Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

The article they refer to wasn't upvoted because the HN community thinks it's a good insightful article, it's because they (we) agree with it, and obviously because we care about it.

Upvoting because you agree and downvoting because you don't is still the biggest problem with ranking posts and comments . If it can be fixed, the fix would have to somehow remove the emotional aspect of voting.

That said, I don't fully agree that the article didn't deserve to be on the front page of Hacker News. For me, and possibly other startup workers HN is a source of inspiration.

Any article related to problems, solutions and technology themes in general might serve as inspiration to a great startup idea. Wether it's the millionth article about bitcoin, or a post about Timmy stuck in a well.

View on HN

Generally speaking, I don't mind the Apple fanboyism in the articles because it's relatively well-balanced in the comments. (And because at this point I recognize the Marco/Daring Fireball/etc group of domains well enough to avoid them)

The one complaint that I definitely have about the HN quo is how it feels like conversations are trying to be transposed onto the medium; someone posts a PHP/Apple/Olympics rant and then half the top links are swallowed by thinly veiled 'responses'. It seems like the wrong approach, splitting multiple conversations on the some topic.

If you are an apple fan, then it seems balanced. On an absolute level it is not balanced. You notice this subtle bias everywhere, most likely because many people use macs.

I've seen questions about how to do something in linux/windows downvoted (replying to people who suggested homebrew or macports)

For what it's worth, I have an iPhone and iPad but no plans to switch from my windows laptop.

And I have a macbook, and no plans to switch from my android phone. Still have a windows partition though.

>someone posts a PHP/Apple/Olympics rant and then half the top links are swallowed by thinly veiled 'responses'.

Love it or hate it, it's the new self-promotion/branding via blogging. If a controversial article makes it to the top of a popular or niche internet forum like HN, and you have something of substance to say about it, it's infinitely better to post your thoughts on your own blog instead of in the comments of the social news submission.

The niche forum sees it, and you can claim credit in the comments, associating your handle with your blog. But more people may see it - potential clients, employees, funders, cofounders, employees, etc - and it's good way of beating writer's block and adding content to your professional blog.

Additionally, there's a soft limit to how negative you can be in the comments, where you can be downvoted. Submissions can only be flagged, not downvoted, and if you flag more than two submissions a day, your flag button is disabled. (It looks like it still works, but your flags no longer affect the ranking of a submission)

I don't think upvoting-on-agreement problem can be fixed technically. It's a cultural problem, and it should be fixed by internalizing the better model (see below), and then spreading it loudly enough and discouraging the default human reaction ("upvoting those who think like me"), because it ruins the signal-to-noise ratio in most of online communities.

The best rule on whether to upvote I've seen is this:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#What_are_the_moderation_r...

"Please do not vote comments up or down based mainly on whether you agree with them, unless the comment consists of a proposal and you wish to register your opinion regarding the proposal.

"Instead, vote on comments to the degree to which they improve the accuracy of your map. For example, a comment that you agree with that says nothing new should be voted down or left alone. A comment you initially disagree with that causes you to update some in favor of the author's opinion should be voted up."

"I don't think upvoting-on-agreement problem can be fixed technically."

I think there is a technical fix: two orthogonal upvotes. One upvote/downvote pair for agreement, another for whether the post/comment added value. It's a pretty simple fix and I think it would work, but it could have other unwanted side-effects.

People would just hit both down arrows.

Very good point.

This could still perhaps be solved technically, although it would take a lot of effort and is probably not worth it.

You can detect cheaters. People who give up/downvotes on the "value add" dimension that are not well correlated with the community's opinion of value add would be detected as cheaters, or at least detected as users who do not share the same values as the community.

Much harder to do, but possible, is to detect cheating in agreement by analyzing trends. Users who agreed with story A, B, and C may have a 90% chance of agreeing with story D. A user who bucks these trends enough can be detected as cheating or randomly voting.

A few people would, but many others would be able to say "This is a quality comment, but stupid idea".

The site could display the "down-correlation" number, which will be high if someone consistently hits both down arrows at once.

I'd like the quoted text in the berekuk comment enabled as a tooltip on the uparrow, as a mouseover.

I'll contribute $10 for somebody to add this feature. Where's the "tip" jar?

I'd be interested to see if downvotes were only allowed along with a comment explaining the downvote.

I'd just like to see how that played out.

That would lead to general inflation. You need to give comments on both directions.

What I'd like to see is article downvoting. As it stands there is no user-inflicted punishment for posting a sensationalized or otherwise terrible article

Which just shows how few people up-vote articles. Getting front page of HN easily gets you 5-10k pageviews if not more, yet your average top story has 100 votes. Most people consume without contributing in any way.

I actually very rarely upvote stories at all. Both here and on reddit.

What if you had to add your opinion everytime you up/downvoted?

Self-reported opinion is terrible. That assumes people would be honest about it ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com