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Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

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Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#41

Post by jamongkad »

LPTS wrote: post #36
aston wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic downmods are my least favorite thing in the world. Let's downmod jamongkad just because he claims not to care about being downvoted! Is that funny to people, or something? I just don't get it.

Im a fan of the ironic downvote personally. Its hilarious if you have the right sense of humor. It makes me almost pee myself laughing. I don't understand why we shouldn't be hacking the downvote system. This is supposed to be hacker news. Ironic downmods seem consistent with that thinking, as well as consistent with the tricksters hackers are supposed to be.

Agreed, I'm not really a liberal down voter (well if you add the fact that I down voted Wallflower for being a baby a few days ago), the gist of my original comment so to speak is how everybody goes all randy about getting downvoted and such. But yeah this is not Reddit and Digg we must practice a modicum of restraint when we feel we need to downvote on something. On an interesting side note my original comment garnered 2 points!

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#43

Post by Mystalic »

After reading all of the comments, it seems clear that most of the community wants some sort of "downvote" mechanism to assure that comments and articles lacking quality do not reach the front page and do not "clog" up the HN community.

It also seems clear that HN wants to tweak the system so that it's fair, doesn't allow for people who simply disagree without just reason to downvote an article, and holds the integrity of the community.

I have to add that any system implemented has to be simple but effective (two sets of downvotes is not simple, for example).

So my suggestions:

- Downvotes still exist to make sure articles and comments lacking quality, or are clearly karma-bombs designed to bring something to the front page. - You can't downvote until you've gotten to understand the community. That means a minimum Karma limit, say 50, that signifies that you've contributed to HN enough to know the general rules of the community and some of the nuances that make HN what it is. You could also make it so you can't upvote or downvote after say, 25 karma. The number's arbitrary, the point is that you need to time to understand the community before you start downvoting items.

- Karma count doesn't appear until there's -3 or +3. That eliminates initial biases and "peer pressure" voting for an article starting out. Not ideal, but could work.

- Most of all, we must remember that, if a person is submitting quality, any downvotes they get for any reason is going to be balanced out by a greater amount of upvotes.

No system is perfect, but you need downvotes for quality control. Let those who have more connection to the community do that work if necessary.

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#44

Post by andresvi »

hooande wrote: post #22
mlinsey wrote: post #5

"If I disagree with someone, I won't vote up. If I really disagree with someone, I'll post a rejoinder comment." I haven't been here very long but I've thought that expressing disagreement isn't the purpose of a downvote at all. Instead, it's meant to indicate that a post detracts from the discussion and probably shouldn't have been posted to begin with. Using downvotes to express disagreement would only result in di…

As an example: There was a post about the birthday of the user edw159. Some people thought that the post wasn't hacker "newsworthy" and others thought it was ok. I commented "I think edw159 is one of the more active members and recognizing his birthday is ok" and I was downvoted pretty far. I think my comment was appropriate and it added meaningfully to the conversation, but a lot of people downvoted it to (I assume)…

I’ve noticed the same reaction. I’ve posted some comments that disagreed with others and I got downvoted – so it is really discouraging to disagree. I think that the solution here could be that next to karma there is courage section for people who are not afraid to disagree. There should also be something like “Karma Court” where respected guys from YC community decide if the post that got downvoted was plain stupid/disrespectful or just disagreeing. The members of Karma Court should bee respected fans of YC - motivation to become karma judges could be even bigger respect and recognition from other community members. What do you think of that?

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#45

Post by gscott »

xlnt wrote: post #16

i can testify that getting mass downmodding for saying something unpopular was common about 9 months ago. it seems the same to me now.

There is a general bias of HN and if you fall out of the range of that bias then you will for sure be downvoted. I believe that is because many of the users are very young and are not mature enough to value different ideals. You have to coddle them and not shake them up very much.

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#47

Post by gojomo »

bayareaguy wrote: post #40
gojomo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG once before weighed in with "it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement" [1]. But, the mixing of the "quality" axis with an "agree/disagree" axis risks coarsening discussion. A disagree-downvote is mildly censorious: it lowers a comment's placement and docks the commenter's karma. It stings. I don't want to downvote comments simply because I disagree, but if such comments are highly-placed because…

The mixing of the "quality" axis with an "agree/disagree" axis risks coarsening discussion. I think in practice there are only three useful situations: - you post a good comment, and I agree - you post a good comment, but I disagree - you post a bad comment I think we all want a scheme where I can reward you in the first two situations and punish you in the last one. Unfortunately what we seem to be getting is one th…

I can agree with a comment and not want to karma-reward it, if it's mundane or repetitive. That might even go so far as to agree with the sentiment but find the comment of punishable quality, a sort of "OK but enough already".

The idea of weighing ratings from commenters in the same thread more highly is interesting.

Discouraging votes-without-reading and allowing quick corrections, as with comment text, both make sense to me too.

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#48

Post by gojomo »

menloparkbum wrote: post #38
gojomo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG once before weighed in with "it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement" [1]. But, the mixing of the "quality" axis with an "agree/disagree" axis risks coarsening discussion. A disagree-downvote is mildly censorious: it lowers a comment's placement and docks the commenter's karma. It stings. I don't want to downvote comments simply because I disagree, but if such comments are highly-placed because…

I downvoted you because I can't stand it when people use footnote notation in a posting that is only 1/5 of a page long.

URLs inline look crappy:

News.YC as yet has no syntax for linking from text as in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Li... Wikipedia] or [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode]BBCode[/url] or [Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown).

News.YC also doesn't follow the recommendation of appendix C of RFC3986 http://www.rfc.net/rfc3986.html> with regard to angle-brackets as URL-delimiters -- and it even inserted that stray semicolon.

Hence the footnotes even in tiny comments... they look nicer, not breaking the flow of the writing so much.

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#49

Post by mlinsey »

babul wrote: post #29
hooande wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example: There was a post about the birthday of the user edw159. Some people thought that the post wasn't hacker "newsworthy" and others thought it was ok. I commented "I think edw159 is one of the more active members and recognizing his birthday is ok" and I was downvoted pretty far. I think my comment was appropriate and it added meaningfully to the conversation, but a lot of people downvoted it to (I assume)…

Initially you may worry about karma (as I did too) but we have to realise it does not exist (and that it does not matter)! I now appreciate down votes and see it as a way for the community to 'teach me' (not in a negative way par se but as a guiding/helping hand) in the simplest way possible. :)

That brings up an interesting idea - karma is used to rank stories and comments, and make sure more interesting content is more visible. But the "game" aspect of karma (trying to make the top posters list, trying to appear a the top of threads) probably encourages some unhelpful behavior.

If users really shouldn't care about their karma, would the site be served better by not making karma visible at all, for users or for comments? You could keep upvotes and downvotes, and even let users know their own karma and how their own comments are rated (so they know when their contributions are being rewarded), but their would be no high-score table of top users, and users would only be able to guess at a post or a comments karma based on where it appears on the page.

This would take away the motivation some people have to contribute high-quality comments - I'm not sure whether the net result would be positive or negative.

Part of this discussion needs to include a serious discussion of what this site's core goals are. If this site were a web startup that needed to get high traffic, than a game-like system that gets posters addicted to writing comments to try and boost their karma makes sense. If the site is more about making sure it has the highest quality content possible for its original niche target audience, than that would make this approach less appropriate.

Re: Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

#50

Post by xenoterracide »

gojomo wrote: post #48
menloparkbum wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because I can't stand it when people use footnote notation in a posting that is only 1/5 of a page long.

URLs inline look crappy: News.YC as yet has no syntax for linking from text as in [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Li... Wikipedia] or [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode ]BBCode[/url] or [Markdown]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown ). News.YC also doesn't follow the recommendation of appendix C of RFC3986 http://www.rfc.net/rfc3986.html&#62 ; with regard to angle-brackets as URL…

I hate foot notes period... unless their are links to them... and links back. They aren't so bad in books... (but still suck there) but in web pages they drive me nuts.
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