Is negative reputation abused on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Is negative reputation abused on HN?

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18 pointslaumars35 comments

As a fairly frequent downvoter, I should probably explain my rationale so that others may retaliate accordingly. These are the main types of comments I tend to downvote:

1. "This." Unless you're adding something substantive, please don't say it.

2. Piling on. If you're saying exactly the same thing that your only sibling comment said 2 hours ago in a single sentence, please don't say it.

3. This website's design sucks. Not everyone on HN is a web developer. If you don't like the font choice on a blog about Galois theory, kindly inform the author directly.

4. Useless side-tracking from the main point. Some side-tracking is interesting. If you teach me something about 14th century linguistics while commenting on an article about peanuts, I'll probably upvote you. But if you want make a snarky aside about Americans buying too much bottled water when the article is about life in Egypt, please consider not saying it.

5. Unnecessarily rude or dismissive. "Your design fails on so many levels."

Even though this describes a lot of comments, I'd estimate my upvote/downvote ratio at about 5:1. Finally, I don't view a downvote as necessarily a negative thing. It simply means, "This particular comment does not contribute to this particular discussion." I've been downvoted before, usually rightly so. I still manage to feel warm and fuzzy inside and you should too.

I don't really see 4 as a problem, at least not on a threaded forum. Subthreads are supposed to go on tangents, that's what they're for - the deeper you go, the further away you get from the abstract subject involving everyone to more and more context-specific conversations between fewer and fewer people. It is a discussion forum after all, you can't expect everyone to play for the crowd.

Although - this fact doesn't really work to Hacker News' benefit at the moment, since it doesn't support folding threads by default (though apparently that's coming) so side-tracking can be more of a bother than it probably should.

The purpose of downvotes is ill-defined; some people use it as a spam-control button, some people use it as a "this post doesn't contribute to the discussion" (which is itself subjective, and is a subset of:), some people use it as a "your opinion is wrong" button. All are valid use cases, IMO.

The third case is the most controversial one, but...we use the upvote arrow to say "your opinion is right", and nobody complains about it. In a scenario where it's invalid to say "your opinion is wrong", it's also invalid to say "your opinion is right", at which point we might as well just remove the up/downvotes and replace them with a single "flag" button, which will still get abused to minimize opinions people disagree with.

Really, what I think you're experiencing is just the growth of the readership, your own aging and the perspective that comes with it, and the natural tendency of online communities to trend towards middle-of-the-road, safe discussion. That can't really be fixed democratically, IMO, because it is the democratic nature of the system which enables those problems in the first place.

Unless you can figure out how to make the upvote button always mean "this post empirically contributes new thoughts or ideas to the discussion", and nothing else, then attempts to fix the downvote button will be half-measures at best.

Out of idle curiosity: Is anyone aware of a zero-sum karma system, where the total sum of karma in the system is roughly a function of the active userbase, and granting reputation to someone else costs you some of your own? That might make for a fun little economy-in-a-bubble.

IMO this is one of the major problems with HN these days. Any mildly controversial or unpopular viewpoint get downvoted, even if factually correct.

I think that you should be forced to leave a comment if you downvote, explaining why you downvoted and giving the OP a chance to respond.

Forced comments on downvotes is a suboptimal idea. I would far rather someone drops an "I disagree downvote" and ignores a post than have pointless "I downvoted you because I disagree with you" threads.

I looked through your comments, and you don't seem to have many downvotes. In fact I didn't see a single one in two pages of your comment history. Perhaps we all just need to do whatever you're doing :)

I've actually done an analysis on all Hacker News comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/

The arguments in this submission are mostly anecdotal, and the plural of anecdote is not data. What the data shows is that the average comment karma is decreasing in 2014, but that could be from a combination of downvotes and people making new comments which aren't engaging enough to score an upvote, and therefore it would bring the average down.

In retrospect, I should have made a chart of "How has the proportion of downvoted comments changed over the years?"

Couldn't have agreed more. I was burnt couple of times either by moderators or other HN'rs last few posts which were totally legitimate but received bunch of down votes. The commenting system seems to be broken in this case. If there was another website like HN, I wouldn't mind switching over in a minute :)

I think the real problem being highlighted here is that of aggressively enforced cultural conformity. there are some things that the HN community does not permit to be said. its censorship. that's how the system was designed of course. it does create an echo chamber and its supposed to.

Could the author of this post offer some specific examples that they would consider abuse? My feeling is that while what he describes happens, on average, good comments survive and bad/unhelpful ones are buried.

The hard problem is keeping the benefits of the current system while also improving it. Perhaps a 'worstcomments' list that could be periodically reviewed for abuse, alongside 'bestcomments': https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

There is no "worstcomments": all comments which hit -5 are autokilled.

The -4 comments are pretty terrible, though. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgp...

> all comments which hit -5 are autokilled

That's not true. What made you think that?

I remember one of my comments that was downvoted to oblivion. I think I lost about 11 points on it, and yet the lowest it ever showed was -4. Is that by design?

No; it's an accidental consequence of a change we made earlier this year, and is temporary, i.e. we intend to change it back.

The linked document was created from a SQL query to return a comment with the lowest score from that time period: the lowest score was -4, and the Algolia API does not have any [dead] comments.

However, I will concede that the API may be buggy: the lowest comment score from 2013 on was always 0.

I'll check with the new API to see if anything is different.

If you downvote too frequently the software detects it and stops your downvoting from having any effect. (I think?)

Downvotes for poor reasons are often corrected.

Some topics attract a disproportionate amount of downvoting. This is a good thing because those topics are intensely but shallowly interesting and the downvotes should be training people to avoid those threads. (Except people seem to say "the downvotes prove me right")

I can't think of an example where I received a "bad" downvote. I'm kind of surprised I haven't got more.

> This is a good thing because those topics are intensely but shallowly interesting and the downvotes should be training people to avoid those threads.

This is not an objective fact, though. This is just your personal taste (and obviously, that of downvoters who would agree with you.)

It's entirely possible (and I would argue, preferable) to avoid threads you don't find interesting without having to 'train' others to agree with you. Just don't read them.

But then /new has more of those submissions, and the site attracts more people who enjoy reading shallowly but intensely interesting articles and people who enjoy heat not light in threads.

Communities need to be careful about what they accept otherwise they get destroyed.

I'm starting to experience this personally [1] [2]. in the past two weeks, my posts are getting systematically buried by people that disagree with me. In response, I've been trying to make more controversial posts. I have a decent amount of karma to burn (lost 10 points in 2 days), but I'm definitely seeing a trend. Politically unpopular opinions have been downvoted to all hell, but I am unable to be sure if this isn't just the people in the conversation with me downvoting my posts.

I have, however, been scraping the bottom of the comment barrel, and have found quite a few gems that were clearly buried due to disagreements with the premise of the post, rather than the HN guidelines.

my basic rule of thumb is: upvote everything I reply to, whether or not I disagree. if I see grey text, and it isn't an obvious troll (or meets the criteria kevinskii talks about), I upvote.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8434094

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417226

I've seen a number of interesting threads which inevitably end up with the first post blotted out to near-oblivion, and about half of it in various states of erasure.

Hacker News seems designed to select for intellectual novelty rather than conversation. It's unfortunate that disagreement even for petty reasons acts as a global censor. Different groups of people downvoting whatever they personally think is uninteresting, irrelevant or wrong gets in the way of the site's utility for everyone else.

and is completely against the HN guidelines. what are rules when everyone breaks them without caring?

Please can you link to which bit of the HN guideliens that you think are being broken by downvoters?

You have enlightened me: there are no guidelines on downvoting. at all. that's fairly terrible, IMO. I guess I should expect downvoting to be an ungregulated wild west, and accept the spiteful downvoting that comes with it.

I understand this sounds sarcastic, but I'm being serious.

The rules are not what people seem to think they are.

I've seen enough threads where people claim the subject is not "HN material" in which it has to be pointed out to them (by dang usually) that, in fact, this is not just a forum for technology, startup culture or 'hacking' however you define it.

The community has become large and diverse enough that there's a good chance quite a few people will find a subject of interest which you don't care for. This doesn't mean that Hacker News is necessarily declining in quality, but rather it means your particular biases are no longer as normative as you once thought. Hacker News material is defined entirely as whatever gets upvoted, that's the system, it's no more or less meritocratic than that.

But people seem to find it an affront when some stories make it to the top of the heap, as if they got there by cheating.

You're right. the rules aren't what I thought they were either. I'm adjusting my views accordingly.

I rarely care about "non-hn" stories making it to the front page; discussions on HN were more important than the links themselves. I wonder if I'm in the minority there.

I would guess that in [2] you were downvoted for incomprehensibility and then, in the reply posts in that sub-thread, for tone.

It does seem a bit odd to say that you have been experimenting with bad postig style and to then complain that people have downvoted you because of it.

> rather than the HN guidelines.

Please could you link to the bit of guidelines that you're talking about?

> you were downvoted for incomprehensibility

see, that's the funny part. it was a thread about the right to remain silent, and I was explaining that Silence = consent/agreement. when I brought the other poster's silence up as agreement, I was buried to -3.

Did you have a problem comprehending my post, with the point of the discussion in mind? do you believe the moderation was fair (main post was at 0)?

I fully accept that I am attempting to be controversial. I usually don't state my actual opinions for fear of being downvoted. But now that I have sufficient karma to avoid hellbanning (for at least a while), I figured I could give experimenting with moderation habits a try by speaking thing I believe.

> Please could you link to the bit of guidelines that you're talking about?

see my other reply to you. You were absolutely correct about there being no regulation for when/when not to downvote.

EDIT: tried to explain controversial opinions a little

also, seeing as you're paying attention, here's[1] another one I'm watching get downvoted due to disagreement. Do you think the moderation is appropriate?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8434094

In this comment you offered the same theory about "pump and dump" that many others had over an hour earlier. It wasn't anything new. And the idea that Apple's demise would lead to the rise of Ubuntu is, well, let's just again say that I didn't (and won't) downvote you.

that's a very polite way to disagree. :)

I'm not very concerned about non-interested parties (such as yourself) downvoting. mainly, I'm interested in how much sockpuppetry is actually going on. it's relatively trivial to make a bunch of posts using a myriad of nicknames (I have 5+ abandoned accounts with more than 500 karma each - lost the password to all of them), so I'm fairly certain that if a random sociopath had enough time, he could easily game the comments of a thread.

Even while understanding the broader discussion and knowing quite a bit more than the average person about Miranda rights, I did find your post to be incomprehensible.

In the ensuing discussion I assume you were downvoted for unnecessary rudeness, not for being controversial. Note that I didn't (and won't) downvote any of your posts. I hope this helps.

What part of that post confused you? was it the idea that everyone knows the "you have the right to remain silent" script? or that one should look up all the words in it?

regardless, thank you for your overall input. I would love DanBC's input on the same.

I still have no idea what your point was.

I can't downvote replies to my posts. I guess most people can't. Of course you can't be sure if people maintain extra accounts for karma fiddling, but I think it's reasonable to assume that most people here do not.

So in less words: the people you are replying to are (probably) not downvoting your replies.

that's honestly what I would like to test for: sockpuppet accounts vs. hivemind. I'm okay if everyone universally agrees that I'm an idiot, but this feels like sockpuppetry to me. especially the -3 one. normally HN doesn't feel like reddit, but it's starting to.

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