A HN post with negative points – how? • Hacker News Board

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#21

Post by aaron695 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

OuterVale wrote: post #8

Original poster of the thread here. Doesn't appear to be negative anymore, but here is what it looked like: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652 Screenshot was taken at 06:50 UTC.

A guess would be it got a story flag -4 points.

Then something happened that overrode the show score, which is not the same as the real score for stories.

Like you did a edit? (after it got one flag, which would not be seen)

(Random guess)

[Edit] Up votes wouldn't change it until it got back to zero since -3 is not valid.

The external -10 might be too many comments with a low score is not good

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#22

Post by 1970-01-01 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

Bots. I've posted many popular and unpopular takes here. Down always comes first, and as the bot votes evap into the ether, the true human take is almost always revealed after an hour or two.

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#23

Post by gchamonlive » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

Take this post for instance, the link to the upvote is https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48106316&how=up&auth=26...

If you change `how=up` to `how=down` it downvotes the post.

I tried it once, didn't change the vote count, but I issued the inverse operation with `how=un` and the vote count went up, so I'm guessing someone upvoted at the same time I downvoted. That or it doesn't really work like it says it does, but it does respond with a 301 followed by an OK, so I think this works.

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#24

Post by svara » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

paulnpace wrote: post #6

HN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

That's probably the submitter's friends voting.

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#25

Post by kotaKat » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

GaryBluto wrote: post #10

tux3 wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

which is weird, because normally they just ratelimit you to oblivion and back - not even allow the post in the first place. or just set you to be automatically dead.

unless this is just a glitch of early ranking to get posts onto frontpage that posts start with an invisible negative amount of points and get upvoted out of new and the invisible negatives to frontpage? (eg all posts start out with some value of negative points between -10 and 0 or something and the new votes will help nudge it out to the frontpage?)

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#26

Post by madibo3156 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #15

When 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…

Pointers are hard

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#27

Post by edu » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #15

When 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 has been added as a link, instead of a comment one. Then when you click on it you go the linked page.

LGTM

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#28

Post by hoppyhoppy2 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

1970-01-01 wrote: post #22

Bots. I've posted many popular and unpopular takes here. Down always comes first, and as the bot votes evap into the ether, the true human take is almost always revealed after an hour or two.

As stated elsewhere in this discussion: downvotes exist for comments on HN, but not for submissions, as far as anyone is aware, which is what makes it puzzling.

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#29

Post by yuppiepuppie » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:17 PM UTC

paulnpace wrote: post #6

HN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

Ive been curating HN Arcade for a few months now. One thing I noticed is the vast amount of ShowHN games that get 5 karma points. I was thinking this was some sort of boosting system that low karma ShowHN posts get.

Re: A HN post with negative points – how?

#30

Post by hans-l » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

OuterVale wrote: post #8

Original poster of the thread here. Doesn't appear to be negative anymore, but here is what it looked like: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652 Screenshot was taken at 06:50 UTC.

Maybe there is an API to downvote posts and some bots found it?

Edit: Actually I would wager that it’s some kind of automatic downvoting when the system detects bad votes or comments. Something like “friends shouldn’t vote”. Since we see voting on posts and not comments we could see it go negative.