But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.
And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.
What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?
I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.
Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).
IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.
[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.
OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.
Your comment says:
> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great
My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.
It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.
For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.
Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.
That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.
That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.
And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.
But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.
That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.
I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.
This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.
If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.
The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.
This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.
I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.
Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth it.
I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting this comment, haha.
The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.
Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.
With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.
A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.
(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)
Way to prove his point internet rando's.
I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.
In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.
Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.
With down votes: -60 Without: 10
Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.
With down votes: 0 Without: 10
Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.
With down votes: 9 Without: 10
Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.
With down votes: -960 without: 20
Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!
Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.
For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.
I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.
Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.
Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.
Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.
[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.
When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.
Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.
And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.
A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.
If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.
edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.
Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.
Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.
Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.
...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless it's Friday.
But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used.
If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.
Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.
Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.
(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)
If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the majority you probably won't have experienced this.
I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.
I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the comment somewhat valuable.
Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news, but the problem is the same.
The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].
[0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to get the vote.
Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed. (although plenty people think it should)
This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it, and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the conversation.
I assumed the latter, because those places tend to be places worth sticking around, and because this is definitely where HN falls in.
I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on reddit? All day every day.
Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good comment/discussion/disagreement.
On Reddit though, it’s the standard.
Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or "hateful". Or banned.
Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit accounts.
This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.
If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.
Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.
But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.
Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.
"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."
I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.
It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.
The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.
Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.
There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.
Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.
No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.
My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than just participating in it.
Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does.
Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):
FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very basic logical flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies. Downvotes aren't just a tool to enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I intended.
I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.
But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.
Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).
Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's definitely the norm on Reddit.
My experience on HN is that it desperately hangs on the words you choose and the threads you visit. The lower the barrier to entry (social subjects for example) the more delicate and convergent things become.
I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.
> Why would I participate in that?
This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!