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An Update on Hacker News

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Re: An Update on Hacker News

#91

Post by chimeracoder »

dang wrote: post #69
rspeer wrote: post #37

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user. Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges remo…

As other users have pointed out, to flag a comment you have to click on 'link' to go to the comment's item page [1]. I don't know why PG designed it this way but have always assumed it was a speed bump to reduce impulsive flagging, since flags are more powerful than downvotes. We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is all too familiar over here. 1. https://hn.algolia.co…

> We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is intimately familiar to us, I assure you.

Is it possible to either allow people to upvote a comment they have previously downvoted (or vice versa), or at least to undo an accidental upvote/downvote?

Especially on mobile devices, the margin of error here is very low, and I know I have accidentally downvoted a comment that I meant to upvote.

(In addition, I know some people may upvote/downvote a long comment before they have finished reading the entire text. This probably isn't behavior that should be encouraged or catered to, which is why allowing people to change their mind on votes[0] may be overkill. But at least allowing people to revoke an incorrect upvote/downvote might mitigate this effect.)

[0] ie, the way Reddit does

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#92

Post by logicallee »

maxerickson wrote: post #42
logicallee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your name is bad for the site and you should change it. nomen est omen.

Repeatedly breaking threads by deleting your comments after there are replies is worse. So is threatening to delete your comments over down votes.

I delete comments to keep the site clean and on-topic, and not too argumentative. It's not 'threatening to delete my comments over downvotes' it's 'agreeing to withdraw a comment if it's too controversial.' (i.e. downvotes, no replies.) Not every thought needs to be voiced. Also, your feedback may have been better directed to my email, I do list one.

An example of where I recently deleted a comment was in response to this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569545 where my opinion was actively solicited. However, I decided that the reply to it sent the thread in a wrong direction, and also could be read without my reply. I looked instead for the person's email who had asked, but he didn't list one so I ended up deleting my comment. In effect I was saying that on reflection I chose not to comment on the linked essay in that thread.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#93

Post by hackuser »

lotharbot wrote: post #66
hackuser wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment I hope downvoting has nothing to do with agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated). I want to see many more comments that are valuable and challenge the community (and challenge my thinking too). The groupthink is already well known and if not, will certa…

pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.) I generally don't unless the disagreement has another value-subtracting component (lack of substance, poor reasoning/phrasing, factual errors, unnecessary incivility.) For disagreeable but worthwhile comments, I prefer responding instead. But I recognize the value in having differences of opini…

> pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.)

What value does this provide to the reader? Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth, IMHO, and provides little marginal value, because I already know what it is and it's easy to find. In fact, I wouldn't read HN if all I found was the groupthink -- I gain far more from new or challenging ideas.

EDIT: When Amy up/downvotes, it is for the benefit of Bob and other readers. Amy receives little benefit besides maybe a little emotional satisfaction. If the vote mainly was for Amy's benefit, HN wouldn't need her vote to impact anyone else's threads -- we all could have personalized, independent scores for each comment. What benefit do I, Bob, receive if Amy is just voting on what she agrees/disagrees with?

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#94

Post by readerrrr »

vacri wrote: post #71
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad. I don't think this is true. Given that downvoted comments become faded, I have a strong reason to believe that the intent is to hide them because they are actually bad

It only takes a single person disagreeing with you to fade your comment.

That is also a problem. One downvote later and the comment is immediately biased toward future readers.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#95

Post by lmm »

maxerickson wrote: post #42
logicallee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your name is bad for the site and you should change it. nomen est omen.

Repeatedly breaking threads by deleting your comments after there are replies is worse. So is threatening to delete your comments over down votes.

People respond to incentives; the whole point of HN karma is to incentivize people to increase it. So I don't think we can blame people for deleting downvoted comments (when they tend to lose more karma if they don't)

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#96

Post by peterwwillis »

jonnathanson wrote: post #54
readerrrr wrote: post #14

If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments. But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment? My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't a…

"If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments." In theory, no, downvoting is not supposed to be used to disagree. It's supposed to be used to move "stupid" comments (inarticulate, illogical, poorly argued, etc.) down towards the bottom of the screen. Flagging, on the other hand, is meant to call out wildly inappropriate, offensi…

There is no particular purpose for HN downvotes other than to express dislike. It's not needed to move 'stupid' comments down, because only 'non-stupid' comments rise up. The comments which are never voted on have no intrinsic value, so they might as well be stupid anyway.

I wasn't even aware of flagging on comments until someone mentioned it, and to be honest it's so inconvenient i'd probably never do it. Downvote is an easy enough way for me to say "I don't like this" and it helps reinforce the group dynamic, which is what they want (this whole post is about manipulating group dynamics).

The only way to fix downvoting is to put an express purpose behind it, like a button that says "I disagree" next to a button that says "I dislike" next to a button that says "Inappropriate comment". But for some reason forum admins always prefer generic feedback which give rise to unexpected behavior. Heh, it probably keeps people upset, which reinforces user engagement.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#97

Post by jacquesm »

logicallee wrote: post #29
angersock wrote: post #8

A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change. Good to hear they decided to roll that back. PG opened a pandora's box when he said that d…

your name is bad for the site and you should change it. nomen est omen.

Nothing wrong with his name (or his comments).

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#98

Post by jonnathanson »

tptacek wrote: post #73
jonnathanson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments." In theory, no, downvoting is not supposed to be used to disagree. It's supposed to be used to move "stupid" comments (inarticulate, illogical, poorly argued, etc.) down towards the bottom of the screen. Flagging, on the other hand, is meant to call out wildly inappropriate, offensi…

That's a reasonable take on what downvoting is for, but the HN take is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement.

Interesting. At first I thought, wait a minute, isn't "don't downvote to disagree" in the HN Guidelines? Then I checked, and no, it isn't. The guidelines talk about downvoting ("downmodding") very briefly, and only to say that one shouldn't complain when it happens to him or her. There are no guidelines on how or why to downvote.

Maybe this is a problem, in and of itself? Seems different people have different takes on the use case for downvoting.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#100

Post by thaumaturgy »

minimaxir wrote: post #24
danielweber wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you see the scores of comments? I only see the points of my own comments.

Comment scores are visible to the Algolia API after a period of time. Otherwise, the API returns a "null" for the points field. (example: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/2921983 ) This is apparently unintended, as the official API has no points field. (example: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2921983.json?prin... )

Oh, interesting. I stopped indexing HN comments after the points data became unavailable (it was still available through the Octopart guys' api, until Algolia took over). It looks like comment scores start showing up around the 30 day mark.
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