Hacker News Reader

Comment by eevilspock | Hacker News Reader

Silent downvotes right on schedule!

I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym.

I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.

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So let's consider the alternative - forcing people to comment on downvoting.

Let's say I see a post that is clearly not contributing to the discussion (on my personal opinion of course, not that I have any other one :) or is too misguided to even argue with, or lacks any redeeming merit, etc. Now, I want less of this on HN, so I am going to downvote it.

Now, let's say I'm forced to comment on it. I can't really say anything useful about it, and maybe even if I could I don't want to bother - if it was worthy discussion-wide, I wouldn't want to -1 it in the first place - so I'd say something like "this is just stupid". Or "-1 for not presenting a sane argument" or something like that.

Now, what happens when the comment author sees it? He comments "no, your face is stupid!" of course. And so we get a whole mess we wanted to avoid.

And now people see this whole mess and want to bury it so it doesn't stink up their nice discussion. But they are forced to comment too, so instead of removing the mess they are making it worse and make people hate each other for no reason but disagreeing on who started this mess.

Does not look like an improvement to me.

You ignored the alternative that I suggested.

I wonder whether any of the Hacker News staff contributes back to the Arc Forum project?

Hacker News may be Arc's most successful implementation (may not be, I don't know) but it does seem as if there's potential being wasted in keeping it a black box.

I think it would be solved by requiring a comment with each downvote. The motivations for an upvote are obvious but a downvote should have to explain why, even if it something as simple as "citation needed" or "factually incorrect, here's why."

I often get the sense that anonymous and unexplained downvotes carry a sense of "this post is so obviously wrong it defies the need for explanation," which means that nobody learns anything from the exchange.

EDIT: I got downvoted for this comment and I have no idea why

That would result in too many redundant comments. Many people will down-vote for exactly the same reason.

Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

> Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

We never hear complaints about people not distinguishing between "I subjectively like or agree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively sound or rests on good data".

How can HN distinguish when even its users cannot? "Objectivity" is so subjective.

Devil's Advocate: HN could then create a special category of comment - the downvote comment. Upvoting a downvote comment would downvote the parent, thus grouping similar sentiment.

I agree with you though, on both points.

> I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".

I would like having strong AI driving HN too. Because humans are very bad at distinguishing those two and confuse them all the time. Once we invent the AI that allows people to separate them I'd be all for using it here on HN.

In that case, it seems to me all of the value lies in the comment, and none in the downvote.

I agree, but I think the comment should be a private message, seen by only the commenter (and perhaps the mods). I don't like seeing a comment thread cluttered up by debates about whether a comment deserves down votes.

1: Presumably, people won't post redundant downvote comments. One or two tends to get the point across.

2: You can still collapse threads.

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