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The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

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Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#281

Post by jayd16 »

benlivengood wrote: post #40

I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order. In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Fo…

Ironically reddit has solved this by having terrible search facilities. Subs can stay small and hidden.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#282

Post by Graffur »

rurp wrote: post #143
benlivengood wrote: post #40

I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order. In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Fo…

This matches my experience as well. HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.

In fact it seems like a no brainer decision. Why should a day 1 account be able to downvote content?

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#283

Post by type0 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #277
bhupy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why spam should be treated any differently than conversational indecency (personal attacks, bad faith arguing); in theory it could all fall under the bucket of "this doesn't belong here", right?

Personally, I flag for blatant rule violations such as comments that are filled with personal attacks or spam. I will downvote comments that are simply low quality, like comments that merely say "^ This!". I don't usually downvote bad faith arguing because it's hard to prove when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.

> when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.

Sometimes the person just misinterprets the conversation, especially if not being a native english speaker, but the responses could get overly harsh and that's a pity because I'd like to see more international discussions here.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#284

Post by _Microft »

downandout wrote: post #144
joering2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would actually like to see a list of largest karma-wise HN members who left. By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you post the result please: SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100

I used to be incredibly active on here, and then I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons. I have all but stopped commenting compared to my previous activity. It just stopped being fun. Even posts I make that have nothing to do with politics, that only point out provable, factual information, get downvoted. I have over 13K karma, even after losing a few thousand points over…

> I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons.

That could well be because a lot of the downvotes I saw in your recent comment history were on outright political topics (Parler/Trump‘s ban from Twitter/…) It might help if you just stayed away from those if you otherwise enjoyed being active here?

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#285

Post by harpiaharpyja »

crazygringo wrote: post #198

It's kind of amusing that the entire premise of this article is undone by the aside: > update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively…

The content of the article still stands if you take it about social voting systems in general. I guess you can apply it to like... Twitter or something.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#287

Post by type0 »

dustinmoris wrote: post #128

Kind of ironic because HN still remains one of the most interesting and engaging communities whereas StackOverflow has become pretty insignificant, outdated, stale and very hostile and unfriendly to new posters.

It also has completely different use cases which makes the comparison a bit meaningless.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#288

Post by [deleted] »

massung wrote: post #134

No system will be free of problems or gaming. But, doesn't hacker news actually have implicit down voting by way of time? HN isn't designed to be a searchable Q&A or forum. It's a "what's a currently popular" site. If something isn't good, it just disappears faster than the opposite. Have I wished I could down vote things sometimes? Sure. But then I just wait 5 minutes, refresh, and it's gone.

[deleted]

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#289

Post by Hiopl »

crazygringo wrote: post #198

It's kind of amusing that the entire premise of this article is undone by the aside: > update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively…

I'm also baffled by his position. I often think that downvotes on HN serve to reinforce conformism to an accepted set of values and ideas. Which might be okay if, say, you want to "immunize" a community against racism, sexism or fake information, but isn't great if issues (as in politics or even in tech on a social level) are a lot more nuanced and there might be plenty of room to explore ideas off the beaten path (and no, I don't mean inane stuff like "but masks don't work" or "but it's just like the flu"). It's easy to find yourself on the receiving end of endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive but clashes with the accepted HN narrative.

It makes me wish downvotes weren't a thing. I'm okay with flagging, since I mostly see comments flagged that clearly break HN's simple rules.

Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

#290

Post by type0 »

ddevault wrote: post #139

Hacker News gets it most wrong with the flagging system, which is ripe for abuse (and is constantly abused). I sent this to dang some time ago, and was met with a muted response: I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that this is to make it so that users cannot downvote until they have demonstrated some understanding of…

Yeah, I think the guidelines should state that you can't just flag everything you disagree with, there should be consequences for that sort of behavior.
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