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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)

#441

Post by Blikkentrekker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #103
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on comments. — what purpose does it serve? I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong nor easily disagreed with, and thus incurring the most upvotes from simply being quick to read.

> I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on comments. — what purpose does it serve? It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise. > I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that…

> It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.

No, it provides feedback as to what the community wishes to see as to better help those who care conform to it.

Absolutely useless, unimaginative comments that contribute nothing and state the obvious are seldom downvoted, so long as they not voice anything that disagrees with the voterbase, and may even be upvoted.

> I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.

I went through your own list of comments and could find some greyed out comments that really had no business being greyed out and downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815734

This is not noise, this is something someone disagreed with, for reasons I don't understand.

I've seen quite a fair bit of greyed out comments on H.N. that were accurate and informative, as the comments that truly do not belong are most likely removed by the moderators to begin with.

I believe that comments are most likely to be upvoted by users when they say something the user already agrees with without thinking, as such something that tells him nothing new. — the end result is that the least informative, most obvious comments tend to be the most upvoted.

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

#442

Post by smichel17 »

grawprog wrote: post #392
Hiopl wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (a…

I think the problem when it comes down to it is there's generally more than one kind of comment as well as more than one kind of reason someone downvotes. You've got your objective factual comment Your subjective factual comment And your opinion based comment. I'm probably missing some. These can all be combined sometimes into one comment. Then you've got your reasons for downvoting. Disagreeing Factually incorrect W…

I haven't used it for a while, but imgur's old voting system was quite nice, I think. There was no downvote on the post itself, but instead you could upvote any number of tags on the post. So, for example, if I felt your post was factually incorrectly, I could add a "factually incorrect" tag (or add my +1 if the tag already existed). This was only for posts though, not comments.

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

#443

Post by ford_x »

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…

I don't see how absence of downvote button helps. Popular topics without moderation get flooded with garbage sooner or later.

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

#444

Post by krageon »

Hiopl wrote: post #289
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 (a…

> endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive

If you habitually find yourself on the receiving end of this it's worth re-examining why you think it's not offensive and if it looks like everyone else actually agrees with you. To a certain extent you are correct: It is to be expected that when you say something that's too "nice" you get a ton of downvotes (and the same goes for something too "rough", probably), that's just how things are. On balance though, you get so many more upvotes for constructive posts on issues that aren't loaded at all (or where your opinion is so centrist you don't post anything controversial) that it ends up not mattering.

I'll allow that none of this applies when you are an extremist, but to my mind being an extremist means that unfortunately a lot of what you say will be offensive. That loops back to the beginning of my post :)

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

#445

Post by krageon »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #378
tirrex wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." Can we use flags for this purpose? Problem is even though a comment does not violate any rule, it gets down-voted as hell if you say something that majority of people would not like. e.g there are posts about hyped programming languages, go check out down-voted comments, most of them does not deserve to be d…

As someone who gets downvoted probably more than average, I don't agree with you. Downvotes are the least problematic way for people to tell me they have some problem with my comment and minimizes the fallout from me having to try to navigate gender politics as part of the mix. It would be vastly worse for men to only be able to express sexist garbage by openly attacking me and trying to find some plausible excuse fo…

I was struggling to respond to the GP in a way that explains it well, so it's fair to say that it's impressive you did. Thanks :)

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

#446

Post by Blikkentrekker »

rrradical wrote: post #407
jldl805 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for the person you are talking to but this site has much less tolerance for deviation from cultural norms - which is both a good and bad thing. Compared to even niche subreddits there is much less room for "freewheeling" (can't think of a better term for it) comments. It has costs but what for what you pay, you gain in a more serious and sober environment.

Wow, I think my experience has been different. Redditors seem to pile on a 'wrong' opinion and downvote to oblivion, whereas HN seems more evenhanded to me. I'm sure it depends on the subreddit though.

Reddit does not pœnalize one for downvotes to the same extent.

On Reddit, if one's all time score be negative, one is throttled to one post per 10 minutes.

H.N. throttles to five posts per day if one's recent comments are negative I believe the number is that I've read.

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

#447

Post by krageon »

jcpham2 wrote: post #196
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…

Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having intellectual discussions on the open internet. That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like. I h…

For what it's worth, I would normally downvote this post because it essentially opens with "I'm absolutely right", goes straight into "I will be downvoted" and closes with "I don't need attention". What is the point of that? All that you've come here to say is apparently that you don't need to be read and you're successful regardless of what anyone thinks. Great, I'm happy for you. What value have you added to this conversation? You're not helping on an emotional level and intellectually I'm really struggling to see the insight I'm supposed to be deriving from this as well.

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

#448

Post by marrs »

rcurry wrote: post #311
Hiopl wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (a…

I agree with you 100%, I love HN and have been here for years but the downvoting feature disgusts me. Either allow a post or don’t, but this weird “fading” of someone’s post just because some people don’t agree with what someone has to say strikes me as petty and cheap. HN should be bigger than that.

Couldn’t agree more. I also find it rude for other people to presume I need to be told what to read.

And this regardless of the fact that downvoted comments are often more nuanced and interesting than the content surrounding them

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

#449

Post by krageon »

downandout wrote: post #252
ascar wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember you because of the about me. I was reading a somewhat controversial comment from you and then visited your account page probably to check for sibling comments in the same post. Your about me definitely changed how I feel about your comments and probably the source of your recent experience.

My about me is based upon my experience here over the last few years. I updated it at some point in the last 6 months, long after all this started. So it is a symptom of my experience here, not a cause.

It being based on your experience doesn't change the fact that it looks like it was written for the explicit purpose of getting under people's skin. Essentially, the responses you are getting (here) are the ones you are angling for.

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

#450

Post by wombatmobile »

grawprog wrote: post #411
jorvi wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that would still happen in an upvote-only system. The 'good' comments would float to the top and the 'bad' ones would stay low in the threads and sub-threads. To be honest, I feel the most damaging in the HN voting system is the greying out of comments. It often leads to bandwagoning where if a comment even goed to 0, some people just blindly ram the downvote button because someone already (visually) decided for…

True, the greying out does tend to have this effect, then again, sometimes I see a greyed comment I agree with that I think was downvoted unfairly and upvote it where I likely would have just read their comment and not upvoted had it not been grey. I forget sometimes when I'm just scrolling through to be honest. But, I do agree, systems with upvotes only works sometimes, it seems to depend though. On one forum I post…

There's a temporal dimension to downvoting too.

I notice sometimes a comment goes negative quickly. If it sinks to -3 then it is probably doomed, but if it only goes to -2 or less it can rise up again, if it has some form of logic that enough people can see, and isn't just a dumb or offensive comment.

Presumably the first two downvotes of a nuanced but serious comment sometimes lead to mindless followers taking it down to -2, which is a quick pile-on, but by then, it has reached enough views that it may be counterbalanced by people of the opposite view upvoting.

I have occasionally seen comments go back to positive from -3 too, although it is rare. These are invariably comments which state an uncommon position, which look like an unpopular trope, but which can be decoded by knowledgeable people who think it through and upvote.

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