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Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#71

Post by mhb »

froo wrote: post #13

As someone who has received a string of downvoted commented recently (admittedly they were warranted given the nature of some of them) I really don't see the problem. Someone disagrees with you and does the initial downvoting, then groupthink kicks in and your score hits the floor. It's a simple fact of life in social media sites (it occurs on many sites with differing communities), this is why PG put in the -8 limit…

Why do you think that the 8th downvote isn't as carefully considered as the first? Maybe the comment really is that worthy of being downvoted.

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#72

Post by psranga »

andreyf wrote: post #25
plinkplonk wrote: post #3

It would be nice if you linked to the actual comments that were down voted instead of to article pages with dozens of comments, where, presumably, the reader has to guess which comment you were referring to.

I thought there were too many comments to link to: Create's and bitdiddle's responses here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720924 This response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720909 Is identical to this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720766 My comments in this entire conversation, also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720569 (at one point, each of mine was <0, now upvoted out of nagativity, t…

Wrt create and bitdiddle, downvote seems like the appropriate response. It appears that create is factually wrong, and bitdiddle was saying something irrelevant about stock price.

Wrt your comments on the 1984-Amazon-copyrights thing, I think you have something there. HN has too many people who think copyright laws are bad. Many here even seem to think that the GPL is bad (see comments on Zed's GPL rant). And many of them feel this very strongly. That's just the community; when you come in here and say that following copyright law is a good thing, to many people it doesn't sound like a reasonable thing to say, it seems like a harmful thing to say. They turn into white blood cells and stamp out the infection. :)

I don't even bother opening the comment pages on GPL and copyright articles anymore. I don't see any light being generated there; only heat.

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#74

Post by Quarrelsome »

scott_s wrote: post #18
Quarrelsome wrote: post #11

Kudos is not about etiquette it's about what motivates people to upvote or downvote and this differs from person to person. Personally I value truth, humour and interesting information. You will note that etiquette isn't part of my up/down voting practice. Other people have different rules. Kudos is a reflection of the community which means that the community is (if we follow your theory) slightly rude. I don't have…

The purpose of karma on HN is to promote civil discussion, not to show agreement or disagreement. Hence, downmodding comments that you disagree with, yet are still valid, runs counter to the system's intended use.

Aye but purpose ain't always what implementation becomes, people game systems. So the utopian ideal is civil discussion but the reality of it is whatever people decide and you can't control the people.

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#75

Post by mhb »

scott_s wrote: post #18
Quarrelsome wrote: post #11

Kudos is not about etiquette it's about what motivates people to upvote or downvote and this differs from person to person. Personally I value truth, humour and interesting information. You will note that etiquette isn't part of my up/down voting practice. Other people have different rules. Kudos is a reflection of the community which means that the community is (if we follow your theory) slightly rude. I don't have…

The purpose of karma on HN is to promote civil discussion, not to show agreement or disagreement. Hence, downmodding comments that you disagree with, yet are still valid, runs counter to the system's intended use.

Maybe that's not the purpose of karma on HN. Maybe the purpose is to assist its users in making judgments about various issues. If a bunch of smart people read a thoughtful comment and indicate their agreement or disagreement via voting, why isn't that useful to someone when forming their own opinion?

As an analogy, consider the issue of global warming. Very few people can invest the time to decide the issue based on primary research. Instead they rely on secondary or tertiary reports, consensus of the scientists involved and their reputations. This is the comment karma system made large.

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#77

Post by phugoid »

indiejade wrote: post #14

It would be very interesting to see a list of the top 50 or so downmodding offenders next to a list of their "karma score" (or whatever it's called here). Even anonymous statistics would be interesting. Some people are just mean because they can be.

It would likewise be interesting to hear what are your thoughts about anonymity and freedom in general.

Should we publicize a list of people who voted for the Canadian Lobster Party, because they obviously did it out of spite and should be punished for their lack of patriotism? Or do the benefits of anonymous voting (or modding, in this instance) outweigh the costs of people who don't take the rules seriously?

There's a little society going on here at HN. If you feel compelled to punish people who stray from the "true path" here, it's probably just a reflection of your greater worldview.

And in a final attempt to be downmodded, let me quote scripture: "He who is true in a little, is true in much; he who is false in small things, is false in great." Luke 16:10

Edit: Typo

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#78

Post by akamaka »

I've had a few comments downmodded, and it sent a clear message: my comment was simply not valuable to the people who read it.

I use downvotes in the same way. There's many factors that contribute to a comment being valuable: factualness is just one of them. Poor commenters defend positions without evidence; try to cast personal feelings as rational arguments; fail to properly read and understand the article; attack an imaginary slight from the parent poster.

In a real conversation, I'm not going to rebut everything disagreeable that you say: sometimes I'll just frown, turn away, shrug, or interupt you. Downmodding is my way of quickly saying that I didn't get anything out of your comment.

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#79

Post by YuriNiyazov »

To be frank, a lot of the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720779 that you made were not "thoughtful comments that people disagreed with". They were sophomoric. I read through most of it, and didn't vote one way or another, but my take away from it was: people kept pointing out some very obvious things, namely that even within the legal framework that is setup by our copyright laws, there's still a very wide berth of behavior that ranges from tolerable to asinine. Even taking the legal copyright framework into account, Amazon behaved asininely, and that is what Bezos was apologizing for. You stuck to your argument about legality even when it no longer made logical sense, which is just a hairline away from trolling.

Re: Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

#80

Post by msluyter »

gaius wrote: post #5

Thoughtful comments that are factually wrong should be downvoted. Seriously. If your code doesn't compile, the compiler doesn't care how much effort it took you to write it...

Few comments are plainly "factually wrong." For one, the facts are often a matter of debate. For two, many comments represent judgments, your own being a perfect example: is the statement "thoughtful comments that are factually wrong should be downvoted" itself evaluable as either "factually wrong" or "factually right?" Only if you believe that the "should" in this case exists independently in the world could you answer yes to that. Then it would be a fact to be discovered. Otherwise, (and most people take this position), we can agree on the facts and disagree on the "should."

So it goes with most prescriptive uses of the word "should," actually.

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