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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)

#451

Post by CM30 »

aeternum wrote: post #414
coding123 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time I see downvotes with no replies it means the person generally disagrees. I upvoted you by the way :)

I think sites would benefit from having more rich voting options, for example: agree but weak-argument, disagree but well-stated, changed my view, etc. Would yield some more interesting ways to sort and rank comments.

So basically, like Facebook Reactions and those post ratings plugins you can get for various forum scripts now.

Yeah, I think that would work. Especially if 'disagree' is a neutral reaction rather than a negative one, so downvoting for disagreement stops being a thing.

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

#452

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ryandrake wrote: post #136
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. SoylentNews goes one step further, and adds +0 agree and -0 disagree . I'm not sure if such votes have any real effect.

I love the idea of +0 for Agree and -0 for Disagree. A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it. Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious. Leave actual negative scores for low quality things like spam, flamebait and harassment.

> A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it.

It almost goes without saying, but that's how just about all online communities say the upvote/downvote buttons are to be used. Unfortunately no online community can be trusted to be mature enough to actually follow the rules. Not even HackerNews manages to robustly resist the downvoting of dissenting opinions.

> Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious.

That's an interesting idea, to my knowledge SoylentNews doesn't implement this. Having a two dimensional score, one for quality and one for popularity, might be effective in getting people not to abuse the quality feedback system.

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

#453

Post by gwbas1c »

latortuga wrote: post #90
gwbas1c wrote: post #74

I don't know if these are popular opinions or not: 1: I really wish I could downvote Hacker News articles. 2: I really wish there was some friction to downvoting. Perhaps something like choosing among: disagree, factually wrong, mean, incoherent Regarding the downvoting of articles: For awhile I used to see a regular pattern of weird articles on the front page. The discussion would then predictably involve a mod defe…

Didn't slashdot have a feature kind of like this? Reasons why something was upvoted or downvoted alongside their score.

Yeah, that's the one thing I miss from Slashdot while I'm here.

I think it still has the feature... I just haven't used Slashdot enough over the past few years to moderate.

But, one of the things I like here is that you can vote in the same thread that you're posting in. (IE, I upvoted you because you reminded me where my idea came from.)

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

#454

Post by Banana699 »

pessimizer wrote: post #215
ryandrake wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit. The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the most. The assumption of good intention on the part of someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on,…

> Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1. This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.

>low-effort troll comments

This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.

Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

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

#455

Post by clairity »

diob wrote: post #416
clairity wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ‘I've come to just avoid commenting anything like this that might get "hive minded" into oblivion.’ that’s exactly when you should be commenting, otherwise the community is lulled into false conformity. contentious topics require more diversity of thought and more considered words, not less. internet points don’t matter, just the food for thought that comes with broader discussions.

I know, that's why I'm suggesting it be tied to commenting. No comment, no voting down available. The reason why I don't bother as much anymore is I assume if my overall points get too low, I probably get shadow banned (I can comment, but no one will ever see it, or something to that effect).

one of the neat little things about slashdot was that voting included a short reason, like 'insightful', 'funny', 'redundant', or 'offtopic'. then as a user, you had some control over the visibility of comments based on those standard evaluations. that seems more viable to me than requiring a full comment on each downvote (though i like the idea in principle), which would likely devolve into these one-word evaluations as comments anyway.

i wouldn't worry about getting shadowbanned unless you're constantly posting thoughtless and provocative craziness (which doesn't seem likely based on a very quick perusal of your comment history). i read with showdead on and find very few accounts being shadowbanned, and those that are continuously and blatantly violate hn rules (nevermind common courtesy).

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

#457

Post by joquarky »

noizejoy wrote: post #314
benlivengood wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slashdot got popular and the insightful comments got drowned out by Funny+5 because it's low effort karma building that feels like being popular. I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into otherwise useful comments on HN.

My memory is fuzzy on my slashdot days, but wasn’t there a way to filter the funny suff?

I vaguely recall that there was a way for each user to set a bias for each moderation tag, so you could put -5 on the "Funny" tag and effectively hide them (or at least move them to the bottom of the comments).

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

#458

Post by coding123 »

aeternum wrote: post #414
coding123 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time I see downvotes with no replies it means the person generally disagrees. I upvoted you by the way :)

I think sites would benefit from having more rich voting options, for example: agree but weak-argument, disagree but well-stated, changed my view, etc. Would yield some more interesting ways to sort and rank comments.

Build it and they will come.

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

#459

Post by wvenable »

dmos62 wrote: post #432
wvenable wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

You might not mind peopling posting about quality of your contribution but it's a terrible discussion for everybody else. Nobody cares.

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

#460

Post by tptacek »

krapp wrote: post #388
dang wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a problem. I'm often as much as a couple days behind in looking through flagged comments. I think if we build any more software around banning/penalties, it might be some kind of probation system, i.e. a series of temporary bans, maybe with exponential backoff, and with permanent bannage only as an end state. I can think of reasons why it might work better, including: (1) humans tend to do well with feed…

The ability to ban people from specific threads might be a good idea.

The reason you'd create the ability to ban someone from a thread is so you can more freely apply feedback --- ie, soft ban more people. Which would probably just lead to a lot of litigation on threads about whether people should or shouldn't be banned from them. A virtue of the current system is that it's very rare to come across a comment that suggests someone should be banned instantly --- so nobody has that expectation.
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