kburn

This is exactly why I stopped posting here. I've sent an email to YDN. I'm sure they don't want this kind of representation out on the open internet.

> A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

I would absolutely agree with this statement.

I don't think a quota makes sense. But a comment/vote does.

I don't want to limit the amount of times a person can disagree with me (at risk of allowing for disagreeable persons).

It seems though, that people are assigning an equivalence of "agree" to "has value", and "disagree" to "doesn't have value". At least this is how I've been registering the use of the vote.

Opinions appear to vary wildly as to how it should be used, but the ones that appear to make sense to me are the ones that would make sense in an actual conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021371

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021634

This whole thread should be captured in time as an example of rampant abuse of the modding system.

The simple fix that's been recommended quite a few times here, that of requiring a comment for each upmod and downmod, seems to me a reasonable and minimal fix that makes the user more judicious with their votes.

I don't think you understand the "be civil" part of the guidelines.

You asked a question, got a civil answer and responded really rather rudely.

At first I thought this elblanco guy was a bit whiny as well, but now I'm starting to see the pattern of bad behavior behind his point.

After your response (and a few others), I think he is perfectly valid.

If my karma were high enough, I would certainly downvote...nay flag your comment as a clear violation of guidelines.

> It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him.

I respectfully disagree. A downmod supplies almost zero feedback to the recipient. Many posts I've seen with negative mod scores are complex and have a number of topics in them. A downvote at no time explains what precisely was wrong with the post.

It's like a presidential candidate not getting a vote, he doesn't know what part of his platform lost him the vote, just that he didn't get it.

In real life a candidate can pay for a poll and find out why, here it seems that asking why immediately results in more downmods.

(I admit the analogy is imperfect, but hopefully you see where I'm trying to go with it).

The flag mechanism already exists to deal with true trash if I'm not mistaken.

It seems to me, respectfully, that using the downvote to try and clean the community is like a small-town sheriff trying to keep the perceived riff-raff of city-slickers, with their strange ways and funny hair, out of his community.

Maybe only downmods force a user to "spend" karma? This would weed out habitual downmodders.

I don't think you're right. The reasons seem to be that people are downmodding as a social normalization function. It's like saying "don't post more like that please".

I think you are taking downmods a bit too personally.

After following this topic for a while, it seems that the main problem is objection to comment-less downmods, not downmods in principle.

This seems like a cool idea, just not sure how it could be implemented. Any examples of something like this you know of?

Even then, I think the scores for each should be bifurcated so that people can see the number of "worth reading" vs. "not worth reading" votes, and the same for agree/disagree.

I think the practice should at least be modeled liked a number-line. The default is 0, neither an upmod or downmod. Just as it is, an upmod (or +1) should be given if the post was particularly interesting (not agreeable, interesting), and a downmod (or -1) should be given if the post was particularly non-interesting (not disagreeable, non-interesting).

I think too many people only see the world as either +1/-1 with no option to just leave a comment alone.

I think that it also seems to "taint" an entire thread the same as "leper unclean!". Especially when I see an entire thread of negative scores, I know that somebody has a chip on their shoulder for whoever steps in that turf they've decided to police. Participating in that thread is the same as a guaranteed downmod.

I can say, as a new guy, that I would participate more if that were the case.

upvoted because that comment made too much sense to sit at 0.

I'm new here, but I've always assumed (by how they are used) that downvotes were for pure disagreement.

I vote for something like this. I'm new here, but far too often I see thoughtful posts like this being hit hard.

Here's a guy, obviously with some ideas banging around in his head, who feels (rightly or wrongly) that the system as-is is broken. He complains about it, then offers a solution. It seems a reasonable solution and with some tweaks to his/her basic parameters (I think +3/-1 are too constrained) this could work well.

I agree that the spirit of HN seems to be to have good chats on topics and subtopics, and some of the abuses I see around here really scare me off from posting more.

You are right, Dell used to give out restore disks that locked to Dell hardware. They'd even give an appropriate error on non-Dell hardware. I don't think anybody cared to subvert it since it as usually COTS software they just packaged up.

Apple would have to build some pretty heavyweight DRM into the OS. Something that subverting would cause the OS to become crippled.

Apple would have to get their playback environment up to media center standards. Even the Apple TV was a usability nightmare by home theater standards.

Well, the point is is that while maybe the guts are off-the-shelf, but the system design is not.

>not to mention the whole thing reeked of plasticy cheapness

Well, it is a cheap combo. ;)

You can keep lowering your component prices on your list till this makes sense to you. But let's be honest, you'd buy this machine no matter what because that's simply what you are into. The value proposition argument doesn't factor into fanhood.

not a knock, just an observation, I'm thinking these look pretty sexy as well

Yes, lasted 3 weeks.

funny

You should use "JVM". But other than that you should get a job as Sun's marketing department.

Brilliant, but looks open to potential abuse, particularly when cash reserves are low.

I'm not familiar with Campfire. How well does it scale teamwise?