281–290 of 553 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons, with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-as-QC?
That would be an interesting experiment. Make it a 2D axis... Agree Disagree, and Low Quality High Quality. Only allow voting on one of the options.
I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…
It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you? Are you sure you weren’t just wrong and didn’t know it? I’ve been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly downvoted for it far, far more often than I’ve been unf…
Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does.
Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It’s very out of the norm on HN. On Reddit though, it’s the standard.
Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset. This is different from Facebook or YouTube…
I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.
It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.
The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.
I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…
And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point.
Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.
The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet.
Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.
When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.
I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…
* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.
* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...
I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you say anything positive or negative about something people hold as part of their identity you're going to get a response. I think it's better that you get votes, instead of a bunch of emotional comments.
No, it is better to get comments, even emotional and not well written. Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong, or at least know where exactly my opponent disagrees with me, because it I could have written a wall of text, not every sentence of it is wrong. Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the oppo…
If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.
edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.
I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would it be better if you get down voted to hell and also get swamped with throwaway comments like "that's stupid"
I think throwaway accounts should be banned, or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment. If you participate with thoughtful comments, you’ll reach 500 within a month. What bothers me is people creating these accounts on a whim just a throw out some garbage, or maybe a valid opinion, and then disappear in the night. If you had to wait a week to post it might lead to massive duplicate…
That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one wants to create an account will most probably be the moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the account was created with forethought would just lead to the account never being created in the first place ("I would create an account to reply to this, but even if I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").