I believe downvoting a comment that I disagree with is often far better for HN than expressing my passionate "well informed" opinion. Downvoting prevents my inclination toward "trolling lite" in the form of explaining how someone is obviously wrong for the sake of correcting the internet.
To put it another way, downvotes are for downvoting. Downvoting and moving on is the right choice whenever it proxies the possibility of worse behavior. A downvote can be a way of mocking out a flamewar or general meanness.
Here, you can see the score on your comments when you are logged in (your comments have a red asterisk and the point score before your name, others comments don't have either feature.) Additionally, if the net moderation is negative (net score is 0 or less, since score starts at 1) for any comment (yours or not) the comment will be greyed (moreso the more negative the moderation is.)
A symptom of the problem is that such threads tempt so many people to express their opinion for the sake of expressing it. I get lured in sometimes too. But when I can stop myself, I just flag the thread. And if I need to feel better, maybe I go through and down vote comments I disagree with in lieu of telling people their political, economic, or ethical views are wrong.
That's better than me just adding to the noise and heat and lack of civility. Downvotes are socially acceptable. So are upvotes.
My concerns can be summarized into a single question - If HN had existed historically with the rules as they exist currently, would Georg Cantor have thrived in it?
I doubt it. Unconventional ideas that are orders of magnitude less radical than Cantor's get reduced to convention and dismissed all the time on HN. It's dismaying. But it is what human beings do, and especially what human beings in groups do. HN can't change that by proclaiming rules. Maybe we can mitigate it a little, such as by asking people to avoid gratuitous negativity.
Holding a dissenting opinion without being willing to defend it with awareness of your audience's hostility to your ideas rarely goes over well in any forum, though.
Some will, but its very rare that I've seen posts retain a net of negative moderation when they contribute substantially, regardless of the side of an issue they are on (though I've seen controversial-but-substantial comments quickly get heavily downvoted before recovering.)
And I've seen this on every side of issues -- often to opposing posts in the same discussion -- so I don't think its an "echo-chamber" effect, but more that certain topics bringout more kneejerk negative responses from people on either side.
(Its funny that, in regard to accusations of HN being an echo chamber or hivemind, I've seen various posters proclaim with confidence that it was -- and that that hivemind was, variously, liberal, leftist, libertarian, capitalist, pro-corporate, anti-corporate, and in support or opposition to various companies, and any of a number of other things. I think people are way to quick to equate some people disagreeing with or downvoting their posts to HN being a hivemind biased against them.)
I think "Maybe next time it comes up the comments won't devolve."
I once had a few week period where I noticed the majority of my comments drop by exactly 2 karma, usually around the same time of day, regardless of how many upvotes they'd received or how heavily trafficked the thread was. My best guess is that I'd upset two people (or one person with two accounts) and they kept clicking back on my profile until they got bored with it.
I think "in the long run" is key here.
When I make a comment that challenges some band of partisans, but strikes a factual tone, my observations is that it initially gets downvotes (presumably from the partisans who are hovering over the thread/story), but in the end gets moderated highly.
On topics where there is a deep skew in the opinion held by the HN readerbase, it is probabilistically likely that going against the widely held view will receive more downvotes. This has a chilling effect on expressing dissent. Of course there will be people who will be able to mitigate this with their gravitas and eloquence. But it would be better if we can come up with a scheme where we lower the burden on people holding a dissenting opinion.
If HN is tribal then attacking one tribe while praising the others might be a method to farm positive karma.
Then again I am kind of thoughtful when I do and often make sure to point out that I like Apple, and recommend it to others, -I just personally find their products annoying to use for specific reasons
I'm making assumptions here on anecdotes of course.
"I do not agree" "I do not believe this adds value" "Inappropriate conduct" "I think you are being mean / rude" "Bad attempt at funny" "Off topic to parent" "Off topic to post" "Difficult to understand/Noise"
What generally happens is that instead of one argument about been downvoted/upvoted you end up with even more arguments about whether something is +5 funny or whatever.
I've no idea how you solve this in the general case tbh.
Personally, I like the idea of having qualifiers on the downvote without one on the upvote - makes you think a little bit before downvoting... plus the vote buttons are ridiculously small on an mobile Safari - so having to click twice would prevent accidental downvotes.
That said, it's not perfect. There are -1 Overrated and +1 Underrated mods. I would not have these if I was king for a day, because:
• They apparently somehow bypass meta-moderation, or have done in the past (!) so not surprisingly they get abused a lot
• They are vague and don't force you to justify what's good or bad about a post, in many cases I have seen abuse of these mod types devolve into reddit style agree/disagree modding
• They don't adjust the adjective that goes with the post, so for a long time and maybe still now you can get posts like +5 Troll or -1 Insightful, which is just confusing and generally bogus
Stripping out Underrated and Overrated would improve things a lot. I'd maybe make +1 Funny count for karma too because funny posts deliver a lot of value to the slashdot reading experience, IMO, and I see no problem with encouraging them.
I think the balance of adjectives is important though. There is no -1 Wrong or -1 Misinformed mod and that's important. If someone posts something polite, earnest and completely wrong there's no justifiable word to mod them down with. Instead you have to wait for a reply to correct them and then mod that up as Informative, Insightful etc.
PG has stated in the past that downvoting things you disagree with is proper usage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691
I don't know if 'dang has changed this policy, but if so I haven't heard about it.
Sounds great in theory. But then a small number of zealots can derail just about every thread with minimal effort. I image it would really degrade a community in a heartbeat. So it's probably a good thing nobody has found a way to enforce such a policy.
- The extra effort will slow down causal unthoughtful down-votes.
- If there is no justification, the down-voter can be down-voted in turn presumably by a greater degree.
- Any pattern of abuse can easily be seen in user profiles.
One solution is to treat comments that explain down-votes differently than normal comments. That would complicate the system a bit but maybe it will be worth it.
I'm actually surprised to see people here complaining about downvotes being used to disagree with comments. A large chunk of HN users can't even downvote. And I can't remember the last time I saw a gray comment that wasn't gray for a really good reason.
It is quite common and gets really annoying after a while. Some of my comments in the past have broken the rules. Fine - downvote those. But quite a lot of them have most certainly not, and were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue. And too many of those were still downvoted to a very light shade of grey within 30 minutes of being posted - without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be, and therefore no hope of improvement (or even any real indication that improvement is needed in the first place).
When I read through threads, I see that I'm not the only one this happens to. And for the record (since this always comes up), no I don't care if they usually get voted back up eventually anyway.
I think it's the greying-out that's the worst. As though the rest of this community needs to be protected from the substance of your post, because a few randoms downvoted your post after they concluded you weren't capitalist enough, or were too capitalist, or think hip new framework X is rubbish, or that a blog post really was just poorly written and not worth reading, etc. It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here, and it contributes more to negativity than any single post ever could.
And, it's something that the mods here take special pains to totally ignore even when you bring it up in a direct reply to them discussing meta issues on the forum, multiple times over several months.
That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution.
Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution.
> It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here,
Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. The only way it can be seen as an aggression by the software (or, more accurately, the forum operator) is if you think you have a right to be protected from seeing (or perhaps having others see) an indication of whether other members of the community think your comment is worthwhile. But that opinion is directly opposed to the entire idea of participating in a public discussion forum.
> Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution.
Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be". I do realize that people might not be downvoting for mere disagreement but because they think my post did not contribute to the discussion, however without a reply to elaborate on that, it isn't very helpful. The downvote alone will not usually lead to a correction in behavior, since there is no way for the receiver of the downvote to even know that the downvote was given for that reason as opposed to disagreement, much less what the reason might even be. Instead, he'll conclude that this forum is full of negative people who downvote for specious reasons, or for no reason, and perhaps begin to become a negative HN member himself. That's a loss.
And since your next objection might be that I feel entitled to a reply from everyone who downvotes a post - I don't. But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low.
> Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software.
Well, I don't believe the forum software is actually capable of aggression, heh. What I was getting at, is that it is an act of aggression by the site operators against community members here. And no, I don't have a problem in general with an indication of whether the community thinks a post is worthwhile or not - I do strongly disagree with this particular implementation of it. I would have no problem with, for example, just displaying the raw upvotes and downvotes next to a post.
Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read), which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post, considering all it takes is for one random to downvote your post to make it happen. If a post truly is so offensive that people probably shouldn't be made to read it (racial epithets, bullying, etc), we have flag-killing to take care of that.
Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low.
It is not generally the practice to comment to explain downvotes, and, IMO -- especially given the absence of collapsed threads on HN, but even if it were present -- it would defeat the point of downvoting and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio to do so, as then meta-discussion of the problem with posts would take more real estate, at the expense of the worthwhile discussion of the topic at hand.
> But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low.
I actually feel that that number is too high. If a comment is worth responding to, its probably not worth downvoting, and if it ought to be downvoted, responding is counterproductive.
> Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read)
Well, yes, the whole point of moderation, community or otherwise, is to suppress content that is outside of what is desired for the forum so as to maintain the character that is intended for the forum.
Put bluntly, censorship based on the community perception of how well posts align with the ideals expressed in the guidelines is the whole purpose of having downvotes. It is, by design, fairly soft censorship that doesn't (through downvotes alone) actually make the content unavailable, but it is exactly to protect the community from the unwanted content interfering with the wanted content.
> which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post
I don't think its patronizing to the reader to hold out a representation of what the purpose of the forum is and to minimize the visibiity of content that the community has found to be out of line with that purpose. Nor do I find the manner in which HN does it "harsh to the author", despite myself having had many comments go gray -- though far fewer stay there.
In fact, I've often found that a comment going gray triggers my own review and reconsideration, and an edit which makes me happier with the comment. Or results in me deleting a comment which on reflection I realize was ill-considered.
> Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low
I disagree. While its true that a slight greying that lets you know that a comment has been downvoted occurs at a net of one downvote, I don't see that as a "too high" consequence of a false positive. The slight greying at that level doesn't impair readability, and if anything draws more attention to the post. Its only at higher levels of downvoting that there is a substantial negative consequence.
I fail to see the harm you are concerned about here. Perhaps its just being around a long time in online forums, but I think the consequences of no moderation (and voting that doesn't actually reduce the visibility of negatively-voted comments at some point is "no moderation" for this purpose), or of relying primarily on centralized moderation rather than community moderations, are much worse than HN's style of community moderation. And while there are different styles of community moderation (e.g., those used at Slashdot or Reddit), I don't see any clear evidence that they produce better results than HN's.
> It is not generally the practice to comment to explain downvotes, and, IMO -- especially given the absence of collapsed threads on HN, but even if it were present -- it would defeat the point of downvoting and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio to do so, as then meta-discussion of the problem with posts would take more real estate, at the expense of the worthwhile discussion of the topic at hand.
I am not suggesting that every single downvote warrants an explanation. I thought that was obvious. But if you look at the two extremes:
* No downvote is ever expanded on in a comment by the downvoter. The site rules themselves will explain some of the downvotes. However, alone they do a poor job of encapsulating what this community considers productive and unproductive discussion. We usually don't know why downvotes are happening. Nothing improves unless mods take direct action to make it happen, as this community has no mechanism for self-regulation.
* Every downvote is explained. I gather you believe this is the worse of the two extremes and I agree. The forum disappears up its own asshole in endless boring meta-discussion and everyone leaves.
Downvotes should be explained sometimes. My one-in-ten figure from before was a total guess. I haven't harvested any data and I don't have any spreadsheets, but I too often see greyed-out posts that I can't for the life of me figure out why they were downvoted. As in, even if I approach it with an unusually high degree of cynicism I still can't guess at a reason. It's gotten to the point that if I see a grey post I'll just automatically upvote it even if I don't read it. I encourage others to do the same.
If you're serious about downvoting, it's no trouble to type in a short explanation such as "incorrect", "not funny", "obvious troll", "unnecessarily rude". (Those seem to be some typical reasons for downvotes.)
And if you're not quite sure why you're downvoting, having to explain would certainly serve as a determent.
If there was ever a psyhotechnological empathic determination of medico-lego "Do No Harm" principles, commit logs are the definition of info emo sec.
Bitcoin/factum public transaction messaging (uncomplete) is also equal to power for votes of parts of speech are important news triggers.
I do wish, however, that there were simply two voting options: one for up/down on the page and one for agree/disagree. Just to give us all something to do when we disagree with a comment, other than reply or downvote. It would give "disagree" downvotes their own place and let the other votes dictate a comment display order and user karma. Of course, it would also be interesting to see a user with high karma and high disagree score, for example.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
I don't know if he's made another comment on this issue since then.
Shouldn't flagging a post/topic be generally used for a guideline violation?
Yes.
At the end of the day, a good comment will always get more upvotes based on its perceived quality than downvotes from people mis-using the downvote feature. I credit this to the fact that you only get downvoting privileges at 500 points, at which point, you've been around long enough to have a sense of the HN culture. At 500 points, you feel like you're receiving a great power that comes with great responsibility.
> It's an awful experience
It can be, if taken the wrong way. It's important to stress that one shouldn't get too freaked out over losing some meaningless internet points over what may have very well been a misclick. Keeping this in mind, it has not been an awful experience for me when I've been downvoted. I wouldn't even say it's been a bad experience for me.
> Most people use to show they disagree with a comment.
I think this is only true when the reasoning or tone is poor - or at least that's the only case the negatives outweigh the positives. I've seen exceedingly few downvotes when I've disagreed and argued here on HN.
As an extreme example, I've seen a thread advocating Cannibalism in a serious tone gain rating, due to it's solid reasoning and proper treatment of the pros and cons of the matter. More typical topics behave similarly - constructive, well reasoned disagreement gains more points than it looses. This on a forum unlike HN - in that, I believe, you could downvote immediately upon account creation.
It's gotten to a point that I'm not sure downvoting is a net positive for the community any more.
EDIT- example, this comment was downvoted in less than 2 minutes after it was posted. Did this voting improve the conversation or the community?
An "I agree" or "hear, hear" should be downvoted.
- facts are sometimes downvoted - it's gotten worse
I don't like being negative, but if you had actually properly read and comprehended the comment rather than downvoting it, that would have been preferable. In fact this is a perfect example of why downvoting doesn't work properly.
PS, I've upvoted both your comments.
I don't see why "reasonable statements of fact" being downvoted to be a problem. Something can be a reasonable statement of fact without contributing substantially the discussion. That's a perfectly good reason to dislike it being presented in the context, and a perfectly good reason to downvote it.
pg may have said it is acceptable to use downvotes for disagreement, but that doesn't mean that downvote implies disagreement. Being a fact doesn't, on its own, make something a productive addition to the discussion.
It would prevent people from hunting down someone, and downvoting all of the posts without penalty just because they didn't like them.
Though I'm not sure how much of a problem that is here.
Of course, any comment about downvotes is also, understandably, frowned upon and discouraged so there doesn't seem to be much recourse.
We could avoid political or ideological topics altogether but that's very hard considering any conversation can lead to them.
To get back on track, I see it as an extremely hard problem to solve since downvoting due to disagreement is a very big temptation and, once you start, you might not even notice you're doing it anymore.
Here's a word about why. Your comments were rightly downvoted because they didn't contain any information. They lashed out at something you happen to dislike, using phrases like "immature children" that merely vent personal displeasure and offer nothing of value to the community. If HN threads are a swimming pool, that is peeing in it.
HN has a long history of users repeating the same complaints about downvoting. These get downvoted because they lower the signal/noise-ratio. They are such a cliché that the guidelines have for many years contained a rule asking you specifically not to post that kind of comment.
If, instead of familiarizing yourself with any of this and taking your lumps like the rest of us do, you decide to post such things anyway, the only surprise is that they aren't downvoted more.
Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.EDIT: try giving a reason for downvoting. Apparently opposition to downvoting is not a popular opinion.
Perhaps instead of a down arrow the icon is a circle with a slash?