Welcome to HN: A refresher course on how to disagree... (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to HN: A refresher course on how to disagree... (2008)

paulgraham.com

151 pointsiamelgringo231 comments

One phenomenon I've encountered here: There are times when I interject a neutral, but relevant point in a debate. Often one side assumes I'm arguing the other side and immediately tries to "counter" me. Then I have to explain that I'm merely pointing out an interesting point, not taking the side against.

I take this as a sign that some here are more intent on "winning" than on having a discussion.

I've found that, many times over, and not just here.

Specifically, I've found it important to set expectations before setting out a point or comment. People read things with their prejudices and viewpoints at the fore. If you are to get a neutral reading, you must work to create a neutral setting first. This then makes your comment long-winded and apparently initially rambling, off-topic or irrelevant.

To counter that problem one must write very, very succinctly, but clearly.

This is all hard work. However, if you think it's worth making your point, it's the best way to give it a chance.

I always liked Tolkien better than Hemingway myself.

Sarcasm? I can't tell.

No. Hemmingway is usually used as a model for direct and concise writing while Tolkein is often used at the other end of the spectrum. Both are widely considered masters of the language.

I prefer reading and writing the Tolkein end, verbose colorful, almost baroque, writing that exercises the language without feeling archaic vs the Hemmingway method which I always felt was overly restricted and terse.

If you are to get a neutral reading, you must work to create a neutral setting first.

I find this is very much a function of the reader/listener. People who have a high degree of curiosity, and what I call "intellectual integrity" are always working out implications from multiple viewpoints. My archetype for this sort of person is my old Automata professor. I find that it was zero effort to present something as neutral to him.

I also find: the less effort required to get a neutral reading, the more productive the discussion.

I think, in general, you will find that to be a rare thing. Even if you start with a small population that doesn't require "setting the scene," as soon as the population grows, so does the requirement.

I would claim that even in the 400 days I've been here on HN I've seen this happening. When I first arrived it was possible to have a short, to-the-point, informative comment that required the reader to think hard before they got the most out of it. Most of them did.

Now it's necessary to create longer, more detailed, more direct comments that set the scene, make their point, put the point in context, and draw conclusions. This is an inevitable consequence of a larger audience. It also means that the subsequent discussion will be "diluted" because of the wider range of experience and ability of the participants. As far as I can seem it cannot be avoided.

Nor is it necessarily to be regarded as a criticism. If you want a broad range of opinions so you can learn from all points of view then you need a large population from which to draw them. You then must realise that it's not the same as it used to be, and one's style must change to match the new audience.

Finally, I do not think this is a question of "intellectual integrity," and labelling it as such is unhelpful. People will always tend to have an opinion, and setting it aside during a discussion in order to listen/read dispassionately is highly unnatural. It is better to work with human nature rather than demand that your audience set aside their natural tendencies, perhaps especially in the West, where schools are starting to require that their students have an opinion, even when they don't actually know anything.

Finally, I do not think this is a question of "intellectual integrity," and labelling it as such is unhelpful.

I think it's quite helpful. Having to hedge myself against prejudice and sloppy thinking isn't helping me as much as spending time actually having substantive discussion.

especially in the West, where schools are starting to require that their students have an opinion, even when they don't actually know anything.

It seems we agree on some fundamental level. I think the ability and diligence to direct skepticism at oneself is basic and essential. If one does not know how to do that, one doesn't really know how to think.

  RoG> ... I do not think this is a question of
  RoG> "intellectual integrity," and labelling it
  RoG> as such is unhelpful.

  StC0> I think it's quite helpful. Having to hedge
  StC0> myself against prejudice and sloppy thinking
  StC0> isn't helping me as much as spending time
  StC0> actually having substantive discussion.

I'm not debating or questioning the use of a labal to capture the concept. I'm suggesting that the sepcific label you are using is itself a barrier to communication. To speak of someone failing to exhibit "intellectual integrity" feels like you are accusing them of dishonesty. I don't think, in truth, that you are doing so, but that is how it might appear.

You could consider a better label for the near inhuman, almost Vulcan, ability to put asides one's own opinions and beliefs in order to listen to the points being made by someone else. Calling it ""intellectual integrity" is, I think, conveying the wrong message, and caries too much baggage.

And yes, I suspect we are more in agreement than not. I, perhaps, am giving more leeway to those who are not trained to set aside their natural tendencies. It's something I've had to learn, at times painfully, upon entering a business environment after doing research in pure math. It seems to be a requirement, and simply one of those things one has to do in order to communicate effectively with people from the "Real World."

Sad, but true. I've had to learn to live with it.

I observe the same thing, but I interpret it differently. This is because this happens to me even more in conversations of the more... acoustic variety. I interpret it as more of a general resistance to spin-off discussions. In an in-person conversation, if you have a spin-off discussion, you need to stop the existing discussion. This is often permanent. For this reason, if someone wants to talk about a particular thing, they will need to stop spin-off discussions.

On an internet forum such as this, that's unnecessary, but it's a habit that a lot of people have.

I mean this as friendly criticism but I think you've fallen for this one a few times recently.

Either that or something you thought was neutral didn't come across as such. Tone is an absolute pain to get right online. A few times I've done the same thing; made an off hand comment and gone away. Only to come back a little later and found it spawned pages of argument :-(

This community does a pretty good job of disagreeing. Even the occasional bit of name-calling is usually buried in something thoughtful.

Irrelevance seems to be a greater danger to the comments here than the method of disagreements.

The comments are a place for discussing the content of the submitted article. They are not a place for complaining about the NYTimes registration, light text on a dark background, etc...

Irrelevance can simply be ignored, or if necessary, flagged. It can then sink to the bottom of the page with little consequence.

But a down-vote has negative social consequences. It affects the types of comment that show up and shapes and refines the tone here so that eventually only the popular types show up.

I see irrelevant but funny/praising/criticising comments upvoted to +4 or even +14 all the time.[1]

The assumption that bad comments will get less votes is a canard. As the community grows, the same people adding comments also add their votes. If anything, they're more likely to vote since it's just a click, and so noob votes will drown old users even more. It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.

Update

[1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157

This is an important point.

>It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.

Upvotes also tend to select for popular modes of thinking. In the end, a system of only upvotes makes people want to only post things that will be perceived as popular by the community.

Yes true, but it is at least positive reinforcement, whereas downvoting is negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is conditioning through fear. So ignoring the potential ethical problems of conditioning through fear, there have been studies to show that positive reinforcement is better: https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/4924/1/V63N02_087.p...

That's a bit alarmist, but I can't really think of a better way to put it I guess.

Positive reinforcement does have the advantage of encouraging more participation.

I can say, as a new guy, that I would participate more if that were the case.

> [1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157

This is one of the rare cases where humor bought upvotes. I'd say for every 10 evenly mildly humorous comments, 9 of them are voted down.

I agree. And the upvoted humor needs to be relatively good to get past our collective restraint. A few days ago I instinctively clicked on a funny comment before regretting it; that prob happens to a lot of folks.

But a) I see a couple of upvoted funnies everyday, and b) things are worse than they were a year ago. I'm joining in the fuss about it in hopes that we can stem the rot.

At risk of being downvoted even more, this is precisely the type of communal degradation we saw on digg and then reddit.

On digg the average quality of the posts dropped to near youtube levels, and on reddit the community fractured to extremes of opinion.

Don't be afraid to post what you think.

Considering the downvote patrol knocked 10% off of my karma just yesterday when I posted essentially that "people abuse downvoting, it has consequences and I don't like it". I am absolutely afraid to post what I think.

When I did get a response as to why, the self-justifications were fairly alarming.

Of course, if you notice it doesn't stop me, but that's because I'm a stubborn stick in the mud. I suspect that loads of people who are not as thick skinned as I am are afraid.

Exactly I think this is the most dangerous aspect of downvoting that really overshadows any other negative implication of removing downvoting.

I mean if you weren't upvoted, I doubt that would discourage you from posting stuff.

> I am absolutely afraid to post what I think

Why? What have you to fear from being down voted?

He has nothing to fear but fear itself. That and disapproval I'd presume.

You ignorant idiot.

Of course someone like you will agree to this article, you constantly disagree on this form. You just use this to reinforce your one-sided view.

I can't believe that you would just blindly agree to anything Paul Graham says so casually.

I honestly can't understand why you listen to Paul Graham. He is a known ignorant programmer who just thinks he can run companies.

Complaining about other news in a comment about something different is a good thing, people get to have discussions and often an interesting point related to the article as well as other articles that may be related or come out at the same time emerge. If you look at articles even from today with tangents, you will notice irrelevance gets down-voted quickly.

"Irrelevance seems to be a greater danger to the comments here than the method of disagreements"

I can't disagree more. We don't sort responses on a user-preference level. Responses are sorted based on relevance. Each response is ranked by other uses of hacker news thus getting the irrelevant down the list quickly. After a few screens on any topic on hacker news you will start to get to irrelevance, and even when browsing you will see points, which help you immediately ignore a response, hell irrelevant ones get discolored.

I think you are totally off with your point. Basically the biggest issue we face on hacker news is the threat of being invaded by those same people who bicker on other sites. Nothing gives me chills more than thinking that MasterPlanSoftware from thedailywtf.com will hit up this site and start posting. His posts were usually DH1 (with an occasional DH2) and he would keep going. An even worse fear is that spectateswamp will look in our direction (please google him, also see www.thestupidestmanonearth.com). When articles like why's disappearance start filling up 1-2 pages of articles on HN is when these fears get surfaced again. Fortunately we were moderated well so that when such problems occur we get massive posts about erlang driving the non-believers away. So in the end, I think hacker news is perfect.

Hows that? as a side note I disagree with everything I just said

Whoever is downmodding this apparently has no sense of irony :-)

One thing I have noted about irony: In written text, where you don't have cues like tone of voice or body language to detect irony, you usually rely on your the knowledge of the writer: This person does not usually write like this/have this viewpoint, hence it must be ironic.

On an internet forum you usually don't know the person writing (unless you keep track of usernames). And no viewpoint is so extreme or bizarre that there isn't someone somewhere on the internet saying the same thing in all seriousness. You cannot detect irony just by looking at the post in isolation.

Irony can be detected when are familiar with the poster or the general sentiments on the forum, and detect when something is so far removed from the norm that is must be ironic. In turn irony can be used as a marker for group - everyone in the group know what you are supposed to say, an therefore can easily detect when the group members are being ironic. Outsiders will not understand the irony and get confused.

Hence "you have no sense of irony" actually means "you haven't been on the forum long enough to be familiar with the comme il faut viewpoints and language used here. You are not part of the club."

Same can be said for sarcasm. Its why we have <sarcasm> tags. However the entire content of the post is such that it cannot make sense but to be sarcastic/ironic.

I wouldn't sweat it, people downvote when they suspect something might be humorous, sarcastic, or a parody. Adding a tag like <sarcasm> or <humor> simply confirms it for them so they can downvote with a clear conscious.

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

haha I think someone posted a clever comment like this the last time this story surfaced on HN, too. Mabye whoever is downmodding this wrote the first one? ;)

Citation needed. Send us the link to this post.

I'm curious.

I would like to take this opportunity to bring up downvoting. Doesn't downvoting have the same end effect as DH0 (or DH3)?

A downvote signals disapproval/discouragement, yet it requires no legitimate counterargument or reasoning for it.

I haven't seen people calling each other "fags" here, but it seems the downvote is simply the HN version of calling people "fags."

100% agreed, it's used the same way here.

as just demonstrated at least twice.

edit lost track now it's down to -5....

I read what you proposed in your comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013330

I agree with it wholeheartedly. The reason why I downvoted this particular comment here is because I really don't think that it adds any value -- you're beating a dead horse.

edit btw, I forgot to mention that I appreciate you taking the time to read that overly long post.

And in this case, because you bothered to comment I don't feel bad. I feel engaged and I see your point. Not every post I make has a great deal of value, but I'd say that not every post anybody makes here has a great deal of value, even pg. Do they deserve a downvote? Not if the cost is that the poster will not bother in the future, we may loose valuable commentary because of that. And especially if the entire thread becomes contaminated because a downvote patrol has gone and tainted the entire thing, preventing other people from posting because they too might be downvoted.

But this is entirely different than my post a few levels up (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021131), that's now down to -5 at last look, which is topical, in response to somebody else, laments the use of the downvote as a shorthand for "fag" isn't snarky, or rude, isn't spam, isn't overly lengthy, conforms to supposed community standards on being short (as several posters in this topic have brought up) etc.

By merely showing agreement with the repondant, I took I a -5 hit to my karma and absolutely nothing in response as to why a downvote in this case is not shorthand for "fag".

And the main problem is that I can't confront my attackers. Their downvotes are about as anonymous as you can get (anonymity can breed abuse). And the community standards also say that I can't question "why the downvotes?". It's not questioning the votes, it's asking for a reason. So there is absolutely no resolution to this.

From the downvoters perspective, theirs is an perfect crime, they have no repercussions for abusing the system, the victim has no recourse, and no defense, and cannot even ask why, they cannot even metacomment that downvoting appears to be becoming a problem without martyring themselves and getting more downvotes.

If by some happenstance that the victim learns the identity of the attacker because they bothered to post a response, they can't downvote the response and at least see some reciprocity (maybe at higher karma levels than mine you can, but I have no option for example to downvote your reponse). Basically they have absolutely no recourse. They can't even flag somebody who has it out for them and downvotes everything they post because they don't know the identity of their attacker. It's a system perfectly setup for abuse by habitual downvoters as we are now seeing.

It's at these moments that I'm saying to myself "you know what, fuck all of you I'm done here" even though I know it's just a handful of people that run around in a downvote patrol and do that kind of thing.

There's lots of ideas here about how to fix the brokeness of the voting system, here's another, people who habitually downvote, say more than 5 times a month, are no longer able to downvote, and must post at least 20 comments and receive +20 points before they can downvote again. Basically it should be a weapon with consequences.

My gut reaction to this absurdity is to disengage and forget the entire thing. To stop posting, and stop conversing and stop trying to find and contribute to interesting discussion in what is probably one of the better forums I've come across in a great many years. pg hasn't commented on this aspect of the system yet as I'm suspecting he's still observing and watching.

Since the comments for this post have grown a lot, maybe you haven't seen PG's own comment. If that's the case, here's the direct link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021235

Well, the good news is that pg seems to agree with the general consensus that downvoting is broken.

I'm afraid though that unless each negative tag is balanced with a positive tag, and the tag scores are provided, that we'll end up in a similar state we are now, only with more complexity.

Your post is a martyr post.

This whole thread should be captured in time as an example of rampant abuse of the modding system.

I think downvoting is supposed to be used to mark spam/offtopic etc - Things that don't add to the conversation or contribute anything interesting.

Using downvoting to disagree with the comment isn't the intention afaik.

It may not be intended, but I'm pretty sure it's what it's used for. Plus intuitively, it's as if it is put there for that purpose, since there is also a "flag" action which seems more suited for marking spam/off-topic already.

I don't have any supporting evidence, but it seems like the downvote has been increasingly used to disagree over the past several months.

I think it's fair to say that if most people upvote with things they agree with, then they will downvote things they disagree with.

It may even be a subconscious act.

I suppose someone out there disagrees with you.

As your score on this now perfectly demonstrates.

I agree. I've always thought the intention here was to use comments to disagree, and reserve down-voting for really poor comments that may not be constructive to the conversation. As another poster pointed out, getting down-voted does cause me re-think my comment, but I'd rather know why someone down-voted me.

Personally, I tend to avoid down-voting, even for egregious comments.

Personally, getting downvoted tends to make me rethink wanting to even bother to comment.

Exactly. It discourages participation through negative feedback. If you want to condition people to do a certain thing, like post thoughtful comments, then I think that's best achieved solely through positive reinforcement.

I wholeheartedly disagree:

1) Spam should be flagged not downvoted.

2) On/Offtopic is about as subjective as you can get. Some of the most interesting comments I've seen on HN were the ones that were non-obviously related to the post or were meta-comments, or even better, when an interesting conversation ran wild and flowed from topic to topic to topic.

3) Downvoting is being used more and more and more for uncommented disagreement.

Don't believe me? Visit any thread here and see which posts are sitting at <=0 karma. I guarantee the vast vast majority of them will be

1) Humorous and on-topic (even if the humor is bad).

2) On topic but non-specifically disagreed with by somebody (who? nobody knows since no comments were probably provided).

How does your claim that any given comment was downvoted for disagreement backup your wider claim that downvoted comments were downvoted for disagreement? That's circular.

> 1) Spam should be flagged not downvoted.

Agree.

> 2) On/Offtopic is about as subjective as you can get

Roughly agree, except there are official guidelines from the HN HQ so it isn't completely subjective.

> 3) Downvoting is being used more and more and more for uncommented disagreement.

Maybe, but even if so I don't see it being a problem. HN isn't turning into an echo chamber because of it, HN has always been a self selected echo chamber, as are all self selected groups of people who choose to belong to a group focused on some area(s) of interest.

> Don't believe me?

Don't understand you.

> Roughly agree, except there are official guidelines from the HN HQ so it isn't completely subjective.

This is true, but even within the guidelines, there is considerable room for topics. Some people seem to want to constrain that further to some smaller set of topics they are personally interested in by using the downvote.

> Maybe, but even if so I don't see it being a problem. HN isn't turning into an echo chamber because of it, HN has always been a self selected echo chamber, as are all self selected groups of people who choose to belong to a group focused on some area(s) of interest.

Self-selected, narrowly focused? Sure. But an echo chamber is not what we want, they are by definition, undesirable.

> Don't understand you.

I wasn't clear I guess. My point being is that posts that are off-topic and generally disagreeable are not the ones being downvoted because by and large we tend not to have those too much on HN. The ones that are being downvoted are the ones that are, on topic, but have some other characteristic that the downvote patrol doesn't want to see, such as humor or a dissenting or contradictory voice.

I disagree. I see, and myself, do downvote comments that I disagree with, if it is a strong disagreement. I think there is also a post where pg says something similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

I have found that comments of mine that get downvoted cause me to think about why.

In this case, that would be "DH3" according to the article. Contradiction with no supporting evidence.

Sure, but you could probably argue that calling someone a "fag" without evidence is also DH3. But I think the nuance is that down voting is not explicitly stating a contradiction, only stating that you disagree (albeit anonymously), which is slightly more like DH0.

So yea it technically is also DH3.

I don't think it's clear whether pg is endorsing the downvote as a form of disagreement or simply making the observation that it is often used that way.

Petercooper wrote a great response in that thread. Disagreement by downvote stifles any attempt at honest debate.

Check out http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006808

Downvoting people who are mistaken is different than downvoting people you disagree with. Something that is factually incorrect should be downvoted because it contributes negatively to the discussion.

I try to not down vote for disagreeing, because most of my opinions are wrong. I have changed almost all my positions more than once and it will happen again. If people disagree without trolling it is valuable, even if they are more wrong than me. It helps me be less wrong.

I have started to down vote when people wastes my time: Trolls and sometimes for boring flame wars that show up in every discussion on a subject (like Perl 5 trolls that obviously don't know the language, but has Googled a reference to the operators of Perl 6!).

While I agree with you, one has to realize that downvoting existed before flagging. At the time, it was used mostly for suppressing spam/trolls and egregiously rude people. Now we have flagging for that, although I still occasionally downvote stuff that is rude rather than flagging. Consider it like a minor flag. That said, I'd be fine if it went away and we just had upvotes and flags, but we've discussed this ad infinitum.

Not when used correctly.

I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now.

Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content.

If you use downvotes to show your disapproval and add nothing to the conversation, then I suppose you're right they are tantamount to DH0 comments, but when used correctly they can (in theory anyway!) help provide better, more intellectually stimulating conversations by burying useless banter.

Perhaps a better system would be to tally both up and downvotes rather than upvote-downvotes. This way comments with a score of 0 might still have 1000 upvotes and a 1000 downvotes, showing that it is both a popular as well as a polarizing opinion.

That's a good idea. I think the central issue with the voting system is that it's supposed to be a mechanism for determining quality, but it's being used for determining popularity of viewpoints. And popularity does not correlate with validity. So some way to clearly define and separate mechanisms for these purposes would resolve the issue.

popularity does not correlate with validity.

On the other hand, if this site was seeded initially with thoughtful participants (as I believe it was before I got here, and as I believe it continues to be by visitors who come here from pg's personal website), being popular (upvoted) rather than unpopular (downvoted) may be a fairly reliable mark of a comment worth reading. Everyone here reads a lot of the best of what is on the Web, and observes the behavior of other users here, and I think there are many examples here of highly upvoted comments (or, from another point of view, participants with high karma) being signals of good quality. It may be that there are some equally clear examples here of comments with many downvotes, all the way down to the system-imposed limit of a score of -4, or users with very little karma, being examples of poor quality.

After edit: so my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here, so even if not every popular comment is factually valid, and not every factually valid comment is popular, noting popularity can still be a guide to busy readers here about what to devote time to reading.

my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here

Unfortunately, this doesn't scale. It is true now and that makes HN valuable. As HN grows there may be more people who express opinions that are not thoughtful and well reasoned, and then popularity no longer corresponds with useful. I think that's the problem that pg is trying to solve.

The issue is that in equilibrium, it is not used correctly. It's better to design the system to model natural behavior than theoretical behavior.

Precisely, pg has put some interesting controls on the site based on lessons learned at other places. For example, new users can only post so fast, and can't downvote until they hit some karma threshold.

The idea being that new users are forced to observe the community conventions on the site and decide if they want to conform to them. By the time they "grow up" they can then move about with greater and greater freedom. This seems to work pretty well regarding arguments and comments.

However, as this topic most clearly demonstrates, the pain point on the site is not the nature of the comments or forms of argument, it's the up/downvote problem. The theory was that higher quality posts would naturally end up with higher scores from more upvotes. Lessons learned from this site should show that to not be entirely true.

There is a generic problem with mechanisms of this nature: it is difficult for a crowd to learn. I saw an excellent example of this at the Festival of Lights in Lyon earlier this month:

During one exhibit, there was a giant game of 'breakout' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29) projected onto a large ferris wheel. The crowd was supposed to play it by all waving orange lights. If you remember breakout, you know that there is a limit on the speed at which the bat is allowed to move, so if you let the bat get too far from where the ball is going to be, there will not be enough time to fix it before the ball hits the floor. It was impossible for the crowd to learn this, however, because an individual in the crowd gets no noticeable feedback from their actions once they have been averaged with those of the rest of the crowd.

I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now.

There is a previous comment by pg on this subject

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

that I have had bookmarked for a long time now that says,

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

As we can see from this thread itself, pg is currently considering a different approach to marking comments for disagreement by multidimensional flagging. I am happy to adapt to any rule that this site sets up. For the moment, there is NOT a rule here that "Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content." On my part, I mostly only downvote to disagree if there are thread-contribution-dimension reasons to disfavor the comment as well, and of course I upvote a lot to show agreement to try to emphasize the positive, but there currently isn't a rule about this here from the keyboard of the site management.

I would agree with this sentiment, I find it immeasurably frustrating when I spend twenty minutes writing a cogent and thoughtful response to someone to only get downvoted with no refutation/counter argument. I can agree with downvoting when there are pointless one-liners that don't add any value, like "This post sucks" or "What was the author thinking?"; but not at all when someone has spent time constructing a chain of arguments.

Lots of words does not an argument make, and I'd bet often a downvote on a long post reflects that.

Nor does length equal quality: a good one or two line post can speak volumes more than a poor wall of text.

Just because you spent time constructing an argument doesn't mean it's cogent. In some cases it may be indistinguishable from a troll. But even conceding that popular opinion will tend to suppress valid arguments, I think it's just a fact of human nature that no community can escape no matter how much the members may pride themselves on their [relative] objectivity.

There's a well known relationship between comment length and comment quality. In general, longer comment have more thought and effort put into them.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/09/29/comments_size_does_...

In other words, you can only snark or troll for so long; there's only so many ways to call somebody an idiot.

what does this have to do with my comment?

It's in response to:

>Just because you spent time constructing an argument doesn't mean it's cogent.

I'm (perhaps mistakenly) equating time spent constructing an argument with argument length, since longer posts tend to take more time to write. It's also fairly well established that longer posts tend to be of higher quality on most message boards, and I'm equating cogent with quality (again, perhaps mistakenly).

time -> length -> quality, therefore invoking the law of transitivity time -> quality.

You may think it a cogent and thoughtful response (and you might be correct) but others may disagree even though they do not have the time to spend in a point-by-point refutation of your thesis. Voting is a filtering mechanism, and by downvoting without comment we collectively filter out "noise" from "signal"; what those two terms mean varies from person to person and may in fact have wildly different meaning to the people voting up or down, but that seems to be the intended effect of the voting arrows. Sometimes just saying "no/yes, I (dis)agree with you" is sufficient and the site is better served by encapsulating these statements into up and down votes rather than encouraging the equivalent of "+1 I agree" messages you see on some mailing lists.

I do not visit HN to argue epistemology or ethics and have little use for back-and-forth discussions between two people that nest twelve layers deep and which you can see after the first exchange are never going to end until they grow bored talking past each other and move on to some other comment thread. I would much rather that these disagreements and conflicting positions are handled in a way that does not take up space for other interesting arguments or points of discussion -- downvoting without a reply serves this purpose.

If you don't have time to post even a single sentence in response "I disagree, particularly on point...", you don't have time to be reading the post anyways. Better to keep off the site entirely until you get some proper time.

I disagree, particularly on the point where you suggest that scanning through ten or twenty comments and being able to recognize and vote on those comments which are cogent/useful/correct and those which are not takes an equivalent amount of time to hitting the reply button, setting focus on the reply entry form, composing a well thought-out and cogent response, and then hitting the reply button. Perhaps if we limit ourselves to snarky two-sentence replies it might be possible, but it seems that the parent was requesting more thoughtful responses than you have afforded me in this case.

>...to hitting the reply button, setting focus on the reply entry form, composing a well thought-out and cogent response, and then hitting the reply button

You forgot about "having to hit each and every individual key used in word formation in the correct order, some keys more than once (and a few several times), having to adhere to reasonable rules of grammar to string the words together into a sentence with meaning, and to remember to stay on topic and respond to the comment rather than slowly drifting off topic into a stream of consciousness, having to maintain visual focus on the screen while typing, and after hitting the reply button, waiting for the comment to refresh, and then another 30-40 minutes refreshing to watch my karma".

I think you assign far too much effort to the task of typing a single sentence.

I don't agree with this, and almost downvoted it for that reason, but to do so could only seem snarky in context, and that's not my meaning. I just disagree with what you said. Not with any particular point; with all three points, equally. Not in any interesting way, either: I just evaluate my time and whether I should be "off the site" differently than you apparently do.

Even if you had downvoted me, by the simple fact that you provided some explanation (however minimal) is loads more engaging and interesting than providing an opinion, and coming back to see it scored at -3 or whatever.

I would understand the vote, and would still feel interested in engaging. I would view the downvote as a punctuation or an emoticon on your comment. Not a ricochet bullet in my living room.

Every single objection you make to downvoting can be applied to upvoting, including this one.

I agree with you entirely except for one thing,

Downvoting without comment can do far more damage to conversation than can upvoting.

Imagine a real life conversation where you are speaking to another party, as you speak your mind, the other party continuously nods their head yes -- an upvote. You don't particularly feel the need to stop and ask "why do you agree with me?"

While on the other hand if, in the same situation, the other party started nodding their head no - a downvote, you would probably stop and ask them "why do you disagree with me?"

The conventions of this site essentially say that:

a) You can shake your head no, and the speaking party cannot ask why you disagree with them.

b) If the party asks why they are being met with disagreement, the response is the real world equivalent of a beating.

c) If you compare their negative, comment-less disagreement with any other similar situation, the response is a beating.

The result is that, after a couple exchanges like this, a typical person will not bother to speak their mind at all since they may end up with the online equivalent of a beating. Thus we end up with people that don't want to suffer the consequences of speaking out.

For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014800

Upvotes are like cake, it encourages people to work for more cake. But people will similarly work to avoid a beating, and non-participation is the easiest path to do so.

"Imagine a real life conversation where you are speaking to another party, as you speak your mind, the other party continuously nods their head yes -- an upvote. You don't particularly feel the need to stop and ask "why do you agree with me?"

No, I'd feel the need to politely excuse myself from that person's company. I have better things to do than blather on to bobble-heads.

"You can shake your head no, and the speaking party cannot ask why you disagree with them."

You can ask why you're downvoted. I've seen that asked and answered many times.

"the response is the real world equivalent of a beating."

The real world equivalent of a beating is a beating.

A downvote is not a beating. A downvote is a stuck out tongue, a disgusted look, a thumbs-down, or a shook head.

I can only assume you've never actually had a real beating or helped tend to the injuries of someone who's actually experienced a beating. Otherwise, I can't imagine why you would use such melodramatic terms to describe the mere act of strangers not following your personal protocols if they dislike one of your comments.

> No, I'd feel the need to politely excuse myself from that person's company. I have better things to do than blather on to bobble-heads.

I'm guessing that you participate in remarkably few conversations then, since that just about characterizes every conversation I've ever had.

> You can ask why you're downvoted. I've seen that asked and answered many times.

No you can't, it's even mentioned in the guidelines. You'll also notice that requests like that are usually immediately downvoted, again without comment (or with a link to guidelines). Even requests on somebody else's behalf are treated like raw sewage.

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> I can only assume you've never actually had a real beating or helped tend to the injuries of someone who's actually experienced a beating. Otherwise, I can't imagine why you would use such melodramatic terms to describe the mere act of strangers not following your personal protocols if they dislike one of your comments.

The melodrama does not end with me apparently ;)

What I mean by that image is that beatings are usually provided with little commentary, and if commentary is provided, it's usually of the epithet variety. I'm equating the downmod not so much to the beating I suppose but to the abject lack of reasoning as to "why the beating?". Beatings are usually rather senseless and provided without much reasoning.

A comment that's immediately downvoted several times without comment is certainly a comment that's being ganged up on. And I can tell you that when a gang of people has set themselves on somebody, there's usually not a whole lot of interesting conversation during the altercation.

"since that just about characterizes every conversation I've ever had."

As the words of wisdom go, "Smile...and back away."

...or perhaps I only converse with crazy people :)

"I agree with you entirely except for one thing,"

Then, more to the point, why don't you oppose voting in general on this site?

That's a fair question. I think upvoting tends to provide positive feedback and encourages discussion. Downvoting (particularly the uncommented variety) tends to provide negative feedback and discourage discussion.

The point of HN is to encourage discussion ergo, upvoting is, in general, in line with the point of the site.

I agree that upvoting can also create an echo chamber, but since it doesn't outright suppress contradictory voices, the effect is much less pronounced.

You make two subtle observations that I think are worth emphasizing:

what those two terms ["noise" and "signal"] mean varies from person to person and may in fact have wildly different meaning to the people voting up or down, but that seems to be the intended effect of the voting arrows

It's probably the ability to aggregate these wildly different meanings in an interesting way that makes the voting system good.

Sometimes just saying "no/yes, I (dis)agree with you" is sufficient and the site is better served by encapsulating these statements into up and down votes rather than encouraging the equivalent of "+1 I agree" messages

That's exactly right.

In this whole area, less is more. Many of the objections and suggestions for changing it strike me as overengineering. Given that the site is the creation of an inveterate minimalist, though, I doubt we have too much to worry about. :)

The simple fix that's been recommended quite a few times here, that of requiring a comment for each upmod and downmod, seems to me a reasonable and minimal fix that makes the user more judicious with their votes.

There's a lot in what you say. In the next couple months I'm going to be experimenting with solutions to this and related problems. The general plan will be to de-emphasize points and to add more types of flags.

For comments, there will be at least flags for incivility, fluff, and spam. Spammers, as now, will get banned instantly. People who accumulate a lot of flags for incivility may also get banned for some set period.

I think points do a good job of positioning comments in a thread as you can easily pick out the common consensus, one thing that would be nice if it was encouraged is leaving comments when you downvote so that maybe a discussion can occur.

(Obviously however there are some comments that do not warrant discussion but this probably would end up fitting into the types of flags.)

On the downside exposing points can lead to bias. You could easily make up your mind based on the points. It discourages individual thinking, and frankly if someone is too lazy to analyze and filter out the good comments for him/herself do we really want his/her opinion?

It can result in less accurate filtering. Popular comments may be voted up simply because someone sees the amount of points, skims the comment with perhaps a bare understanding, and thinks "hey, this guy's probably right." And then, ding, a possibly unwarranted upvote. The same effect can apply to an unpopular comment, but the effect is probably stronger for unpopular comments, which is why I think it is so dangerous. An unpopular comment would suffer more of this effect because people who disagree may build up more negative emotions, and this emotion may lead to more impulsive, irrational behavior making them more susceptible to the bias.

Seeing a comment he/she disagree with, and seeing that a bunch of people agree with him/her about disagreeing gives that person a sense of approval which erodes his/her ability to truly evaluate a dissenting comment objectively.

Flags would be wonderful. There are many times where I've seen a wonderfully reasoned argument that I _completely_ disagree with (usually because of the premises of the argument). I am always conflicted - do I

A) Downvote the comment because the I think the conclusions are grossly wrong.

B) Upvote the comment because I'm so enamored of the elegance of the argument, it's contribution to the conversation, and how it made me think more carefully about my own argument.

C) Ignore it - and unjustly not provide my reasoned critique on what clearly took a great deal of effort by the author.

If I could only Flag it as "DISAGREE WITH CONCLUSION" and "ADDS TO CONVERSATION" then everything would be good.

The four flags that I think would be useful would be:

  FLUFF vs CONTRIBUTES
  AGREE vs DISAGREE
  SPAM
  INCIVIL

That way, I can now simultaneously rank an article as both contributing, as well as disagreeing with the conclusion.

An author may then write an unpopular, but carefully reasoned discourse, and still enjoy the positive feedback of his peers on his contribution, even if he is challenging their perspectives.

Personally, I'd prefer if you'd write a comment and explain why the argument is totally wrong. (And preferably starting with praising what you approve of; that would give the right tone to any answers you get.)

Edit: On consideration, I should have followed my own advice and started this with: "A well reasoned, well written and interesting argument. But why aren't you adding the alternative of ANSWERING the argument instead of just moderating?!"

Personally, I'd prefer if you'd write a comment and explain why the argument is totally wrong.

I sometimes invite people to write such comments if they disagree with me. Often, when a comment makes a factual assertion for which I know of no evidence, I will reply to ask for the evidence. I will say things such as "Citations, please?" or "What are some examples of this?" or in some other way ask for the participant to back up the statement to which I reply.

But there are cases when a comment is totally wrong, and not a good contribution to the thread besides (which has always been a generally supported basis for downvoting), and it's just too much bother to post a countering reply or to ask follow-up questions. In such cases, I don't feel embarrassed at all in downvoting the wrong comment. The site founder pg, who announced news of changes he is considering in flagging options on HN in this thread, wrote 681 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Voting and flagging options today are still much as they were then, and so for the moment I don't think it's a bad idea to downvote for disagreement, particularly if a comment has other undesirable characteristics. I will happily adapt to a new system if the site management implements a new system. And I invite participants who disagree with this reply of mine to write a comment and explain why my argument is totally wrong, if that is not too much trouble to you.

Perhaps it's okay to use the up/down arrows to express agreement/disagreement, but then the ranking of comments can only be seen as an indicator of popular comments, not necessarily thoughtful, quality ones.

That's the inherent issue here. It's that the arrows used to represent quality in theory are actually used in practice to indicate agreement. And then with the down voting, you effectively have a system of negative reinforcement because your comments are being downvoted because you're a dissenter, but interpreted as a sign of bad quality and discouraged to speak further. It's interpreted as a sign of bad quality because all the signs say so. You get grayed out if it's too negative and your comment gets pushed to the bottom. Perhaps you'll become alienated and leave the community, making the HN community slightly more homogenous.

I agree with you in that it's a good idea to allow people to indicate their agreement and disagreement, but to have it clearly defined as an indicator of popularity.

I think that it also seems to "taint" an entire thread the same as "leper unclean!". Especially when I see an entire thread of negative scores, I know that somebody has a chip on their shoulder for whoever steps in that turf they've decided to police. Participating in that thread is the same as a guaranteed downmod.

Fair Point with regards to answering the argument, but, with tens of articles a day, and hundreds of comments per article, sometimes all you can afford to do is take 5 seconds to flag your feedback. Also note that flagging/ranking an article also has an impact on how many people see the article, as it rises to the top.

There is also the (strong) possibility that I really have nothing to add to the conversation other than a DH3 "Disagree" - which perhaps suggests that I have no right to be moderating that particular comment in the first place.

I worry that having an explicit "agree/disagree" axis would encourage a popularity contest mentality, so I was about to say that this was a terrible idea... but then it occurred to me that by having it there, it might siphon off the people that are using the upmod/downmod function as if it were agreement-based. So maybe it would be good after all.

I'd like to suggest another experiment for a feature. If the comment author's name is hidden unless you click on the link to the comment, so that by default it isn't shown, it might be able to reduce bias on the initial read or comment. It would reduce the tendencies of people to, at the very least, unwillingly be affected by the commenter's name.

Personally I never even notice the person's name unless I'm going back and forth, so I'm not even sure how much effect this has.

This has been discussed before, and if my memory serves me correctly it wasn't that well received.

What was the problem?

Well, for one, seeing an comment on cryptography by cperciva already communicates a great deal before you've even read the first word. Not to say he's never wrong, but I'm inclined to believe that his largest mistakes on the topic are still more accurate than my most carefully reasoned treatises on the subject. You can find many, many such Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on HN who likewise carry weight on a topic (PG on Startups?) by their very identity.

Absolutely. When Peter Norvig drops by to make a comment or two, I want to know.

Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who". Any system that tries to override human nature has its work cut out for it.

Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who".

Not just nature, but efficiency. The statement, "In argument subject, not author, holds interest" may be true in theory but in practice this breaks down. People without established expertise may have worthwhile contributions but it's easier for people to receive contributions from people with known expertise. For example, I would just as wholeheartedly receive a comment from cperciva as one from "A well-known cryptographer and talented mathematician with a relevant and competitive PhD."

This is mostly notably seen in the physical sciences wherein most theoretical physics treatises are given little attention from the mainstream physics community unless there is a credible and relevant PhD backing it. Physicists simply don't have the time to pick through all of the papers from amateur hour and point out where they messed up the calculation that they should have learned in Quantum Optics 332.

This expedience is partially reflected in HN comments. While ideally everyone would have a chance to respond to every comment to point out where it is factually incorrect, few have the time. It is also disconcerting to see a factually incorrect comment with more points than the factually correct reply. In each of these cases, one could comment to express agreement with the reply and reinforce the incorrectness of the original comment, but a combination of vote up/vote down fulfills a similar function in a fraction of the time. Perfect? No. Expedient? Yes.

I didn't mean to suggest hiding the name so that we can't find out who posted the comment, but rather just making it more difficult. So you can still find out who wrote the comment, by clicking on the link to the comment, or perhaps requiring a mouseover.

I mean I can already see some problems to being able to see a name, and having that "communicate a great deal" just by the name. If the comment communicates a great deal, then why can't the comment stand on its own merits? It just seems that more people will be inclined to upvote because of the person who said it.

And I understand the concern about being able quickly skim and find notable experts replying. This is a potential problem with hiding author names. But I think some of this problem can be alleviated by the fact that better comments usually float to the top anyways.

Also perhaps this feature can be something that is only disabled after reaching a karma threshold?

I think your right if you assume that the argument is a self contained object. But a lot of times an argument draws on someone's experiences. In these cases, it can be useful to know who the person is.

For example, I remember reading earlier comments about the negative impact of working all night long on a start up. If I had said this, people would (rightly) ignore me. But if someone who has a startup had said this, it should carry more weight.

I hope that you'll be cautious with the amounts of possible flags? More choices makes the decision to vote harder, possibly reducing the number of votes, which is not what you want.

Perhaps fewer votes is exactly what you want. I can imagine that lots of people read things and go "Oh - yeah - (click)" without thinking too hard. Perhaps requiring mental investment on the part of the voter is a good thing.

Just flagging adds meaning to downvotes, but can still be used to suppress opinions and people.

Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions. Likewise, upvotes give back the karma you lost modding some comment. A different cost for up/down seems also a good idea. This, simply, could create an incentive to post even when one has nothing to say and prevent constructive modding by people who post little.

Hmm.... Perhaps an agreeing vote would redeem part of the karma paid to up/down vote.

This balancing act is a very hard problem.

Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions.

I asked last week

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006946

whether attempts to make the site better, which is what many downvotes and flags currently are, ought not to be rewarded with MORE karma rather than less. I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work.

"I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work."

I think a bigger danger is the suppression of dissent. Rewarding it with more karma would be a huge mistake.

Dissenting from your opinion in what I hope will be a civil, constructive manner, I agree with you that once in a while I get downvotes solely because I am expressing an unpopular opinion. But that is rare. And I don't shy from expressing minority opinions here on several issues. I don't get a large number of downvotes at all. My two comments with the largest net number of downvotes were (to me, in hindsight) comments that I could have written more clearly with more effort at relating them to the main concern of the thread and adding new information to the thread. On the whole, I think most downvotes are adding quality of expression to the site rather than subtracting opinions from the site. There are a lot of strong opinions here, not all of them in unison, and a lot of those opinions get expressed here.

By the way, it's an EMPIRICAL question whether downvotes or posting disagreeing replies does more to discourage expressions of certain opinions. It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him. If a person has courage of his convictions because his opinions are based on evidence and careful thought, there is little reason not to come back here and express the opinions, even if his comments don't get a huge number of net upvotes.

> It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him.

I respectfully disagree. A downmod supplies almost zero feedback to the recipient. Many posts I've seen with negative mod scores are complex and have a number of topics in them. A downvote at no time explains what precisely was wrong with the post.

It's like a presidential candidate not getting a vote, he doesn't know what part of his platform lost him the vote, just that he didn't get it.

In real life a candidate can pay for a poll and find out why, here it seems that asking why immediately results in more downmods.

(I admit the analogy is imperfect, but hopefully you see where I'm trying to go with it).

The flag mechanism already exists to deal with true trash if I'm not mistaken.

It seems to me, respectfully, that using the downvote to try and clean the community is like a small-town sheriff trying to keep the perceived riff-raff of city-slickers, with their strange ways and funny hair, out of his community.

Maybe only downmods force a user to "spend" karma? This would weed out habitual downmodders.

This is not a bad idea. Force a person to spend some karma to take somebody else's karma away. It's similar to how and upvoting commenting seems to help build karma here.

And meta-comment, really? Your post was downvoted? Way to discourage ideas and effort....sigh

I think a good system would be to have just two voting axes:

1) "worth reading" / "not worth reading" 2) agree / disagree

Then add a system of whatever flags you think are necessary, like "spam".

I treat the current voting arrows as if they meant (1). I vote up things that I think are worth other people's time to read; vote down things that are a waste of time to read. I very rarely downvote. In some cases where others might more liberally downvote, I simply don't vote.

I treat the voting arrows as if they meant (1) as well, and in addition to that, if something is at 0 or worse and isn't in fact a waste of time, I'll vote it back up.

Downvoting something you disagree with kills a discussion, IMHO.

Even then, I think the scores for each should be bifurcated so that people can see the number of "worth reading" vs. "not worth reading" votes, and the same for agree/disagree.

I think the practice should at least be modeled liked a number-line. The default is 0, neither an upmod or downmod. Just as it is, an upmod (or +1) should be given if the post was particularly interesting (not agreeable, interesting), and a downmod (or -1) should be given if the post was particularly non-interesting (not disagreeable, non-interesting).

I think too many people only see the world as either +1/-1 with no option to just leave a comment alone.

To be clear, I thought it went without saying that marking agreement or disagreement would not count towards the worth-reading score, and that the two arrow pairs would not be accumulated into a single score. Two scores would have to be displayed, perhaps giving users the option of seeing only the worth-reading score.

I like this idea alot. It gives community values explicitness, visibility, and teeth.

If people have no incentive to refrain from bad behavior except the occasional posting of the commenting guidelines to the front page, then they will engage in bad behavior. People respond to incentives.

I have a suggestion: Make it compulsory to leave a comment explaining a downvote i.e. when a user clicks on the downvote button, he is asked to comment. You can't downvote unless you provide a reason.

Flags can play the role of downvotes for controlling spam and totally rubbish comments.

It would be interesting, too, if the downvotes could, themselves, be downvoted by others, rendering them valueless. That is, if my explanation for my initial downvote doesn't pass muster, others could downvote-the-downvote, and the initial comment (which I had downvoted) would be left with its full complement of points, as though I hadn't downvoted it to begin with.

That would only be fair because the downvote to your downvote comment would also have to provide a reason. So, it would encourage a real discussion.

Unlike this one where comments are apparently getting downvoted for no obvious reason.

Another interesting experiment would be to display the top downvoters from time to time. We'll at least be able to weed out some of these invisible trolls.

As this thread and numerous others are demonstrating, there is a group of people that lurk and troll through the consequence-free mechanism of the downvote. I don't really care who the top downvoters are (though the metrics would be interesting, I'd like to see different mixes and matches of the various statistics that HN could generate, upvoters, downvoters, karma, number of posts, average comment scores etc), but I think there should be some limit per unit time they can downvote. Like say 5/every 30 days or some such. Given how many perfectly reasonable comments in this topic have been downvoted, I would suspect it's the same lurker-trolls every time, they would have just blown their quota for the month under this kind of system.

And if you notice, it's like pulling teeth from an angry lion to even get any of these guys to bother posting a reason. The answers so far seem to amount to either

1) My time is too important, I'm too important.

2) The downvote is enough reason, it should be obvious to the recipient that they weren't contributing anything.

I'm sorry, but I don't find either of those reasons even remotely satisfying.

I don't think you're right. The reasons seem to be that people are downmodding as a social normalization function. It's like saying "don't post more like that please".

I think you are taking downmods a bit too personally.

Well, different people are having different takes on the semantics I guess. How about a quota though? Nobody likes an overly negative person at a party. IRL, we can't enforce good behavior that way, but here we can through the power of software.

I don't think a quota makes sense. But a comment/vote does.

I don't want to limit the amount of times a person can disagree with me (at risk of allowing for disagreeable persons).

I upvoted this because I think this is reasonable. The purpose of HN is to be a discussion forum, not a karma generating tool. Requiring comments for votes (particularly downvotes) fits the theme.

After following this topic for a while, it seems that the main problem is objection to comment-less downmods, not downmods in principle.

Precisely.

It would be good if "cancelled" downvotes were deleted or hidden. I think there is a risk of downvote explanations cluttering things.

There's already a mechanism for this. It's called upvoting.

An upvote is semantically different than a downvote. A downvote is like saying "I am providing negative feedback", while a downvote-downvote is like saying "You have no reason to provide negative feedback".

An upvote on the otherhand is "I'm providing positive feedback".

This seems like a cool idea, just not sure how it could be implemented. Any examples of something like this you know of?

Closest example I can think of is Amazon's "did you find this review useful" button. You can suss out — somewhat — how helpful a review is.

I think this sounds interesting, but with this system, it becomes more critical for the crows to know the rules.

However, a lot of that might be solved by using words instead of arrows. E.g. a "Agree", "Disagree" and "Detracts From Conversation" button.

I think this is simple and reasonable, and it's usually the particular pain point I usually mention while grinding away on my "downvotes are bad" axe. I think this is better than tags because the universe of possible reasons to downvote something appear to be so large that we'd need a large menu of flags to select from, and also would need to be able to select multiple flags, making scoring posts (which I still think is useful) very hard.

* The general plan will be to de-emphasize points and to add more types of flags.*

I'm anxious to see this experiment. If flags are not binary, I'm curious how the number of different types of flags will be used to bubble up articles and comments.

I like the idea of separating "worth reading" from "agree". If only "worth reading" makes things bubble up then people that strongly agree might mark things as "worth reading" because they want them to bubble up. An interesting problem.

I call them drive-by downvotes.

I imagine some guy in a black leather chair going "hmph," with an angry face, then clicking the down arrow.

This is why I find it annoying. I see a lot of DH3+ comments being downvoted with no explanation. Then I want to upvote the comment and, at the same time, ask why it has been downvoted.

My upvote probably wouldn't count. Then, in return, I'm afraid I'd get downvoted. From time to time I see someone else say "hey, why are you guys downvoting this? This guy is saying something worthwhile."

In which case, the situation reverses and the originally negative comment is +1 or +2. Or more. BUT, still lacking an explanation as to why the comment was downvoted to a negative in the first place.

Annoying.

I think terse negative feedback (a downvote) deserves some level of explanation otherwise the feedback from the vote is meaningless and people become afraid to post.

I always take it to mean that a down vote is supposed to represent that the content of the post was off-topic, misinformed, or otherwise not useful or inappropriate.

I often up-vote people that I disagree with (or who are disagreeing with me) because they are presenting their argument in a way that is reasonable and intelligent.

Ex. I would down-vote someone if they started name-calling, I would not down-vote them if they had an opinion that I thought was wrong. Of course, this would be dependent on how good the argument that they present is, or if the opinion is intentionally flammable.

The simple solution to that would be to require a comment if you are going to down vote. If you down vote you have to comment and say why.

Maybe that should be added as a feature for up vote to. To up vote or down vote you would have to comment. This would ensure that only people who were really serious about their opinion would vote at all.

There are many comments claiming that it's somehow bad, rude, or inconsiderate to downvote comments you disagree with. I totally disagree. There is nothing uncivil about downvoting. It simply means that someone took issue with something about your comment: its tone, its logic, whatever. There's no reason to take offense at this; you could just as easily find it intriguing.

Voting up or down is a nice, efficient mechanism for participating in a discussion when you do have a response, but it falls below the threshold of having enough time, enough interest, and enough worth saying to justify an explicit post. There's nothing illegitimate about responses that happen to fall below that threshold. In aggregate, they add great value to the site. To try to force people to make explicit comments that aren't naturally above the threshold would spread tedium, not civility.

People sometimes allege that opinions are being downvoted to oblivion on HN merely because they're unpopular. In my observation, this is rare. There's almost always some obvious reason (rudeness, irrelevance, etc.). But it's more self-flattering to think that your brave independent thinking was run over by a mob.

Egregious arbitrary downvoting does occur, of course, but it tends to get corrected. When I run across a comment at 0 or -1 that I see nothing objectionable about, I upvote it. Lots of other users do that too, so controversial comments tend to stay roughly at par. Lightweight self-correcting systems are hard to come by, so I think it's worth recognizing when you have one. That doesn't mean that experimentation is a bad idea, of course, but it will be hard IMO to come up with a better voting system. (The flagging system is a different matter.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021116 was immediately downvoted to oblivion (it's hit -6 I believe at one point), not a single comment as to why.

While this one, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021119 while practically of the same content (though a hair less snarky) generated screens full of comments and is sitting at +10 as of this writing.

I think it has to do with the fact that people were scared off of the other post because it went straight into the vote incinerator and thus they didn't want to get downvoted themselves.

A downvote without a comment is just as rude online as a terse "no" is in real life.

A downvote without a comment is just as rude online as a terse "no" is in real life.

It's you who are choosing to interpret it that way.

If I hypothetically told you to take that opinion and shove it where the sun don't shine, it's obviously you who would interpret that as being rude as well.

In manners, the interpreter of the action is usually the one to be concerned about.

Come-on, this is basic manners we learn as children.

(it's hit -6 I believe at one point)

That can't be an actual observation, because the system-imposed limit on negative karma scores for one comment has been -4 for a while. A comment with that recent of an item number would have been posted with that limit in place. I can remember the days when negative karma per comment was apparently unlimited (although such comments would gray out to invisibility at about -25, if I remember correctly) and a longer period when the limit was -8. That hasn't been a problem for most of the most active participants here, even those who actively disagree with some of the consensus opinions that do trigger reflex downvotes here.

Check it yourself. It's not the only post of mine in this thread that's seen a < -4 karma.

I just searched your list of threads, through the first couple pages, and didn't see any such posts. While I did that, I did see a very interesting comment by btilly in a thread I hadn't visited previously, but I didn't see any comments by anyone with karma scores below -4. Does someone have a current link to anyone's recent comment with such a low score?

This one is now back down to -4 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021131

It's been -5 at least twice since posting it.

> while practically of the same content

Not the same content at all. One states firmly, the other opens a discussion. One claims that the only two reasons comments get downvoted are a lack of humour and an anger problem and is little more than a trollbait insult to the downvoter, the other questions whether the result of the downvoting process is the same as an ad-hom attack on the commentor and is not an insult to anyone.

Next you'll be telling me there's no difference between "wanting not to do X" and "not wanting to do X".

If I was being accused of argument ad hominem, I would take that as an insult too that since it's a fallacy in thinking.

My comment was providing lessons on the levels of reasoning used to downvote along the lines of pg's essay on the levels of argument.

Feel free to offer more levels or refinements/replacements for the reason to downvote, I started the first two levels, somebody else followed up with another couple levels.

I think they ran roughly parallel to pg's essay in terms of the lowest level being the lowest form of downvote, the next higher level being slightly more sophisticated, and so on.

People want to just use the downvote to be contrary without having to deal with the consequences of being contrary. It's passive-aggressiveness at its worst.

> If I was being accused of argument ad hominem

Which you were, because you were attacking downvoters personally instead of their use of the downvote system.

> I would take that as an insult too that since it's a fallacy in thinking.

You are free to take whatever you like as an insult, but if you take a fallacy in my thinking as an insult you're going to spend most of your life feeling insulted and that seems like a silly way to choose to live.

> I started the first two levels, somebody else followed up with another couple levels.

I see; I thought you were offering an exhaustive list rather than the beginnings of a list.

> People want to just use the downvote to be contrary without having to deal with the consequences of being contrary.

Can you back that up with anything? What 'consequences' should there be to downvoting things you don't want to see on a site built to be shaped by the voting of people who are present?

> Which you were, because you were attacking downvoters personally instead of their use of the downvote system.

Fair enough.

> I see; I thought you were offering an exhaustive list rather than the beginnings of a list.

Perhaps I should have followed with some ellipses "..."

> Can you back that up with anything? What 'consequences' should there be to downvoting things you don't want to see on a site built to be shaped by the voting of people who are present?

The suppression of dissenting and contradictory voices.

A comment like "downvoted because I disagree with your point about ..." creates value by focusing discussion on a particular area of interest. While just a downvote supplies nothing meaningful to the discussion and merely seeks to suppress some viewpoint in the most general sense.

A definition of discussion is "an exchange of views on some topic", suppressing alternate viewpoints does not lend itself to creating discussion.

Tone-wise, one comment makes a peevish accusation while the other offers an idea and opens a debate. If the first one were at +20, I'd still throw a downvote at it.

On a separate note, would a terse downvote really be more discouraging and more likely to cause friction and ill will than seeing a list of comments like "Downvote: whiny troll who thinks people only disagree with him because they hate themselves"?

It's not the downvote per se, it's the absolute lack of commentary as to "why" the downvote. It offers no chance for the downvoted person to face their detractors, and offers consequence free negative actions on the part of the downvoter.

Materially, a person who downvotes without comment is really no different than a person who posts whiny comment, except that the person who bothers to post the comment opens themselves to public ridicule for their statement while a downvoter is perfectly protected behind a veil of absolute anonymity.

"It offers no chance for the downvoted person to face their detractors"

Why do you think you're owed this?

In a conversation with real people, I can usually go back to somebody who disagrees with me and we can have that discussion (or they can do likewise with me). In other words, they must think about the nature of their disagreement more before openly disagreeing.

In addition, it's good manners. A person who is just contradictory to everything you say, and responds to all of your statements with a "no, you are wrong" over and over again with no further elaboration is usually considered an asshole and doesn't get invited to parties. People want to get invited to parties, so they try not to be rude in this way in real life except towards people they have utter contempt for and whose parties they don't want to go to anyway.

The anonymity of a virtual space however, opens up the doors to people to be out and out rude to one another. A downvote sans comment is even more anonymous because the recipient can't even see who their detractor was (and in addition, by the site guidelines can't even ask for clarification of the downvotes, which is silly).

However, HN guidelines also proscribe:

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

I think this is reasonable, my contention is that a downvote sans comment is the same as the hypothetical person who just responds "no, you are wrong" over and over again with no further commentary.

To put it bluntly, in a face-to-face conversation, I would have dismissed you as a whiny attention-seeker and not spoken to you at all. And if someone had asked my opinion of you, it would have been, "whiny attention-seeker who knows how to have a thoughtful conversation, but chooses not to".

Here, we simplify that with a downvote. Have a nice life.

I don't think you understand the "be civil" part of the guidelines.

You asked a question, got a civil answer and responded really rather rudely.

At first I thought this elblanco guy was a bit whiny as well, but now I'm starting to see the pattern of bad behavior behind his point.

After your response (and a few others), I think he is perfectly valid.

If my karma were high enough, I would certainly downvote...nay flag your comment as a clear violation of guidelines.

A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

PG already commented somewhere that he's experimenting with a number of solutions to this problem, and will hopefully come up with something as quick and convenient as the downvote but with the depth of requiring an added comment.

A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

Uh, yes, that's precisely the opinion my whole comment was objecting to. How can that not have been obvious? Did I edit the baby out with the bathwater? Let me try again:

There are many occasions when a silent vote is the most appropriate feedback, for two reasons: (1) one doesn't always have time to type out a comment; (2) one's comment, if typed out, might not add value. There is a psychological threshold above which an explicit comment makes sense and below which it does not make sense, and trying to mandate otherwise will not work: it will only result in a lot more tedious comments. Indeed, many suggestions people are making strike me as rather schoolmarmish. There are few better ways to suck the life out of things than to make them mandatory.

> A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

I would absolutely agree with this statement.

It has been a long time since I have read this one and it is a very good description of the forms of disagreement.

I do think that PG gives slightly too little weight to ad hominem attacks though. It is true they may be no better than name calling, but they can be highly informative and relevant too. I know he says they can carry some weight, but even there I do not think he gives at least the right kind of ad hominem attack its due.

For instance, in a technical field it can often be very difficult to understand much less evaluate a fully reasoned argument. In this case, to a laymen reader saying (truthfully of course) "The author of this piece has been shown to commit scientific fraud" may be more effective than trying to go through the entire argument in detail. Similarly with say financial advice being able to truthfully say "The author has been involved in con games in the past" can be more persuasive (when true!) than trying to analyze his latest claims. Even pointing out something like "This man's PHD is in <nonrelevant field>, not <relevant field>." can add value to a discussion. Of course it does not invalidate the original argument from the original author, but it does point out the readers that they should read it carefully and not give limited weight to the author's authority.

This is especially true since it can be easier in some technical fields to bring up evidence that sounds good superficially but that an expert knows is false than it is justify the truth. This is because understanding the truth often requires a detailed technical grounding already whereas the pseudoscience does not.

I once had a discussion about this topic with a colleague.

>For instance, in a technical field it can often be very difficult to understand much less evaluate a fully reasoned argument.

I think at the time I had fluffed a response to the question this answers which is "well how do I know that xyz guy really knows his stuff and isn't just a so-called-expert in his field, why should I believe him?".

But this sums it up nicely, it can take decades to learn enough about a field to understand the arguments properly.

>This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We've all seen comments like this:

>u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!

>But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like

>The author is a self-important dilettante.

>is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."

I completely disagree. One is a direct verbal attack, the other can very possibly be a reasonable assertion. If it's followed by a fair explanation, all the better.

If it's followed by a fair explanation, then it's no longer the same argument. I think his point is that if you just say "The author is a self-important dilettante," then that by itself is no different from "u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!"

I think still there is a fundamental difference between calling someone a "fag" vs. a "dilettante". Calling someone a "dilettante" isn't quite name-calling. And if the subject at hand has a history of being a sham, then I don't think it even warrants the effort to spend the time writing an explanation.

I can see where you're coming from, in that "dilettante" may be less outlandish than calling someone a "fag." It's a more refined description, but in the end both are still most likely unfounded claims.

In most cases you are probably calling the person a "dilettante" or "self-important" without really knowing the person. And chances are such labels will be emotionally, rather than rationally motivated. So it's true that in some cases the claim can be legitimate, but given our setting in an almost anonymous internet discussion place, it's unlikely that those claims are ever founded on reason. I think that was Paul's point: that calling someone a "fag" vs "self-important dilettante" are similar in their usually unfounded bases. You're correct in that there is a fundamental difference because calling someone a "fag" is not only unfounded, it's also derogatory as well as irrelevant to any rational argument (irrelevant, unless it is an argument about their sexuality).

The author is a self-important dilettante.

...is designed to insult or discredit the author without any reference to the actual argument (or any objective facts.) If the goal is to move the discussion forward, how can this be "a reasonable assertion"?

Bollocks. I reasonably assert that you're an idiot.

Both are examples of "ad hominem" fallacy. The fact that one is spelled better than the other (and uses a fancy word too) does not make it any less of a fallacy. Fallacy is not an argument, which was Paul's point.

Very good, somehow hadn't seen this yet. Thanks!

If all comments on HN were disagreements, this could be an interesting alternative to the simple karma score of a comment. Better yet, f we could tease the concepts of each level away from the disagreement element, we could have an interesting way of classifying comments. Maybe a Conversational Hierarchy:

CH0 - Attack on a person

CH1 - Statement concerning a person

CH2 - Statement concerning a text

CH3 - Statement concerning a point made

CH4 - Reasoning/facts concerning a point made

CH5 - Reasoned response to a point made

CH6 - Reasoned response to the central point

5 and 6 could use a bit of beefing up, but you get the idea. They could each have karma scores assigned to them (negative for 0-2, neutral for 3, positive for 4-6) and the classification with the most votes wins. The "CH" appended to the beginning of the number makes it so noobs would be likely to the time to learn what they mean. The UI for this would have to be dead simple, maybe a dropdown.

Thoughts?

The only issue I see right now with this is that it doesn't promote interesting but (strictly speaking) off-topic discussions.

Communication can be used for emotional stimulus as much as intellectual stimulus, so it is not necessarily ideal that all arguments fit into some rigid ranking valuing objective refutations over emotionally driven spasms. "u r a fag" says a lot with a little: it's efficient. I mean, if everyone always strove towards perfectly clean refutations of central points, think about how boring the internet would be! It's simply not the case that everyone should just be looking to refute arguments with specifics. And besides, this way of looking at it reeks of elitism, like most Paul Graham articles. How can we trust what he's saying anyway? It's just to get hits to his blog. What a self-important dilettante.

u r a fag

capstone

edit: for those who ask, why did I do it backwards, the answer is simple, and a good life lesson: make sure you have a punchline.

The very highest level of the Disagreement Hierarchy, of course, is DHH:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/

Ad hominem is used all the time by very smart people.

Try getting a theoretician to look at a proof of a famous conjecture written by an unknown.

Try getting a theoretician to look at a proof of a famous conjecture written by an unknown.

That was an intentional ad hominem for humor/effect?

I strongly doubt it because it is a well-known phenomenon.

If you're a well-known mathematician then you'll get a constant stream of "solutions" to famous math problems that are a waste of time to read. Sure, it is possible that you'll find the great solution in that pile. It is more likely that you'll figure it out yourself in the time you save by not wading through that junk.

If you actually take the time to read and respond to the solutions it can get much worse. There are some well-known cranks who, once they get a sense that they have an audience, Will Not Stop Writing.

There are famous exceptions to the rule. Ramanujan being the best known. However they are famous because they are so exceptional.

A person's reputation has a strong quality signal associated with it.

"He hasn't produced good work before, so there's a good chance it won't be worth my time to read his proof" is an imperfect way of allocating limited resources, not an ad hominem attack.

An ad hominem attack is a way of saving resources. Theoreticians use it to save time and effort.

> An ad hominem attack is a way of saving resources

That they are both ways of saving resources does not mean they are the same in any other way (e.g. both "wrong"). Choosing not to read your proof is not the same as declaring that the proof must be flawed because you wrote it.

You seem to have a particular instance of this behavior in mind. Not being familiar with it, I can only argue the general case. I'm sure your proof is actually quite good!

How a theoretician decides where to spend is time is irrelevant. If, however, anyone were to criticize the proof by saying "it is written by an unknown", that would be an ad hominem criticism of the proof, and hence, invalid.

When a theoretician refuses to look at a proof because it is written by an unknown, he/she is implicitly saying that the proof is very likely to be hopelessly wrong because it is written by an unknown.

Yes, you're right about that, but that still doesn't make it an "ad hominem" argument.

When a theoretician refuses to look at a proof because it is written by an unknown, he/she is implicitly stating his or her belief that the proof is very likely to be wrong. In this case, this belief is used as part of criteria for allocating time and effort.

If the same theoretician was to state that the proof is wrong because it was written by an unknown, this would constitute an argument. Said argument would be fallacious, because ad hominem argument is invalid in this case.

Incidentally, your claim that "PageRank is the biggest ad hominem attack of all time" is false precisely because of this distinction. PageRank does not constitute an argument, it's simply a sorting criterion. It's a value produced by an algorithm to determine approximate relevance of a page within the context of a search query. The value itself does not constitute an argument. However, if I were to claim that "page such-and-such presents false information on such-and-such topic because it's PageRank is bad" that would constitute a fallacious argument. However, it would still not be "ad hominem".

Now can you please repeating the same claim over and over in different comments? Repetition does not make it true.

You are splitting hairs. We don't need to stick to the precise dictionary meaning of various terms. Sometimes you gain more insight when you don't do that.

I find that statement highly ironic. After all, you were insisting on false claims about people whose very job is to split hairs. Your false claims relied on misuse of terminology invented and used by people whose very job is to split hairs. It's like complaining to a network administrator that you don't have access to network because he didn't "debug the router BIOS" and then saying he's splitting hairs when he explains why you're talking nonsense.

Don't be pedantic.

You are splitting hairs. We don't need to stick to the precise dictionary meaning of various terms. Sometimes you gain more insight when you don't do that.

It's a pity you're getting down voted, because I believe your concern is genuine and confusion valid. But precise language is very important here, epistemologically speaking - just because we sometime make decisions based on heuristics doesn't mean those heuristics are good models of reality. The distinction between making arguments to collectively determine "what model is representative of reality" and using heuristics to decide what is a convenient way to spend one's time are very different things.

I think it should be stressed that these ideas are necessarily flexible based on the quality of the thing being disagreed with. Basically, Paul's assumed that the post being argued against is ideal, and against that has built his hierarchy. In real life, an effective argument, in fact sometimes the only possible argument, against a poorly formed thesis is a poor response.

For example, the conclusion that, "a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing" is not true in the following case: Suppose someone posited that there is a blue species of monkey living in the basement below the U.S. Senate and the only reason he gave for us to believe him is that he is a trustworthy U.S. Senator. In disagreeing with him, if we bring an ad hominem attack against his trustworthiness it is entirely acceptable and relevant because his trustworthiness is the only proof he's brought in the first place.

I'm new here, but I've always assumed (by how they are used) that downvotes were for pure disagreement.

As far as I've always understood it, upvotes and downvotes relate to the value the voter perceives in an item (article or comment). If you think that the item adds value, you'll upvote it.

In most cases, agreeing with something is a prerequisite for seeing it as adding value. As a consequence, since people mostly upvote what they agree with, one tends to equate upvoting with agreement and downvoting with disagreement.

However, according to my understanding, downvoting should be used when you think that the item adds no value (or adds "negative value"). This is not the same thing as disagreement. Some examples of items that either add no or too little value are: name-calling, snarky one-liners with no useful content at all and very badly edited text (maybe the content has value, but the form negates it).

It seems though, that people are assigning an equivalence of "agree" to "has value", and "disagree" to "doesn't have value". At least this is how I've been registering the use of the vote.

Opinions appear to vary wildly as to how it should be used, but the ones that appear to make sense to me are the ones that would make sense in an actual conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021371

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021634

This article seems to me to conflate two things: how to have an exploratory discussion between two opposing viewpoints and how to win an argument.

For example, in an exploratory discussion, using your opponent's terms can lead to quicker definition of those terms, and less talking past one another. On the other hand, when trying to win an argument, allowing your opponent to frame the debate (either by using their terms or addressing/refuting their central points) can be the worst possible strategy!

I suspect that exploratory discussions where both parties are genuinely disinterested are rare in most contexts.

You shouldn't be trying to win arguments. That's the root of all argumentation evil, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, that's one aspect of debate competition I really despise, the fetishizing of winning arguments. (OTOH, the way debate teams work you're forced to fully understand opposing viewpoints in a way that few people ever do.)

This is a major point in legal philosophy (and presumably elsewhere).

I don't think I agree with you (for example) that an adversarial system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system) is inherently worse than an inquisitorial one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system).

Can you please add (2008) to this? I clicked, hoping for a new PG article.

The next step beyond refutation is synthesis; often intractable arguments are sustained because both sides have a good point that should be acknowledged but is all mixed up with not so valid assumptions.

I also think that "neutrality" or "objectivity" is an impossibility, especially in arguments about social problems. We would all benefit by admitting that we have interests at stake, and that EVERY argument usually has outcomes in terms of who gets what, no matter how "objectively" the arguers try to frame it.

The back button is my method of disagreement

I use the backspace.

Unfortunately it doesn't delete the text you disagree with :)

maybe just turn off downvoting all together?

if someone is breaking the rules, they can be flagged

if you disagree with someone don't vote them up.

This way the top comments will go to the top as usual, and interesting discussions with 100s of upvotes won't have 3 points

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013330

PageRank is the biggest ad hominem attack of all time.

I do not understand why this witty, on-topic post has been downvoted so hard. I believe it added loads to the conversation.

At first glance it is non-sequitur. On second glance it is specious. It's also redundant: Amichail's other comment about theoreticians and conjecture proofs added whatever it added to the conversation already.

Outside of the side discussion about weather PageRank is an example of an ad hominem fallacy, (which is directly related to the OT btw as per DH1)

>It's also redundant: Amichail's other comment about theoreticians and conjecture proofs added whatever it added to the conversation already

So, people can only post precisely one comment on a given topic in a thread or risk downvotes? That's the most ridiculous thing I think I've ever read. Redundancy is not a reason to downvote.

Amichail's post also received a plethora of downvotes if you notice.

Outside of the side discussion about weather PageRank is an example of an ad hominem fallacy, (which is directly related to the OT btw as per DH1)

I haven't downvoted amichail's other comments, even though I disagree with them, because they provoked a marginally interesting discussion on what does and what does not constitute an argumentum ad hominem. I did, however, downvote his comment on PageRank because, to me, it appeared to have been posted as a one-liner intended to make the author look witty without any regard to actual validity of the claim. To be brutally honest, I can go elsewhere if I want to hear or read people who want to sound witty and cool. I don't come to HN for posturing, I come for intelligent and insightful discussion.

So, people can only post precisely one comment on a given topic in a thread or risk downvotes? That's the most ridiculous thing I think I've ever read. Redundancy is not a reason to downvote.

Limiting people to only one comment would be ridiculous, yes. But downvoting excessive redundancy seems perfectly reasonable. If I state the same thing over and over in several comments, without adding anything useful to support, expand or modify my argument, then I'm just being loud and repetitive. That doesn't add any value and that's why I tend to downvote that stuff. Beating a dead horse falls into that same category, you know ;)

First, apologies for using the wrong "whether" prior.

> I did, however, downvote his comment on PageRank because, to me, it appeared to have been posted as a one-liner intended to make the author look witty without any regard to actual validity of the claim.

Which is surprising to me since PageRank is essentially an algorithm based on argument ad hominem (pages with a good reputation are better) and we all humbly accept that as being a reasonable thing to do. This questions the validity of tossing a concept like argument ad hominem into the rubbish bin of rhetorical devices. This is a both an interesting (at least to me) and unique spin on the perceptions of the fallacy in common usage.

> But downvoting excessive redundancy seems perfectly reasonable.

It would be, except by your definition and actions, you appear to consider any number of repetitions > 1 as redundant (please, correct me if I'm wrong and that number is really >2 ). I'm sorry, but you aren't the HN police, watching vigilantly for unnecessary redundancy, guideline violations and other such perceived infractions and policing as appropriate.

> Beating a dead horse falls into that same category, you know

Yes, I get that this is a reference to me and my particular grinding axe <bzzzzz!!!!!>. So long as people keep using the downvote unnecessarily and to the detriment of the discourse here, I'll keep happily grinding away.

I've upvoted you for engagement. I don't mind that you used the downvote to express some kind of disapproval of a comment, what I mind is that it's provided with no commentary. Uncommented downvotes are not helpful or instructive and imho are a bit on the rude side. I'm using my upvote here to provide positive feedback that what you are doing right now, explaining your vote, is useful, interesting and drives discussion. It's also good form concerning arguing (as per the topic).

Too bad it doesn't have a section on when and how to vote up/down. For example,

"V1:voting down because you have no sense of humor and the poster made a joke"

"V2:voting down because you nonspecifically disagree with the poster and don't actually have anything useful to say in response, in other words you downvote because you are angry at yourself."

V3: voting down because the comment is not relevant to the thread, through accidental posting in the wrong place or complete misunderstanding.

V4: downvoting proper - You have a reason in mind, e.g. post is very aggressive, comment is incoherent, comment is trivial and could be answered with a Google query, yet the only way to express your desire for "fewer comments like this on HN" is funnelling through a single downvote, so that's what you do, because explanations all the time would add a lot of noise, and you accept that it's imperfect but will probably sort itself out if enough people vote.

It is a small, but special source of pride, to see comments like my post, discussing the problems with the downvote, be downvoted into oblivion thus entirely confirming my statement.

I downvoted your post because I viewed it as insubstantial and somewhat bitter. The two reasons you provide are obviously (?) not serious reasons; they're just caricatures, so it provides a pretty poor platform for a sincere discussion about why people downvote things.

I don't really see how you can characterize it as "discussing the problems with the downvote." I would characterize it instead as "taunting people who downvote things."

I appreciate the explanation, thereby you are not in violation of notional guideline V2.

I am dead serious about both of those. I'm actually convinced that HN is absolutely and completely devoid of humor. I've actually never seen anything like it.

Given that the topic of downvotes constitute the vast majority of this entire topic and most of the threads, and that the only place pg has bothered to respond was regarding the brokeness of downvoting, it's quite obviously not an insubstantial point I was trying to make.

Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny.

A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny.

I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in. I believe the problem with throwaway jokes is that they're so easy. Among 1,000 average readers, perhaps 5 of them have an insightful comment about, i.e. a new feature in R6RS Scheme, but 500 of them could easily post a silly joke about parentheses. Result? If you try to talk about Scheme you get 495 jokes for every piece of expert commentary. Not cool.

(Realistically, there are many other kinds of comments that are problematic in this way. For example, it's easy to religiously stick to one big general paradigm and zealously apply it to everything, so you wind up with some of that. It's easy to attack people instead of confronting complicated ideas, so you wind up with some of that. I think it's just a consequence of less-informed but social people trying to find an angle by which to contribute. Sometimes I'm guilty of this myself!)

Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff.

> Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny.

Which is a general policy that ensures you'll never see a joke here (screamingly funny or not). I don't think I know anybody who can produce jokes that fit your requirements at any rate even close to 100%. So I would assume, rather than risk it, why would somebody bother if some dude is just going to come by and downmod it anyways? The downvote surpresses the desire of people to even want to try.

I'm not saying that all jocularity is equal. Jokes about "your mom" probably deserve a downvote (and depending on the vulgarity maybe a flag). But somebody making a witty retort, while perhaps not deserving of praise should probably be left unmolested. I've heard more jokes at a convention of priests than I see regularly on HN.

Put another way, a downvote for a harmless comment is the real life equivalent of somebody making conversation with you, inserts a subtle attempt at humor, and you then proceed to glare at them, turn around and walk away. It's not helpful. But I do understand not wanting to respond back in a humorous way either, otherwise we end up with 4chan and all the irrelevant absurdity that comes with going that direction.

However, due to this kind of behavior we end up with a possible HN as it could be (which may be perfectly fine by you, I don't know), of stuffy pedantic and pretentious pseudo-conversationalists who'd rather police a message forum than actually contribute something useful or interesting (or gasp even marginally funny). Maybe that's the goal, I don't know. But it makes for boring reading and conversation.

> A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny.

You flagged that thread? Are you serious? I think that's outrageous!

I've seen this same image before, and I was crying laughing at it. It also could have spawned a useful discussion on perception of platform choice when building software. Customers can be users of software too, and in my experience, what language you use can positively or negatively impact perception of your product and company. The opportunity to have some interesting discourse on that topic is now dead.

> I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in.

But it wasn't a picture of LOLCATS or or a guy getting hit in the crotch with a frisbee or some such. It was at least marginally related, in theory, to the kinds of discussions we should be having on HN. I perfectly understand your desire to seek out interesting and relevant discussion to your particular areas of interest. If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate.

For example, I don't think a thread on R6RS is particularly interesting or useful to a startup-oriented tech discussion forum -- marginally used language discussions should be left on the language maintainer's own forum. But if I saw a topic on the front page about it, I'd leave it absolutely unmolested because somebody thought it was interesting enough to deserve upvotes and it has about the same theoretical relevancy to HN as did the image matrix of language choice perception.

> Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you. I can understand the continuous meta-discussion here about how to keep HN from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slope. But I think we have to be aware of, and meta-discuss how to keep HN from going the opposite direction, that of becoming so rarefied that any nonconforming comments are immediately stifled and the entire board dies except for a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber.

I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons, which is a consequence of coming to a website that now has one zillion readers. My primary interest by far here happens to be serious (preferably very stuffy) programming language and computer science discussion. (I'm interested in many other things, but I have other communities with which I prefer to discuss them; HN seems like kind of an echo chamber personality-wise.) My upvoted submissions are a good list of the things I like to read here: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mquander

I also personally have absolutely zero interest in startup and business discussion, which puts me far outside the target audience for very many articles here, although I leave them alone since that's the stated purpose of the site. So I recognize that my tastes may not represent HN any better than yours, if such a thing can be measured.

Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that.

One thing, however. Your stated policy is: "If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate." That seems like a principled and friendly approach. But I'm not sure it scales. The front page (and the comment threads) only have so much bandwidth. Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology. I know that many posts which would interest me greatly would then be buried on page N; judge for yourself whether this is the case for you.

Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet.

I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions.

> I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons...

True, but there's an obvious intersection of the things we are interested in. We just have to figure out how to play friendly concerning the other things in our interest sets.

> Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology.

Well, the good news is that HN has posting guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Despite what certain members of the HN community would have you think, these aren't "rules", but they do serve a useful function in focusing the site on a core set of topic areas. I don't think there is much danger of HN becoming reddit in that sense. HN effectively acts like 2 or 3 narrowly focused subreddits on reddit.com.

> Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that.

Well, to my understanding, posts that are completely out of guidelines should be flagged. If somebody submits a post with a link to his blog about his Camaro, it's probably okay to flag it ;) A post to something like http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ should probably just not be upvoted if you don't care for it.

I could even see a downvote for something like the referenced post to the programming language perception matrix. But like I said, it could be an interesting driver of discussion.

> Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet.

Well, I think the reason most people come here is for the rather constrained topic set and the emphasis on interesting discussion (not to mention being populated with a very interesting mix of people). But it would also become very uninteresting in the general sense if it become a forum for academic discussions of programming esoterica.

> I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions.

That's really what all my pining away is on this thread, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. I'm a bit shocked and amazed to see a population of people here that are unwilling to do the same. I understand they are peeved at being called out for bad etiquette, but I find the discourse on this site amazing when the mechanisms for the discourse are working properly.

> Which is a general policy that ensures you'll never see a joke here (screamingly funny or not).

Apart from it being untrue, (you can find some unfunny jokes in my comment history that escaped downvotes for instance), it's a good thing that there are some places where every topic or thread doesn't collapse into a witty-retort-fest.

> The downvote surpresses the desire of people to even want to try

And thus HN people collectively adjust the shape of HN to taste.

> who'd rather police a message forum than actually contribute something useful or interesting

What you've just said is that because jokes are frowned upon, nobody will contribute anything useful or interesting. I don't think that follows, and the knowledge that if you post something, the reply is unlikely to be a one line attempt at humour encourages longer more thoughtful comments.

> Maybe that's the goal, I don't know. But it makes for boring reading and conversation.

No, it makes for very interesting reading and occasional actual conversation rather than banter.

> The opportunity to have some interesting discourse on that topic is now dead.

Dead here. You could post it at reddit and see what happens. You seem to be present at HN, so presumably you like it, yet only be in favour of downvoting spam and offensive stuff. If you do that, it's not HN anymore it's a general news aggregator. It can't be at the same time about a restricted set of ideas and topics selected by the votes of the people who are here, and also open to everyone to comment anything on any topic, that's contradictory.

> I perfectly understand your desire to seek out interesting and relevant discussion to your particular areas of interest. If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate.

Or, you could find somewhere else where LOLprogrammers comics are relevant, and don't penalize 'us' who don't want to participate by trying to change here so that is relevant here as well.

Given that not-everything is OK here, there will be people who don't fit in, don't like what is posted and don't like what is excluded. If that's not what you want, the choices are to find or start somewhere else where the limited subset of things more aligns with you, or to break open every niche and limited site until everywhere has everything as an allowed topic.

I'm not trying to say that everything I like should be allowed and you should go away, I'm trying to say that people who are present are shaping HN with votes and sometimes I agree and sometimes I don't and if and when I disagree more than agree it will be time for me to change or leave. Until then I throw my votes into the mix as well and see what happens.

> Yes, I absolutely agree with you

You so don't, you've argued against everything he said.

> a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber

Isn't that inherent the very nature of a group that can't discuss everything?

> What you've just said is that because jokes are frowned upon, nobody will contribute anything useful or interesting. I don't think that follows, and the knowledge that if you post something, the reply is unlikely to be a one line attempt at humour encourages longer more thoughtful comments.

I don't think that's what I said at all, but If I was confusing I apologize. I'll try and say it succinctly, if people go out of their way to post something reasonably interesting or thoughtful, but possibly counter to a commonly held viewpoint, it tends to get downvoted around here. Those downvotes are a way of saying "you are not conforming to the group mind, shape up". A thoughtful or interesting post doesn't have to be long. Short, pithy ones are just as interesting, yet also get downvoted for not conforming to the group mind.

For example, on the validity of argument ad hominem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021182

This was immediately downvoted, yet it's a wildly interesting contradictory thought and mildly funny as well. It's concise, witty and provokes the common perception regarding such arguments. My conjecture is two fold:

1) It's clear that a population of HN members simply didn't understand it and thought it was purely a joke, and annihilated it (because what people don't understand they tend to attack). Nobody who didn't get it took the time to write a three word reply "why is that?" - instead resorting to the downvote.

2) Given that this seems to happen quite a bit around here, a person who finds themselves habitually downvoted will perceive that negative community response, not as a process of a social normative function (after all, the community guidelines desire interesting comments, if a person is supplying interesting comments, they are already "normal") but as a process of rejection by the community and will simply stop providing input to the community.

This has two effects:

1) An interesting voice will no longer be heard, the quality of the discussion will become artificially limited by a social majority.

2) Since only comments that conform to the social majority's viewpoints survive, comments will only reflect the social majority - ergo an "echo chamber" will form.

> And thus HN people collectively adjust the shape of HN to taste.

If the taste is a bunch of people trading the same ideas around over and over again, it's not very useful other than to confirm their own preselected ideas and assumptions. We get smarter when our ideas are challenged by dissenting or contradictory voices. It helps us evaluate our viewpoint and beliefs. The reason an echo chamber is bad, is that no new viewpoints ever enter to "stir the pot" and force people to reevaluate things and become smarter and grow. If HN is to become an echo chamber, then it's better to not have HN at all since everybody already knows everything. The taste of an echo chamber is stale. History tends to cherish the revolutionaries far more than those that maintain the status quo. At any rate, they add flavor to the mix.

> No, it makes for very interesting reading and occasional actual conversation rather than banter.

I agree that, in the general sense, banter is not what HN is for. But I think forums are better if people can feel a little bit free to express their opinions and personalities a bit and not be constrained to an academic discussion all the time. The tempo of this site is fast enough, and the general population seems to be experienced enough, that short comments can still contain lots of meaning (like my example above).

> If you do that, it's not HN anymore it's a general news aggregator. It can't be at the same time about a restricted set of ideas and topics selected by the votes of the people who are here, and also open to everyone to comment anything on any topic, that's contradictory.

I don't think there is a lot of danger of that happening, as this meta-discussion is demonstrating, the HN community is vastly interested in the quality of the site.

In addition, the topics of discussion are reasonably constrained via guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Now, these aren't rules per se, but they state what the intended theme of the site should be. I don't think there is much danger of seeing Ron Paul and Kucinich posts swamping the front page any-time soon. But a post about a new law affecting business in say South Korea is on topic. It may not be to you if all you care about is say, discussions on Scheme, but it is to me since Korea is a technology oriented place to do business and such laws may have interesting ramifications for startups elsewhere. I'm in business, I'm in technology, and I may do technology related business in South Korea.

> Or, you could find somewhere else where LOLprogrammers comics are relevant, and don't penalize 'us' who don't want to participate by trying to change here so that is relevant here as well.

That's like saying "don't penalize us who don't want to watch reality T.V. by putting it in the programming queue for the station I just happen to be watching! I'm powerless to change the channel or turn off the TV! It makes me to upset I'm going to write a letter to the station and demand that they remove all reality TV from their programming lineup!"

It's nonsensical and silly.

A submitted topic is like a virtual salon, if you don't like the nature of the conversation in that salon, feel free to try the next room, don't burn down the building.

>Given that not-everything is OK here, there will be people who don't fit in, don't like what is posted and don't like what is excluded. If that's not what you want, the choices are to find or start somewhere else where the limited subset of things more aligns with you, or to break open every niche and limited site until everywhere has everything as an allowed topic.

I'm reading that to mean that the lurking downvote patrol trolls here are the ones that don't fit in, yet don't seem to be able to "move to another salon without burning the previous one down". Again, just because you may not be interested in doing business in South Korea, doesn't mean that the people participating in that thread aren't. Feel free to move along, don't deep-six the discussion for everyone else who is interested.

> You so don't, you've argued against everything he said.

You apparently ran out of steam and couldn't be bothered to read the rest of the statement. Here, I'll paste it here for you again. "I can understand the continuous meta-discussion here about how to keep HN from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slope. But I think we have to be aware of, and meta-discuss how to keep HN from going the opposite direction, that of becoming so rarefied that any nonconforming comments are immediately stifled and the entire board dies except for a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber."

> Isn't that inherent the very nature of a group that can't discuss everything?

No, I think you need to lookup the meaning of the term "echo chamber". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

In short, they are something to be avoided because they limit rational thought.

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