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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Took a break from HN (and others) for about 8 months at the end of 2012 and start of 2013. The HN I came back to feels very different. Everyone knows better and is eager to prove it by putting others down. Comments are no longer about the OP, but about how the OP is laughable, let me tell you how to do it. So sad.

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I've noticed this as well and I've always felt it had to do with the fact that you cannot downvote comments. Comments systems that allow for only upvoting seem to skew towards surfacing loud comments versus reasonable comments.

The silent reasonable majority (that is less inclined to comment or even vote) needs a way to help curate when things get unbalanced. Think about how you might not end up actually clicking upvote on a comment that is reasonable and that you agree with but how you most definitely would downvote the snide negative comments that top HN comments sections all too frequently.

You can downvote comments once you reach a certain karma. 500, I think.

But you can downvote comments, if you have sufficient karma.

So is the problem that the people with the power don't exercise it, or that people don't upvote the reasonable comments in a sufficient ratio to push the bad comments down?

Meta-HN is not my favourite topic but perhaps it's time we had a review to account for how the community has changed since the last one.

The problem is that if someone forcefully demeans another while sounding or being authoritative, it's intimidating for others to speak up. Maybe he really does know best, they think.

And, to be honest, sometimes they really do know best. When it comes down to it, it isn't about being right or wrong. If someone makes an OSS project, or a post, or anything, and you don't agree with it (or they are flat out wrong), just don't be a dick about it. No one knows everything and we're all just trying to do our best and get better.

I agree with you, especially on civility.

But I have often felt that there is confusion in some circles between being a dick and providing accurate feedback without "sugar coating" (something which a lot of people claim to provide/enjoy receiving). So I am not sure what can be done here.

No it's who ever has the majority wins. Not even the top 1% can make a difference when 99% of the users are upvoting something.

> So is the problem that the people with the power don't exercise it, or that people don't upvote the reasonable comments in a sufficient ratio to push the bad comments down?

So, I can't speak for everyone but it's fairly rare that I down-vote a post that appears to have been written in good faith (even so-called "middlebrow dismissals").

I would imagine (or, indeed hope) that most users with the ability to down-vote are fairly conservative with it. It's important to keep flame bait and trolling comments off of HN, but I'm less sure where to draw the line WRT comments whose content I find uninteresting.

I think the karma threshold for down-votes makes it a very different dynamic than up-votes in two ways. First, it means more people get to up-vote than down-vote. More significantly, it makes it look very different to those who can down vote. While I view the up vote as saying 'this comment is good and deserves recognition', I see the down-vote as saying 'this comment is so unacceptable that it does not belong on this site'.

I actually think Reddit's /r/programming shows that a potential downvote for everyone doesn't do anything to bring about reason. It used to be a vibrant, smart, collaborative community. Now you need the skin of a Rhino to post there.

I agree. Reddit has changed for the worse. It seems like HN is changing as well. If only there was a way of keeping out those types of people.

There's always charging for membership.

I think it is the quantity of the people, not the quality.

And so has changed the story titles!

Now I see: "you can't... " , "you don't..", "don't try...".

Mostly titles that sound like coming out of mouth of some extortionist.

Dear person, please lead the following statement as if it were written the most possible respect, humility and grace: Your post is laughable, because we cannot take you seriously, since you ate about 8 months behind the rest of us on terms of evolution. The way you should have done it is by slaughtering a unicorn and drinking its blood out of a hollowed rhino horn, which is also illegal to obtain, so essentially my post is completely stupid, irrelevant and misses the point by such a magnitude that the statement is in a completely different planetary system. However, I will remain ignorant of this. Oh, not to mention, I believe everyone loves reading my long, obnoxious walls of text.

^ Posts like those? :D

If all the obnoxious posts were like that we wouldn't have a problem. The problem is with bad comments that are not sufficiently incendiary for people who agree with their thesis to want to downvote them.

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