Personally I'd prefer if comments displayed upvotes and downvotes as separate tallies instead of a total. It means something very different if a post as a lot of up and down votes that sum to about zero or if it has no votes at all.
The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
61–70 of 475 posts
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#62I think one obvious problem with downvoting where downvotes automatically hide content is that it creates echo chambers. The downvote button is definitely a 'disagree' button here and I think it's not really conducive to great discussions. Then again, this isn't really a forum - it's transitory comments about the news of the day. Perhaps the argument is that there shouldn't be substantive discussion here in the first…
I’m not sure I agree. I tend to say things that are somewhat controversial on HN, and if I said them in San Francisco I’d be liable to be tarred and feathered, being a Libertarian from Kansas, but I try to be diplomatic and haven’t yet had a comment that’s gotten hidden. I think people are fairly charitable as long as you’re presenting a cogent argument. I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren’t missing…
I think HN does it better than reddit, where the comments are hidden quickly once negative, but I've seen a lot of comments edited based on downvotes as people wonder what, exactly, other users are disagreeing with. Doesn't exactly contribute other than to say 'your opinion is wrong.'
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#63Getting it wrong for 12 years now: The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) 10 Years In, Was He Right? “Value of Downvoting; How HN Gets It Wrong” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 - June 2020 (1 comment) The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…
I'm a huge fan of no downvote button, so much so in fact that I don't think users of any karma level should be able to do it.
Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#64Personally I'd prefer if comments displayed upvotes and downvotes as separate tallies instead of a total. It means something very different if a post as a lot of up and down votes that sum to about zero or if it has no votes at all.
Imgur is a great example of this at work.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#65I think a critical missing context of reposting an old 2009 article is that a newer post in 2011 makes downvotes free instead of costing reputation:
>Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
Why? He saw that users were too hesitant in downvoting which allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site. Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that.
(I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the downvoting system and incentives.)
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#66Reminds me of all those yes people.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#67I just wish you could remove the number next to your name natively in HN. It can't seriously take more than 5 minutes to implement this. There's no excuse IMHO. I want to interact with the site without seeing the number change and wondering why it did.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#68I like the idea of paying to downvote, but also an interesting effect of downvotes is that they skew views of a position. Having one upvote and 100 downvotes is the same as having 401 upvotes and 500 downvotes. Isn't that odd? One is a comment everyone hates and the other is a comment almost half of all people like.
what you're getting at is that both the mean and the variance have information (they're independent variables), which is good to keep in mind. on hn, both of your examples would be at -4 (dead) with no way of differentiating the two.
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#69I initially loved the idea of voting posts up and down. Thanks to seeing how it actually works on SO and here, well, I am not much of a fan anymore. At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down, before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma". Without requiring…
Comment and explain your downvote, you'll likely be downvoted for doing so, or be accused of trying to be a mod, or waste your time explaining yourself to someone who wasn't even interested enough to post a substantial comment in the first place. The main reason I downvote is "low quality comment" which is subjective and I don't want to enter into a debate about arguing that it is against the author arguing that it isn't; it's a voting system, I vote, you vote, we all vote, and a consensus comes from that. I don't want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses", I want it to be my vote among many.
(Or rather, I do want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses, and I want to be able to delete other people's comments", and I recognise that's bad, and that a vote system limits the maximum damage I can do to one vote per comment).
Re: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
#70I initially loved the idea of voting posts up and down. Thanks to seeing how it actually works on SO and here, well, I am not much of a fan anymore. At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down, before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma". Without requiring…
Yeah, I really wish that HN required you to comment in order to downvote. Or even just required that a comment had replies before it could be downvoted; I don't care so much that every single person justifies their downvote as that the person getting downvoted gets an explanation.
That only incentivizes people who have all the time in the world to disagree on the internet. Most users with expertise just don't have that kind of mental-bandwidth to spare. Just as it is not worth your time to get into a verbal argument with flat-earthers, its not worth your time to comment on most posts that you disagree with.