The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

It makes me wish downvotes weren't a thing. I'm okay with flagging, since I mostly see comments flagged that clearly break HN's simple rules.

I think this ignores the concept of purpose. If you are optimizing for popularity, then this works. But a lot of forums (including Hacker News, theoretically) intend to optimize for relevance, which is contrary to popularity in many cases.

For a really clear-cut example, Kim Kardashian's Instagram posts get far more likes than pretty much any post on Hacker News. Would Hacker News be better if it were replaced with a redirect to Kim Kardashian's Instagram feed? In terms of how popular the content is, this is an unambiguous yes. But that would not be a better Hacker News, it would just be more popular because you've replaced Hacker News with something completely different.

That's an extreme example, but the same applies for content that's more relevant than Kim Kardashian's instagram feed. Popularity measures breadth of appeal more than anything else, so if you're trying to appeal to specific interests or cultivate some kind of niche content, popularity can be a negative. Downvotes can function as a way for a site's userbase to say, "Whoa, this is not what this place is supposed to be about, even if it is broadly appealing."

Exactly. And this is actually something that I like about Twitter, and hate about Reddit. Don't like what I post? Reply and say it.

Any upvotes would be greatly appreciated.

In terms of the social structure of Spolsky thought "How do I move the Turtle in LOGO" [1] was a good question for the site (he wrote it).

Atwood thought it was a bad question. Judging people's character by the questions they ask became standard. And people have an excuse to be rude and abusive on the site.

Which is unfortunate.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you post the result please:

SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100

You've quite well described my latest experienced with StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer" that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted and given quality answers.

HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.

Hello Reddit. Unfortunately now I basically just use Reddit to browse and don't comment much, because of that behaviour

It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.

If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.

What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.

12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.

Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.

Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly controversial and important topics are being removed with this mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.

I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

What do you think HN does get wrong?

Phrasing it in a more positive way, what could you do to raise the quality of conversation on HN even higher?

See: any thread about aeronautics, education, or (historical) warfare.

I would also expect such a place to have a magnitude or two fewer people.

Habr.com makes both up and downvotes costly, and they have an evolved system checks and balances. The best I´ve seen. They can even fight off Kremlin bots successfully, this is major feat in their region/language of choice.

- You can earn points but never lose them by submitting URLs for discussion.

- You can't lose more than 4 points per post, no matter how many times it is downvoted. There is no upper limit to points gained from a single upvoted comment.

- There is only a 24 hour time window in which comments can be downvoted, but they can still be upvoted even months later.

The expertise problem is harder. Sometimes I see a post that has more misconceptions than sentences, but is grammatically correct and written in a confident tone. Only people who actually understand the subject matter will spot the problems quickly. It's tedious to write introductory level corrections for commonly repeated mistakes. For some of them I have considered keeping a mini-FAQ locally and pasting standard responses to standard misconceptions, but HN also discourages repeating identical posts.

If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either. The saving grace of the downvote is that it affects comment sorting order, so at least misconception-heavy posts that are downvoted won't dominate the upper reaches of the discussion page.

Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to death elsewhere. You can definitely see downvotes used as simple disagreement or for punishing unpopular speech (rather than being wrong, let's say). That's a bummer but is a side effect of modern times.

Let's say that a issuing a downvote resulted in a 15 minute break from posting or voting. You gotta want to do it.

" people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about."

I'm afraid that's baked deeply into the DNA of computer programmers.

If shutting someone else up (and let's not mince words here... that is exactly what you are doing) isn't worth even a token cost to you, maybe you should reconsider whether shutting them up is truly justified in the first place.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, quality posts are almost always downvoted immediately. (I assume it's by self-promoters hoping that it will cause their content to rise in the rankings.)

Hiding posts scores has helped with bandwagoning, but I wish the two options were "upvote" and "report to mods."

Comments that hit -1 can still recover. Comments rarely recover after -3 or so. The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.

And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly addressing the parent comment

Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is hidden

You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner.

My experience is that:

- voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations

- dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example)

- greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable.

> I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?

I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.

Just don't grey out comments for 2 hours or so to allow people to vote. It's fine to greyout comments after that.

I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong nor easily disagreed with, and thus incurring the most upvotes from simply being quick to read.

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

I'd guess that's the point - giving power over visibility to users who've proved themselves in line with the forum zeitgeist helps maintain a site's culture as-is and prevent it "diversifying" into Smaller Facebook #50691.

(Or rather, I do want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses, and I want to be able to delete other people's comments", and I recognise that's bad, and that a vote system limits the maximum damage I can do to one vote per comment).

With that in mind, I'd likely just not have downvotes period. If something is low quality enough to deserve a downvote, then it should be in violation of my community standards. Downvotes are designed to stop engagement. That's not the kind of thing I'd want unless it's something bad.

Then maybe do something a little different with upvotes. Say after you upvote with a comment a certain number of times, you get access to a quick upvote option. Or canned upvote comments.

And maybe general comments would count as an upvote unless you uncheck the box. That way we could keep generic upvote comments like "well thought out argument" or "he used good references" in their own little section without stifling good interactions.

For you. I see two arrows - one for upvoting and one for downvoting - next to every comment in this thread.

[edit] Haha, somehow missed that this was a quote from the article, sorry :D

There's been a couple of blog posts from the SE staff trying to move the needle on how close/downvote happy the community is.

This reads to me like charging people to pick up trash while they're out walking. Voting is a mini-act of trying to improve the site for others by sweeping trash comments down and out of others' way and lifting good comments up to prominence; who would pay to do that? Who would think it reasonable to expect people to pay to do it?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358992/youtube-hiding-d...

That might change soon: https://mobile.twitter.com/YouTube/status/137694248659415040...

I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren’t missing out on much. To get your comment dead in my experience you have to either be extremely inflammatory or just spout absolute nonsense.

Simple:

If you downvote you have to give a reason, you cannot simply downvote, I can write a script to downvote every post on here everyday. You have to provide a reason for the down vote, and your reason can be upvoted or downvoted, but they have to give a reason which can be up or down voted and so on.

If you up vote, you have to give a reason, and your reason can be up or down voted but that up or down vote has to have a reason that can be up or down voted and so on.

Recursion. Get it? I don't understand why a site populated but programmers did not think of it, I have suggested it like a million times and it gets down voted, again for no reason given, for all we know a bot is doing it.

It is sort of an obvious thing, I am probably not going to try again because it is just too annoying.

Good bye.

Also, I think in those days you did see vote numbers, but you didn't see the big obvious greying out of downvoted comments that exists today.

Scottopherson 5 minutes ago | unvote | parent | flag | favorite | on: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets ...

Don't feel bad that you didn't notice - I was reading HN for a long time before I realised that un-upvoting was possible.

Regarding anything else about how Hacker News works, I found this quite useful:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

***FAQ***

What does this mean?

The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Red-I mean "hacker" "news" account has decreased by one.

Why did you do this?

There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to:

*Rudeness towards other Posters,

*Spreading incorrect information,

*Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a `/s`.

Am I banned from the HN?

No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy. If you accrue enough down-votes, dang will be forced to hellban or IP-ban you, which will completely and permanently prevent you from using the website whatsoever (until you get another account and IP which takes like 2 minutes).

I don't believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it?

Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception.

How can I prevent this from happening in the future?

Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on news.ycombinator.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: HN is privilege, not a right.*

So what presumably happened is that he noticed that philosophy, sound as it may be on paper, created a miserable atmosphere.

I think the thing is though, HN and reddit don't give you options to remove these numbers because they have an effect. It's the nudge they give to people to adjust their contributions to be something the community actually wants. No shock these services are not offering options to turn that nudge off.

It might be nice of them to give the tally as class to make it easy to filter with a userstyle, though.

I think you're totally right with the first sentence I've quoted. The second has some truth to it, but I think it's a more personal effect than you seem to be acknowledging.

The most common complaint of long-time forum members is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down. In reality, the signal-to-noise ratio could stay the same, but for any individual community member, we will personally find less signal in the noise. The discussions will inevitably become predictable to us.

When we first join a forum with a particular focus, we likely have an incredibly incomplete view of the topics being discussed, or at least that community's interpretations of those topics (some of which might change our mind). We'll have lots of epiphanies. We'll connect a lot of dots that we hadn't connected before. We'll have real world experiences that we can anchor to discussions in the forum, allowing us to bring our life context into the forum and the forum context into our lives.

Over time, though, we'll be learning less and less from the forums. The forum discourse can initially advance somewhat as we come to useful consensus on some topics, and as the earlier members have more life experiences. For any forum that allows new members, the discourse is bound to hit a steady state of much more slowly evolving discourse. In the long run, forums likely evolve at roughly the same rate as society as whole.

The forum still fills a very useful function for those new starry-eyed members who have a lot to learn and much room to grow. For them, the adventure and discourse and overall experience is nearly as good as it was for the early forum members.

Meanwhile, those early members continue to grow at human rates, not society rates. We outgrow the forums. We start to see similar points over and over again, ones we've already argued to death and assessed for ourselves. We've personally experienced supporting and contradictory anecdotal evidence for many of the forum's consensus viewpoints. The "signal" at this point mostly comes from discussing entirely new events in the forum's focus area. The sorts of things where you might say, "I wonder what HN thinks about this?"

Therein lies the rub. As we personally have discussed to death the technical topics that drew us to HN, we almost wish to give "the HN treatment" to broader areas, especially philosophy, politics, and other current events. But we are not experts in these areas. It might feel exciting to us to discuss these things with our peers, but to anyone looking in from the outside, we're a bunch of bumbling idiots who think we know it all. If these topics start to dominate the conversation, the forum is no longer interesting to newcomers. Foremost experts in these areas have little reason to visit the forum, so any advancing discourse is much slower than it was for the original forum topic.

Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud in this comment. I guess my conclusion is that it's probably best to strive to keep the forum on topic, even if it gets boring for the oldtimers. I think it's totally fine for members to realize they've outgrown the forum and move onto other ways of spending their remaining time on this planet. We can take some satisfaction in the role that we played in the forum's early growth, and we can be grateful for the role that it played in our growth. And we can let the next generation muddle on in our stead, experiencing their own adventures while moving the center in their own direction.

I manage an instant messaging community of about 10000 stem professionals and you can see negative community feedback loops develop or die down in real time depending on how you act on them. It's evident new members take in the vibe when they arrive and act to reinforce good or bad trends. If you let people make crass jokes, soon they're posting rude comments then insulting each others. If you let people post memes about technical topics, soon it's random tiktok videos, then it's porn. If you let a regular member go off on a newbie who asks a bad question, the next thing you know people are bullying newcomers left and right.

All I wanted was to build a nice virtual gathering spot and meet cool people but now I have to play fascist because the feedback effect is so strong.

Would you lose respect for a professional nurse's nursing opinions if he said learning to nurse is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it?

I see this sentiment a lot on HN. The fatal opinion minefield.