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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change.

Good to hear they decided to roll that back.

PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark.

It'd be nice to see an official policy statement changing that position, but I don't think it's likely. In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.

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I read an anecdote about the Swedish language today that's just too good to check[1]:

Being fluent in both Swedish and English, I know there are certain concepts, such as the difference between belief in an opinion and belief in a fact, where the Swedish language makes clear distinctions (tycka and tro) and English does not. English speakers spend ridiculous amounts of time arguing about these things, and Swedes simply don’t need to. It’s not that English speakers can’t conceptualize the difference between opinion and fact, but doing so is way more difficult in English, because the word “belief” in English is quite fuzzy, whereas in Swedish, the language makes it simply impossible to confuse the two.

HN voting seems to suffer from an inability to make this distinction: I think it's terrific when comments are downvoted because they're factually inaccurate, no matter how well they're written. So much nonsense ends up at the top of some comment threads simply because it reinforces existing beliefs or loyalties. On the other hand, if you make a good case on one or another side of some live debate, I don't think it should matter whether I agree with you or not. The discussion is always enriched by quality arguments.

[1] http://ken.arneson.name/2014/11/10-things-i-believe-about-ba...

Is not the real issue that people sometimes mistake opinion for fact?

> PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark.

Since that remark came to my attention, I've put less thought and research into my HN comments.

It only takes a few net down votes to make a comment sufficiently hard to read that it is effectively dead. For example, suppose there is an article about government surveillance, which the article opposes, and the article makes an assertion about the 4th Amendment that is wrong. If you post a comment explaining the error and how the 4th Amendment actually works, some people will misinterpret this as implying that you are in favor of government surveillance, and down vote you for that.

The people who correctly interpret the comment are not as likely to up vote as the people who misinterpret are likely to down vote, and so the down voters have an advantage.

If down voting simply moved the comment toward the bottom, rather than making it almost unreadable, it would be OK. It the combination of making down voted comments hard to read and saying that down votes for disagreement is OK that is the killer. The message that sends is that comments here are supposed to agree with the majority opinion.

> In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.

I don't think this is true. Given that downvoted comments become faded, I have a strong reason to believe that the intent is to hide them because they are actually bad

The irony of your comment being faded should not be lost.

Yes, I think that was the actual intent of the system. However, bad != disagreeing with the majority. If the up/down vote functionality is to be used to express agreement or disagreement, which is a change from the original philosophy, then the system should change accordingly. angersock's point is that, as it stands now, a faded-out comment may simply be expressing a good but unpopular opinion.

You're using circular reasoning - that the comments are faded because they're bad, and the evidence they're bad is that they're faded.

But, people downvote comments for any number of reasons, and even doing so for mere disagreement is within the acceptable guidelines - and of course for everything, despite the lack of clear context, the effect remains the same.

It only takes a single person disagreeing with you to fade your comment.

That is also a problem. One downvote later and the comment is immediately biased toward future readers.

your name is bad for the site and you should change it. nomen est omen.

Repeatedly breaking threads by deleting your comments after there are replies is worse.

So is threatening to delete your comments over down votes.

I delete comments to keep the site clean and on-topic, and not too argumentative. It's not 'threatening to delete my comments over downvotes' it's 'agreeing to withdraw a comment if it's too controversial.' (i.e. downvotes, no replies.) Not every thought needs to be voiced. Also, your feedback may have been better directed to my email, I do list one.

An example of where I recently deleted a comment was in response to this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569545 where my opinion was actively solicited. However, I decided that the reply to it sent the thread in a wrong direction, and also could be read without my reply. I looked instead for the person's email who had asked, but he didn't list one so I ended up deleting my comment. In effect I was saying that on reflection I chose not to comment on the linked essay in that thread.

Well, your reasoning doesn't come across like that to me, sorry.

And I have to say, you do delete comments with replies.

People respond to incentives; the whole point of HN karma is to incentivize people to increase it. So I don't think we can blame people for deleting downvoted comments (when they tend to lose more karma if they don't)

Nothing wrong with his name (or his comments).

how do you read 'angersock'? To me the plain reading is "an online persona distinct from one's usual persona; and one which has an extremely angry tone."

I agree there is nothing wrong whatsoever with his actual comments.

Your reading is correct...unfortunately, my early posts actually did better than expected, and I seem to have become the mask, so to speak.

I agree there is nothing wrong whatsoever with his actual comments.

That's the nicest thing anybody's said about me all week. :)

well, I've seen a lot of great posts where I wished 'angersock' would change his name. I am sure they will get visibility under a more neutral name as well, and you can always put in your profile that you had posted under angersock.

Honest question: when you read a comment, do you read the comment first, or the username? Because - and I realise it's difficult to judge 100% accurately - I think I always read the comment first, and often don't even glance at the username. And the styling seems to encourage that too.

Would it really be as crazy as it sounds, in the interest of promoting discussion above all else, to just hide usernames altogether?

I don't think they'll get more visibility at all. A name is but a sequence of letters, angersock to me does not mean more or less than logicallee and I'll read both of you with equal interest. Of course other people might have a different set of criteria but the reputation of a person should be the sum of their output and interactions, not <= 10 alpha characters picked from a limited set. And what better story than someone who enters a forum under a moniker like that and decides to change his ways. Beats the alternative!

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