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Comment by president | Hacker News Reader

Something really needs to be done about downvote brigading on HN. At least people should be required to provide a reason for the downvote.

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Please don't break the site guidelines. They ask you not to post like this for several good reasons, one of which is that it takes time for the voting on comments to settle. Often unfair downvotes get canceled by users who come along, see the situation, and make a corrective upvote. Meanwhile complaints like this one linger on in the thread, gathering dust and adding inaccuracy to offtopicness. They don't garbage-collect themselves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The guidelines also, for several good reasons, ask you not to post about "brigading" and the like. These perceptions are nearly always imaginary, as the current example illustrates. Everyone sees something they don't like and says "aha! brigading!". Nobody sees it change to the opposite and then says "oh! guess I was wrong about that." I've looked at the data on this closely for years, and the conclusion is that with rare exceptions (and I do mean rare) it is all cognitive bias of the purest form. Cognitive bias plus randomness equals narrative. It also equals noise in HN threads—and it evokes worse from others who have the opposite bias and take it as flamebait against their side.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That’s not scalable. But maybe a 1/N probability of being required to do so, for reasonable N.

(Edit: something like slashdots categories could work but you’d need some incentive to be truthful rather than trust them to separate a “troll” from a “disagree”.)

Plus, if anything, I’d say it’s more common for there to be a bias against downvoting relative to upvoting.

Maybe- comment required to downvote, or upvote on existing child comment required to downvote

Oh nice, so you have to endorse some existing response (which could be your own) in order to downvote. That could work!

The limit is about three comments every couple of hours or so. Downvotes on the other hand, are limitless. That should not change while there is a limit on comments. Voting is really the only major way to interact with this site. Three comments every few hours leave no room for actual discussion.

That's because your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit: I took a look at your account's recent comments because often we just remove rate limits when the problem has been corrected. Unfortunately, in this case the opposite is true. Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It destroys the curious conversation that HN is intended for, so we have to ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What notifications do you see when your account has been restricted?

That depends on the nature of the restriction. One is:

  You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.

I've wondered if a five-a-day downvote limit would benefit HN.

Or just make it cost karma. Anyone that down-votes too much would wind up at the threshold for down-voting and be rate limited by their ability to make up-voted comments. It would also render ineffective the strategy of having a bunch of accounts with enough karma to downvote and using those accounts all at once to make comments you don't like dead (the presence of corporate or state controlled accounts employing this strategy has been suggested multiple times).

The way to game that is to just upvote random comments that you don't care about in stories that you don't care about, just to have made enough upvotes to enable you to downvote again.

I meant have comments that get upvoted, not upvote other comments.

Oh. That's harder, but not much. You just need two accounts. Make some innocuous comments on account 1, upvote them with account 2. Now you can downvote from account 1.

I think they already rate limit down votes. I think I recall seeing at least a few not apply when I checked as an experiment in the past.

I try to up vote at least twice as much as I down vote. If I down vote a a low quality comment, I try to at least up vote 2 quality ones to offset it.

Slashdot had (still has as far as I know) a daily limit on up and down votes, and quite a small one at that (I think 5?). It also prevents you from voting and commenting on the same topic.

I agree that downvoting should be mainly for either a mean post, a post that adds nothing ("me too" or "lol"), or a poor argument like an ad hominem or incorrect premises. Instead it's used for feelings, as if we could collectively vote on reality. Maybe dang/mods could put some ever-present reminder someplace in the comment 'reply' page.

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