> It was right after someone downvoted me because pointed out something that broke with their opinion.

It took you 8 years to realize that's how that place operates? Hell, that describes the culture on HN pretty well.

Freewheeling downvoting was a flawed idea from the beginning. 20 years later it turns out Slashdot had the right model for moderation.

I've never used Slashdot, how is the moderation model superior?

Instead of a plain up- and downvotes, you rated a given comment with one of several positives (insightful, interesting, funny, informative) or negatives (troll, flamebait, offtopic)

The best part was you could set your personal filters to exclude “funny” comments, or boost “offtopic” ones if you want. With thresholds! So the funniest stuff could still break through, but you didn’t have to wade through a million pun posts to find the serious comments.

They also have a metamoderation system where others’ moderation choices are shown to you and you agree or disagree.

Never seen another site like it. Kinda hope /. makes a resurgence.

And it would show the sum of the +1 and -1 votes, and the most applied label, e.g. (+3, Informative).

I have to say the most enjoyable comments were often those that got to +5 but with a negative label, like (+5, Flamebait).

If I remember correctly, you also couldn’t moderate on posts that you had commented on so it prevented using downvoting as extra signaling that others agreed with you in an argument. Also, you got 5 moderation points sort of randomly, you didn’t have the option to always be moderating. I browse Slashdot occasionally but once I found HN, the topics and discourse interested me here more, haven’t really spent much time there in years.

Thanks. I forgot about the 5-at-a-time thing! But now I remember the tiny delight when I was entrusted with that little clutch of power. I “spent” them wisely.

And this is another thing I think made that mod system good. Only so many points available.

It used to be 10-at-a-time. And you could game the system by moderating 'underrated' or 'overrated' which were never metamoderated iirc.

Man, I haven't been on Slashdot in like 15 years. My username has four characters. To give you an idea how long ago that was.

You're right, it was a pretty good way to do moderation. As in everything with software, what old is new, right?

I only have a 5 digit Slashdot ID, but I remember the early days. I really, really liked /. back in the day. I don't remember what happened to drive me away but going back now the content seems to be very similar to what's on the HN front page now. However, there's something about the look and feel that is off-putting to me. Maybe its the fonts or the stuck in the 00's design.

IIRC, they also limit the base scores from - 1 to +5, while only giving people a limited number of points to distribute. It helped avoid what you see on reddit sometimes where a comment gets piled on for no reason.

Also -- people would randomly be given moderation points, and you only had so many at a time. I think people's chance of getting moderation points was weighted by how 'good' of a community member you were (account age, participation in moderation, metamoderation 'agreement')

Soylentnews also exists based on the slashdot source, and uses the same/similar moderation.

It’s crazy that slashdots moderation and meta moderation didn’t spring up elsewhere, but it was probably too complicated for what most people want out of a voting system.

I wouldn't say HN is as bad as reddit, with the mob mentality downvoting. At least on HN, some people show signs of taking a moment to think.

Of course, I realized that for years, however, and now I’m realizing maybe I should quit hackernews as well

I've always felt the downvote option was a colossal mistake and just allowed controversial or unpopular points of view to disappear, strengthening the filter effect for everything else.

I mean even 4chan doesn't have downvote functionality, if people disagree with you they'll just call you a f* or n* which, while nasty, doesn't actually change visibility of your post, plus only the admins can ban you or delete a post, not jumped-up mods, and frankly you'd have to be pretty extreme on there to earn that.

But 4chan is also a complete cesspit. Like any place that adopts "free speech absolutist" attitudes. Reddit's heyday is long passed, but at least it is still very useful for grassroots information amalgamation. If you've ever had to google some issue, typing reddit into the query will land you some posts with discussion in them. Good luck finding that on 4chan.

there's a few semi-shady things that 4chan does better than anywhere else though. like finding pdfs for rpgs. not to say it's not a pit, cess or otherwise, but there's a good few nuggets swimming around in there.

It is a cesspit but for broadening perspectives it is much much better than reddit, even with less structure of discussions and worse discoverability.

"free speech absolutism" wasn't ever a huge problem, on the contrary, the suggested alternatives always seem to end up worse.

You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.

> You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.

The main issue with that is that it assumes anyone on the internet is arguing anything in good faith. Boosting checkmarks has turned twitter to nearly unusable to actually unusable, because the signal to noise ratio on the replies from checkmarks tend to be somewhere on the factually provable incorrect to outright slurs spectrum. Expecting any better on 4chan of all places will be a a fruitless endeavor more akin to self-harm. If you don't want to wade through shit, maybe don't have your discussions in a sewer.

HN, while not perfect, will often be a place that cultivates some rare insight.

There is no trivial way to detect motivation, on the contrary leveraging the accusation of someone arguing in bad faith is usually seen as ending an intellectual exchange.

To be realistic, this can be that case, especially on the net, and there are ways you can make an educated guess. But it stays a guess and in the end I want to do the guessing myself. It cannot be outsourced aside from the most trivial cases like spam, advertising, etc.

That aside people with a foul mouth might use words differently while others people might receive it as a slur. We now have words that have much more might than they had before with the better approach to such issues.

This seems very naive to me. There are enough people yelling "OK Groomer" at me on certain platforms that I know the signal to noise ratio is bad enough that engaging is at best a waste of time and at worst getting more soundbites than I could possibly debunk, so I lose the optics part of the debate by default.

See "Never Play Defense" from the alt-right playbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA

And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has a tendency to devolve into calling authors of posts deranged (or deranged, but with nicer choice of words) more for their identity and politics rather than the words they wrote, as was the case with Alyssa Rosenzweig's article being posted a few weeks ago.

It simply isn't viable to assume good faith for everyone. I often (unwiesely) get into fights with transphobes that I shouldn't, and I had maybe 2 insightful well-reflected discussions over the past 10 years. Sometimes they'll complement me on not fitting their expectation of an "SJW" (which is, presumably, a screaming child), but then go on to call me a slur anyway. And when I say slur, I am very positive that this is the right classification. Unambiguously.

I recommend the entire Alt-Right playbook series, in fact. A lot of these concepts are not limited to the alt-right and are often used incidentally by everyone, but it is important to know when you have no chance at rhetoric overcoming... anything. I guess sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen, especially in a post-fact world.

I agree, downvoting is a bad idea across the board for silencing people that are not in the majority group-think. You don't even have to have a reason to down vote someone.

Do you think Hacker News should get rid of downvoting?

Im not sure, it doesnt seem as bad on hacker news. I agree its really bad on reddit though.

What I find interesting is that on HN, downvoting doesn't seem to have a negative impact, not as much as Reddit anyway. And I wonder if that's because folks who use HN really care about HN - I do - and make a good-faith, concerted effort to contribute in a positive way, with moderators who will enforce rules, but will not remove posts they disagree with (Reddit), or mandate arbitrary and inconsistent standards (Reddit).

We are experiencing almost a reverse Library of Alexandria of House of Wisdom moment. The people are Boston Tea Partying their own contributions, destroying the value by using scripts to delete all their comments. As sad is it is to see the platform go to shit over time, I feel a poetic peace along with my bittersweet sadness to see such a loss of information, all at once. In some sense there is no undoing this week, even if the blackout ends. As they say in The Worlds End, “for the greater good.”

>Groupthink circle jerks Hate to say it, but fleshy meatbag humans love this stuff on and off line. Our species is evolutionarily motivated to group up.

It's completely undeniable, societal progress regardless. We still do it all day every day, some worse than others.