group dynamics). But I don't know if I totally buy into that. I have no idea if this is true, but I'd hypothesize that voting patterns would be different under one explicit guideline or the other. I'd also think that downvoting-to-disagree runs the risk of fostering an echo chamber, which discourages dissenting or different viewpoints, particularly on hot-button topics.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#115

Post by minimaxir »

privong wrote: post #107
dang wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Comment flagging cannot be revoked, but story flagging can.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#116

Post by incision »

hackuser wrote: post #46
readerrrr wrote: post #14

If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments. But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment? My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't a…

> 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)."

I agree.

Thing is, the "when to downvote" debate is ancient at this point and no closer to consensus.

These days, I'm given to thinking that any voting system should assume the behavior of least resistance, that it's thoughtless, reflexive and therefore only potentially valuable after being sanitized / aggregated / weighted.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#117

Post by solistice »

hackuser wrote: post #67
natch wrote: post #31

It seems like early comments on any article generally have a huge advantage in garnering votes. This appropriately rewards engagement, but also pushes down other worthy comments that come slightly later, often to effective near invisibility when replies to the top comment dominate the discussion. I wonder if there is any mechanism that could help counter this.

I expect that there is a strong correlation between how soon a comment is posted and its points. Two thoughts from a relative noob (sorry if these ideas already have been discussed or tried): * On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received v…

> On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received vote

So essentially the same kind of system that is used for the link page? I honestly don't see why link aggregators use one system for links (based on time posted and points) and another system for comments (based solely on points). A very engaging link and a very engaging comment both share the same qualities, whether it is informativeness or adding something interesting to the discussion.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#118

Post by ggchappell »

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…

> pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement

That doesn't mean it's a good idea. I would urge everyone (including PG) to reconsider the acceptability of this practice -- it strikes me as being harmful.

To put it a different way: PG & friends have put together a quality discussion forum. One of the reasons it remains relatively high quality is necessarily that many users of the site do not use downvotes to express disagreement.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#119

Post by scrollaway »

kolev wrote: post #101
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…

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

Compared to Reddit, HN has a way, way smaller number of instances of "downvote to disagree". You can't prevent it entirely because sometimes it is the right behaviour (such as someone spouting crap on vaccines causing autism, for example...), and sometimes there's an opinion people feel too strongly not to downvote but not strongly enough to reply instead.

But the amount of times I've seen controversial opinions rise to the top just because they're thorough and elaborate has been really fantastic, and I make sure to upvote things I disagree on myself. On reddit, the top comment tends to be a one-liner pun -- and again, it feels wrong to me to upvote things I disagree with on Reddit, so I don't do it and it just makes the whole situation worse.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#120

Post by r00fus »

xorcist wrote: post #75
readerrrr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Downvoting and threaded view is hard to combine. What you describe is the trivial way. It has the downside that if a comment has few subcomments, downvoting them don't accomplish very much.

Slashdot solved it by "re-parenting" - i.e., a great reply to a redundant/trollish comment will appear to start it's own thread.

Another approach is simply to hide the offensive comment and weight the entire thread in relation to other threads when determining display order.

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