Observations on what's getting downvoted, with some dissected specimens
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Why? The ridiculous system here that gives you one shot at hitting the right button with no chance to correct your mistake. I've seen too many comments saying, "Sorry, I was trying to upvote your comment and fat-fingered the downvote button by mistake." I often read HN on my phone or a tablet and it will be all too easy for me to do that.
Reddit, for all its flaws, gets this right. If you tap the wrong button or change your mind, perhaps after realizing that you misunderstood something, you can fix it.
OTOH HN actually has a fair number of usability issues, though it doesn't seem like there is much interest in fixing them (I'm sure PG has plenty of other things to do). I think this might be partly because this board is written in some form of LISP so less people will be comfortable tweaking the source.
Would it be heresy to suggest a re-implementation in something like rails, or gasp even PHP?
Your mistake will result in someone losing a point on a website. Sure, it would be better if you could fix that but it's not a big deal.
You can make truly catastrophic mistakes everyday driving a car or even pushing an update. On HN other users can easily rectify minor slip-ups like that.
A much worse mistake is upvoting crap. That is really damaging to the site.
1. The cultures of the communities are largely technical, which is a culture that tends to care more about accuracy and truth, rather than just how closely a comment hews to personal opinions. It's okay to disagree if you present reasonably worthwhile support in the post.
2. The structure of the communities only allows highly valued members to down vote. On Slashdot all moderation (up or down) is controlled by the karma system, and metamoderation "watches the watchers". Here on HN, you must have quite a bit of karma (I think ~500 these days) before you can down vote.
Compare to Reddit, which in most subreddits probably the worst quality moderation I've ever seen in a community. Unpopular truths are downvoted to oblivion, and lies rise to the top if they validate popularly held beliefs. The only exception that comes to mind is /r/askscience, which sets a very high bar to comment at all--all answers must be presented by proven experts or contain references to scientific publications.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the tendency of technical people to value accuracy and truth over personal opinions. In my experience, people who are technical also tend to have very strong opinions about everything, especially if the subject is technical in nature.
>>The structure of the communities only allows highly valued members to down vote... Here on HN, you must have quite a bit of karma (I think ~500 these days) before you can down vote.
500 karma is really easy to accumulate. All one has to do is conform with popular opinion, and for an active poster it would take a month or so. I was under 500 karma recently, and I kept thinking to myself how much easier it would have been if I had posted in threads about controversial topics and just agreed with everyone. If I had sided with Samsung for example, and spouted the popular (but wrong) opinion that the decision hurts innovation.
What would be the value of karma gained that way? (I mean value for myself - is there any value in being a phony??)
When (or if) I can downvote is not very interesting either - so far I get a lot of great content from HN - like valuable book recommendations. Karma won't make it any better.
What I'd like is HN to remain a good source of information for as long as possible, since I am still finding lot of great info. Karma could help that, but would require an activate participation on my behalf (like clicking for downvoting - consider I rarely highvote, odds are it won't be very useful to me)
Just yesterday I saw a post of mine get voted below - 4 for just questioning the interest of an approach - I first tried to explain how, in my sense, the proposed approach was wrong, gave an example, then basically gave up - not because of the karma but because there are better things to do with one's time.
Everytime there is a score, we humans want to try and max it out. It's a natural tendency, but not always for the better- sometimes thinking whether it might be worth it helps :-)
Karma on HN seems especially worthless. You quickly see who's posting sense and who's not - for ex I didn't need to see the user actual score to consider yummyfajitas posts very interesting and worth spending time to read
...
* If I had sided with Samsung for example, and spouted the popular (but wrong) opinion that the decision hurts innovation.*
Irony.
That aside, voting systems by design favor majority opinion. From the few stories that discuss it, the behind the scenes moderation that goes on here is likely the differentiating factor in comment quality from sites like reddit. The ability to down vote only after participating in the community for a while is just one of many heuristics for moderating the community.
It's more complicated than that. Different voting systems lead to different outcomes, even with the same voters. Just compare discussions on here or reddit with answers on stackexchange.
Though of course, you might chalk that up under the heading of moderation.
Certain (small!) subreddits have these places matched, if not beat.
The key word is small: Once the community grows to become a true microcosm of Reddit, which is a microcosm of a good bit of the English-language Internet, it becomes cat pictures and memes as far as the eye can see because that is what most people want. Individuals decry it, but there is no single countervailing force big enough to do anything about it except, you know, start a new (small!) subreddit.
So /r/politics is a hole but /r/sex is a good place for adult discussions about human sexuality.
(The only alternative to big-is-banal is a very active group of dedicated moderators empowered to remove posts and ban users. This seems to be hated by a lot of people but, dammit, it works.)
I also recall that Slashdot used to be a lot bigger and more important as a news aggregator.
(EDIT: Apparently some commenters on my post did not read the article. Meta-trolling FTW.)
(I intend to harness the inevitable downvote singularity as a new form of clean energy.)
In a community like HN, I think it has a secondary value, as well, in that it provides well-intentioned posters with feedback that they are making a weak point, or doing it in a way that is not contributory to the community. There is (or was) a standard of discourse on HN that down votes help to reinforce by communicating to people that they need to improve their communication. Lack of positive signals is not the same thing as negative signals.
It certainly is abused by insecure morons, but I think it's a bit narrow to decry it as useless because it can be misused.
Dream on. Whenever I try to troll a bit (or let's say be flamboyant) I get upvotes. Sometimes massively. Whenever I present "unpopular but sincere opinion" I get downvoted, usually massively.
What upvoting is supposed to be: "Good post that adds a lot to the discussion." What it really is: "I agree with this guy."
What downvoting is supposed to be: "Person is spamming, making a weak point or arguing in an inflammatory manner." What it really is: "You're wrong shut the hell up."
This problem could be fixed if people were forced to give a reason for their upvotes and downvotes. Imagine if every time you click upvote, a small textbox appears that has a list of predefined options, such as "valid point" or "good contribution" or "i learned something". Similarly, every time you click downvote, it automatically takes you to the Reply page; if you don't reply, your downvote does not go through.
This kind of transparency would encourage people to be more thoughtful when they cast their votes.
Here I'm serious and know what I'm talking: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4607657 (-8) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698183 (-2) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826775 (-2)
Here I'm flamboyantly trolling: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360362 (+8) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334634 (+2) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116814 (+6)
Firstly you begin with "No.", which many many folks on here find rude and arrogant, and I'm basically with them - plus I've read so many ranty unreasonable posts beginning with "No." that it begins to hoist a red flag - then you misspell "keyboard". Those kinds of things tip people over from "disagree" to "downvote".
Second, "Do not ever bring PSD to me. Ever." - who are you talking to? Yes, I think we get it, but you must understand how rude it sounds. In this case I am sure that had you replied to the (sincere) follow up question then you'd have got some correcting upvotes. You didn't, so it looks like you're just ranting.
Thirdly, typos: "something what", "get's". You don't get downvoted for typos, but when you're saying something like you were in that post you need to do so with authority. If you undermine that then it recontextualises the post and makes it seem like you're bullshitting.
The problem that they all have though is TONE. You sound aggressive.
I also make a habit of upvoting comments that have been unfairly downvoted, and downvoting silly one-liners that don't add anything but noise to the discussion.
As for my own comments being downvoted, it really makes no difference to me since people can still read the comment. If I ever get hellbanned, I'll just leave.
It really bothers my sense of ethics that the scenario you described can happen: someone posting insightful comments for a year and not realizing they are a "ghost". It's a waste of human potential - both for the writer and for those who don't get to read the comments - and the system here is explicitly designed to keep the writer in the dark about the situation.
How is this a good thing?
It's a good thing if only because the alternative would be a ban, and they would stop posting altogether. They may be a ghost but I see value in their posts - or I wouldn't have showdead on.
This makes me wonder how many users have showdead on?
I write to share ideas/experiences I have. If there are replies, there is a valuable feedback - either as a validation, or as a suggestion of other things I should reconsider. I try to "reward" the valuable inputs by pressing on upvote, even I forget sometimes (upvoting is diverting - I don't really like to spend time on that)
Someday I may be hellbanned. Maybe 90% won't see my posts then, but the 10% that do is what matters - people who see value in dissenting opinions, and may still offer interesting insightful replies
Perhaps there should be a method for those with "showdead" switched on to petition for a review of a hellbanned user?
If you want to keep your community at a high level, then I feel it's important to be able to illustrate to contributors what you consider to miss that mark. I used to comment along with every downvote, but there are so many bad comments on HN of late that it would take a full time job.
Another example is the ubiquitous person who posts on some story complaining about the CSS or that the font of the page is bad design. That person never seems to get downvoted despite being flagrantly off-topic.
The only constant seems to be that comments spouting very popular truisms ("patents are bad", "functional languages are good") garner lots of upvotes.
Hint: if you downvote this post it's a strong indicator you either didn't read the article, didn't read the post, or both.
If everyone here made that style of comment would HN be a better place? For example, maybe half the comments here can be variations of "I don't even read Ars Technica", "That was the worst ever article, a new low for Ars demonstrating how it's going downhill fast from its complete failure", "Anybody who reads Ars is probably a Romney lover", "Ars is the worst site ever... I've been reading every article daily for years and it hasn't improved", and so on. In fact, replace Ars with HN and let people make all those comments about every article. This place might gradually devolve into YouTube comments as people learn through example what types of comments the community values.