It's interesting how much such an utterly irrelevant thing annoys me. There's really no reason why accidentally making a number increase by one should matter, but I suppose it's the fact that the site is falsely representing it as a deliberate action by me.

There isn’t “really no reason” why it’s annoying; it’s exactly as you said: the site is falsely representing your upvote as a deliberate action. And your action changes a number, labeled “kudos”, seen by all future visitors to the page, so your action ends up implying endorsement of the page to future visitors. That’s why the kudos feature annoys me – it falsely represents the page to be popular, but rather than just completely making up a number of kudos like a normal liar, it ties the number of kudos to the actions of unwitting page visitors. That gives the author plausible deniability that it’s possible that that many people really did like the page, though in fact that is very unlikely.

It's not irrelevant. It's a design decision that punishes curiosity with unwanted and nonundoable actions. What else is the site going to do on my behalf because of something as simple as parking my mouse on the wrong part of the screen or in this case hovered over a nonintuitive button expecting some hover text to tell me what it is?

I did that once awhile back. I didn't know what the little bulls-eye was for. When I hovered over it, it said don't move. I was expecting some silly thing to happen (like when the bottom of a Kickstarter page gets cut off). There is no indication that what I was doing was "up-voting" a stupid blog post. Possibly one of the dumbest features ever.

That's an interesting UX decision since I'm pretty sure you could undo Kudos on the previous version of Svbtle years ago.

Are non-undoable likes the logical progression to the likes-only-no-dislikes method of social media validation?

I don't think they ever had an undo feature. I remember when the platform was first introduced... people complained about it then too. Plus I'm pretty sure it's only been around for ~<2 years.

I remember trying it when it was popular and after mistakenly giving a kudo I could "undo" it by clicking the same icon.

He talks about it here http://dcurt.is/unkudo

wow. he sound like a bit of a... well I'm not sure what that makes him but it feels like something I don't want my kids to be.

Wow. If it's so irrelevant, why put it there?

He is obviously intelligent enough to know that people don't think the number is meaningless. My guess is that he was just too lazy to add the undo, and also takes a small amount of pleasure in seeing people get annoyed at something he thinks they shouldn't get annoyed. Not the end of the world, and he actually does have a small point (accidentally incrementing a "kudos" count is not really something to get bothered over). But with the pretentious blog post, his underlying douchiness reveals itself.

Same here - I went looking because of your comment and then accidentally kudo'd it.

Wow, that's obnoxious. Just leaving your mouse over the "button" is enough to activate it.

Some blame goes to javascript and the DOM (mouseover should not an event IMO), but this is a truly obnoxious feature.

I forgot why I don't click links to svbtle but thanks HN for reminding me why :)

I agree, but isn't this an HN problem too, with upvotes? (If it's possible to un-up or down vote a story or comment on HN, please someone tell me how!)

HN's UI gives you a much stronger hint of what the controls do.

You cannot undo an upvote (you can unflag posts and articles though). This is particularly a problem when using HN on mobile devices where distinguishing up and down votes is all but impossible. I'll often make multiple wrong clicks trying to navigate to a link or vote on an item. It's frustrating.

Subtle's interface is doubly deceptive: it lies to the user and it misrepresents the consequences of those lies. Makes me lose a lot of trust and faith in the product, actually. As well as those who use it.

Funny how things brand you.

HN doesn’t let you un-upvote something either, but you need to un-upvote something on HN far less often than on Svbtle. On Svbtle, it is very easy to accidentally “kudos” a post, because all you have to do is move your mouse over the kudos circle, and the site doesn’t warn you that doing so will trigger a kudos. On HN, at least you have to click a button-looking thing to trigger the non-undoable action of upvoting.