Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#31

Post by fauigerzigerk »

I don't like downvoting because downvotes are so ambiguous in meaning. An upvote clearly means "read this!". A downvote could mean disagreement on the subject, dislike of the author or just disinterest. I might want to read a story with wich many people disagree, but I might not want to read one that everybody finds completely irrelevant or shallow.

The trouble is that the meanings of up and downvotes are different for news stories and comments respectively. For a comment, the votes almost exclusively mean agreement/disagreement. Only in rare cases do I disagree with a comment but still find it so important that I vote it up. This is different from, say, a scientific paper where this happens frequently.

Overall I think downvotes are unnecessary and cause a lot of bad blood.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#32

Post by fauigerzigerk »

german wrote: post #27
pg wrote: post #3

I noticed that on reddit the voting on my essays always had a higher proportion of downvotes after 10 minutes than 10 hours. I know there are reflexive upvoters as well as reflexive downvoters, but from the way the ratio changed over time it seemed that a higher percentage of downvoters were reflexive than upvoters. If so then the downarrow injects more stupidity into the system than the uparrow. Shorter version: dow…

I rarely downvote on something but I think that having that option does no harm. Maybe on reddit downvoters are more likely to be thoughtless, I don't think that is a problem with news.ycombinator readers. It would help a lot to have the same statistics for downvoters on Y combinator.

If you rarely downvote and others allways downvote items they don't like, your opinion is going to be underrepresented. I think that is a harm. As I said elsewhere, downvotes are too ambiguous in meaning.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#33

Post by oditogre »

Jd wrote: post #28
bct wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another alternative is a two-axis system. Up-down for agree-disagree, left-right for quality.

Does anything like this exist that you are aware of?

I've never heard of anything like this, though I've thought of it quite a long while back for Reddit. The problem is that it won't solve anything. Most people will still downvote / leftvote things they don't agree with and upvote / rightvote things they do agree with. If the desire to silence a dissenting opinion could be controlled by the majority of people, free speech would not be such a rare thing, let alone need to be written into law.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#34

Post by auferstehung »

dood wrote: post #21
auferstehung wrote: post #11

I think a method of ranking news based on the number and quality of comments would be better than voting up and down. This method would be somewhat analogous to page rank in that the rank of a story (webpage) is indirectly determined by the comments (links) and quality of the comments. Writing a comment is arguable less reflexive than clicking an arrow. Also interesting news that was generating a good discussion coul…

The problem with this is firstly that it creates a feedback loop, where the more commented something is, the higher it climbs, the more commented it is... Secondly, it'd be hard to extract a quality measure from comments alone - there are a number of metrics (number of unique users commenting, rate of commenting, amount of voting...) but how do you get from that to a quality measure? How do you distinguish controvers…

But a feedback loop is exactly what is desired. The hard part is to amplify the signal while suppressing the noise. Up/Down voting also creates a feedback loop that I would argue provides a very noisy signal of quality at best and an irrelevant signal at worst. The thesis under consideration is whether comments can provide a better signal corresponding to the item commented on. If this is true, it is desirable that items commented on climb higher and generate more comments,

If you consider comments to be analogous to links, the quality of a news item (or comment) can be extracted as easily as pagerank determines the quality of a webpage. Controversy can not be distinguished from quality because they are orthoganol measures. Many controversial issues (to VC or not to VC) are of high interest to readers of this site and would be considered high quality while off topic political controversies would probably not be considered high quality for this site. In general, most interesting things are controversial.

The existence of noisy comment threads (jokes and snark) is a good point. I would think that some form of Bayesian spam filtering could penalize these comments. Off topic comments could be penalized similiarly if a Bayesian filter was trained using the text of the news item.

I disagree that disagreeing or disliking is disagreable. I would call it conversation.

I don't think a bigger algorithm is the answer. One with a good impedance match would suffice.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#35

Post by JulianMorrison »

I wrote a reddit post on this http://reddit.com/info/gg2w/comments

... although most other commenters didn't agree.

Summary: up only voting measures personal interest. It tends to promote anything that has a constituency. Up and down voting measures community approval. It tends to promote group-think.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#36

Post by derefr »

Goladus wrote: post #13
jgrahamc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire up vote/down vote thing needs to go away. Voting on a story should be related to an action that the user is taking which implies an up/down vote. For example, in my Facebook application Wildfire stories are up voted only if you pass then on to your friends. As you mentioned to me yesterday, delicious/popular is interesting because it's based on pages people bookmarked for themselves. John.

I think the hardest part is finding what behavior to track. Click-through is obviously bad. Bookmarking and passing to friends will also slant the stories in a way that isn't necessarily good. I have a lot of friends that don't really care about hacker news, and tend to bookmark more reference-type material. Comments are useful, but that slants towards controversial topics.

Simple idea someone might want to found something on: provide a little highlighter extension for browsers/in a wraparound frame/as a bookmarklet. Track pages people highlight; title and describe them as the few most highlighted words.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#37

Post by derefr »

oditogre wrote: post #30
axod wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could always have a downvote, but weight it as far less than an upvote. Personally I miss having the option of a downvote. Yes I agree downvotes can be an uninformed reflex, but removing any voice of disagreement seems overly harsh. I'd say have upvotes that count as 10 points, and downvotes that count as 1 point or something like that.

I disagree, as noted further up the thread. Preventing downvotes doesn't remove the dissenting opinion. In fact, it allows and encourages it. Downvotes allow groupthink to silence disagreement. If you disagree with something, instead of downvoting, post a comment explaining your position.

Likewise if you agree with something--then posts can just be sorted by comment count. Of course, it could be said that the upvote button is just a collapsed and made-convenient form of replying "Me too!"

Wouldn't it be interesting, then, if instead of editing a metadatum, clicking the arrow made a duplicate of the post (or, rather, a Post object with the votee as its prototype), which then stacked under the original...

"'A stacked comment' posted by bob, joe, fred"

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#39

Post by whacked_new »

eru wrote: post #38
whacked_new wrote: post #26

I think the up/down voting system is intrinsically flawed. A better system would be something like a monetary system.

An information market?

I've thought of doing that; I assume when you mean "market" it implies trade. So one way is to invest in shares of a piece of information and get returns to fluctuate based on the demand for that piece of information. But that would die given enough users, so implemented something simpler, but similar.

Re: Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

#40

Post by eru »

whacked_new wrote: post #39
eru wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An information market?

I've thought of doing that; I assume when you mean "market" it implies trade. So one way is to invest in shares of a piece of information and get returns to fluctuate based on the demand for that piece of information. But that would die given enough users, so implemented something simpler, but similar.

A prediction market like http://us.newsfutures.com/ works by having an ultimate arbiter of value: Either the event in question happens or it does not happen.

I wonder how one would implement a market based system for recommending articles. Could you elaborate on your ideas?

Post reply on HN