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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)

#431

Post by dmos62 »

rozab wrote: post #235
klyrs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of downvoting, or how Stackexchange gets it wrong about HN's voting system. It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding. If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise t…

It's gross how in the Reddit redesign comment threads longer than a couple levels deep are actually hidden, even if there's only a single thread on the post. Apparently deep discussion is something they now want to discourage.

> Apparently deep discussion is something they now want to discourage.

That might be true, but a more benign explanation is incompetence.

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

#432

Post by dmos62 »

wvenable wrote: post #131
dmos62 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> controversy that has little value or importance to this site What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.

Participants want to discuss politics, current events, sports, etc. But this site is Hacker News and it is for specific subject matter. If you want to discuss off-topic controversies, there's an entire Internet full of sites to have that discussion on.

I've expanded about what I think about this in the neighboring comments. I'd like to ask this though. When you feel that a thread is going off-topic, to the detriment of the forum, please post a comment pointing that out. Others might disagree with you, or they might see your point. What I find really problematic is when a discussion that I care about is flagged without any input. I perceive it as spiteful, because usually it's me having a controversial opinion, and I'm more likely to be spiteful in turn, though of course I try not to be. I don't mind people questioning the quality of my contribution. I actually welcome it, because I care. Just don't reject it off-hand.

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

#433

Post by TeMPOraL »

dmos62 wrote: post #428
TeMPOraL wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem. And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has different niches :). You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.

> HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place. That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom. HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker…

I think we don't differ all that much. I also find the people and quality of discourse the most valuable thing on HN. However, I also claim that these things are not orthogonal to the topics of discussion!

Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discourse gets, and the faster good people leave - it's a feedback loop that quickly grinds a community down to the lowest common denominator.

That's why stable, quality communities either expel (like HN) or contain (like plenty of forums limiting politics to only the Offtopic board) such topics. And it's not like it's a new invention - a lot (possibly most) societies have a long-standing custom that says not to bring up politics and religions in typical conversations between strangers (or at dinner with extended family).

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

#434

Post by [deleted] »

wvenable wrote: post #168
tpmx wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen purely technical discussions being removed from page 1 just because some people really wanted that stuff to go away, and had the power to make it happen.

Where's this technical discussion? Lets see if I agree with you. Because I've seen people totally make up stuff to make a point.

[deleted]

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

#435

Post by thu2111 »

klyrs wrote: post #253
CDRdude wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way to resolve political downvoting today—-new accounts were unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or downvotes having to fit categories like ‘insightf…

I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that. They started a really good thing with…

I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in.

Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc.

I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything.

There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk.

These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.

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

#436

Post by CaptainZapp »

r00fus wrote: post #360
Graffur wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a lot more. You shouldn't be able to downvote replies to your post. Rate limits. Metamoderation. Hell/shadowbanning. Most good forums rely on an active superadmin moderation a lot - when that goes away or is unreliable the site dies.

> There's a lot more. You shouldn't be able to downvote replies to your post.

You're not allowed to do that anyway. You can only upvote direct replies to a comment of yours.

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

#437

Post by dmos62 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #433
dmos62 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place. That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom. HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker…

I think we don't differ all that much. I also find the people and quality of discourse the most valuable thing on HN. However, I also claim that these things are not orthogonal to the topics of discussion! Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discours…

I sympathize. I used to actually choose technologies (up to a point) based on what kinds of discussions were to be had in their IRC channels.

I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.

When I see that a conversation is going south, I try to bring coolheadedness to it, or point out how it could be made better. I think that's the way to a good forum.

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

#438

Post by simias »

r00fus wrote: post #371
simias wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think downvoting is an anti-pattern because it's a negative interaction, and I think negative interactions shouldn't be encouraged if we value high quality discourse. If downvoting bad comments (for any definition of bad) was harder or even outright impossible you'd still have an alternative: upvote an other, better comment to have it shadow what you consider a less valuable contribution. And that's a positive inte…

How do you promote signal over noise without being able to attenuate (downvote) the noise? Trying to outshout the noise results in FB style cacophony.

The main problem with FB IMO is the community, not the moderation tools. I highly doubt that adding downvotes to FB would vastly improve the average quality of the contributions, actually it may well make it worse.

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

#439

Post by jokoon »

I thought about making an aggregator when you can only downvote, so that only "surviving" posts would appear.

In general most users don't upvote because they're not sure they agree with a post or article or really want it to have more visibility.

But I'm betting that most users would prefer to express their disagreement or negative sentiment if it was the only option, and say nothing about things they agree with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminationism

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

#440

Post by TeMPOraL »

dmos62 wrote: post #437
TeMPOraL wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we don't differ all that much. I also find the people and quality of discourse the most valuable thing on HN. However, I also claim that these things are not orthogonal to the topics of discussion! Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discours…

I sympathize. I used to actually choose technologies (up to a point) based on what kinds of discussions were to be had in their IRC channels. I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat. W…

I spent a lot of time in my teenage years on IRC, talking about technology until late hours, so this resonates :).

I think I see what you're getting at, so let me reassure you a bit, and correct for any miscommunication I may have caused:

> But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.

HN doesn't strictly forbid controversial topics. The guidelines[0] outline what is and isn't considered on-topic, provide heuristics for good behavior and pleas to avoid certain bad patterns. They don't say, "these topics will be automatically removed", or "these topics will get you insta-banned". They're just guidelines, a description of what this place should strive for. They work as a Schelling point[1] for individual participants.

So what happens in practice is, when you post a clear-cut intellectually stimulating hacker topic, it'll get upvoted. If it's boring, it'll get ignored. If you post a completely garbage submission, it'll get flagged faster than you can refresh the site. If a topic is on a fence, the balance of upvotes, flags and vouches will lean one way or the other. It's an organic system, but the direction it's leaning is strongly shaped by the guidelines - the one thing everyone knows everyone is expected to know :).

It's also easy to observe that whether or not a given topic stays on the front page or gets quickly flagged out of it isn't just a function of the topic and the source - but also the context (and I think sometimes the timezone). For example, political news aren't very prominent on HN, except when something really big happens, and HN briefly turns into a 24h news station.

And on the controversy itself, the general principle is - it's not the topic being controversial itself that's the problem. The problem is if the discussion around it decays into low-quality bickering. For some topics this is almost a law of nature, so people flag them on sight. But others only get flagged down if and when they evolve into actual flame war.

All in all, I think it's a decent system.

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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

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