It's kind of amusing that the entire premise of this article is undone by the aside:
> update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized.
But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively harmful.
And then this:
> Is it realistic for users to expect to post in an environment where there are no penalties at all, no way for their peers to express disapproval or disagreement with their post?
Huh? Peers express disapproval and disagreement by commenting within the post. As I am doing precisely right now. ;)
Jeff Atwood is a super-smart guy who's done amazing things but this particular piece leaves me quite baffled.
I'm also baffled by his position. I often think that downvotes on HN serve to reinforce conformism to an accepted set of values and ideas. Which might be okay if, say, you want to "immunize" a community against racism, sexism or fake information, but isn't great if issues (as in politics or even in tech on a social level) are a lot more nuanced and there might be plenty of room to explore ideas off the beaten path (and no, I don't mean inane stuff like "but masks don't work" or "but it's just like the flu"). It's easy to find yourself on the receiving end of endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive but clashes with the accepted HN narrative.
It makes me wish downvotes weren't a thing. I'm okay with flagging, since I mostly see comments flagged that clearly break HN's simple rules.
I think the problem when it comes down to it is there's generally more than one kind of comment as well as more than one kind of reason someone downvotes.
You've got your objective factual comment
Your subjective factual comment
And your opinion based comment.
I'm probably missing some.
These can all be combined sometimes into one comment.
Then you've got your reasons for downvoting.
Disagreeing
Factually incorrect
Wrong opinion
Again, probably missing some...
When you start combining all these comment types, with downvote reasons under one generic down arrow, there's going to be some ambiguity, some good comments that get down voted, some bad comments that get upvoted and everything in between.
And...furthermore, it's impossible for other users to determine why a comment was downvoted. Maybe, they were all disagreement downvotes even if it was a factually correct statement. Maybe they were factually incorrect downvotes for a correct opinion post.
There's no real way of knowing, so in the end, better just not to worry about it either way and unless you're clearly posting something against the rules, just try again next time and write something that hopefully doesn't get downvoted.
But that would still happen in an upvote-only system. The 'good' comments would float to the top and the 'bad' ones would stay low in the threads and sub-threads.
To be honest, I feel the most damaging in the HN voting system is the greying out of comments. It often leads to bandwagoning where if a comment even goed to 0, some people just blindly ram the downvote button because someone already (visually) decided for them that that particular comment is 'bad'. No consideration required!
True, the greying out does tend to have this effect, then again, sometimes I see a greyed comment I agree with that I think was downvoted unfairly and upvote it where I likely would have just read their comment and not upvoted had it not been grey. I forget sometimes when I'm just scrolling through to be honest.
But, I do agree, systems with upvotes only works sometimes, it seems to depend though. On one forum I post on, they only have upvote equivalents, but it tends to lead to fairly quality conversation a bit like hn, though memes and jokes tend to get upvoted far more than here....or maybe without downvotes you actually get to see the upvotes on jokes, I dunno, I've made a few of those one liner joke comments hn frowns upon and watched it go up and down over and over until it settles between -1 and 2 depending I guess on whether more people found it funny or annoying.
But...with upvote only systems, you also get horrendous trash like Facebook.
Then again, with upvote/downvote systems you get decent places like hn and horrendous trash like reddit and SO(an over exaggeration to allow me to keep this paragraph similar in structure and phrasing to the last) so who knows what's best really?
I think in the end it always comes down to the community and the mods.
It doesn't matter what kind of point system you have, what matters is the people who are most involved in the community, the rules of the community and how the mods act.
I notice sometimes a comment goes negative quickly. If it sinks to -3 then it is probably doomed, but if it only goes to -2 or less it can rise up again, if it has some form of logic that enough people can see, and isn't just a dumb or offensive comment.
Presumably the first two downvotes of a nuanced but serious comment sometimes lead to mindless followers taking it down to -2, which is a quick pile-on, but by then, it has reached enough views that it may be counterbalanced by people of the opposite view upvoting.
I have occasionally seen comments go back to positive from -3 too, although it is rare. These are invariably comments which state an uncommon position, which look like an unpopular trope, but which can be decoded by knowledgeable people who think it through and upvote.
I haven't used it for a while, but imgur's old voting system was quite nice, I think. There was no downvote on the post itself, but instead you could upvote any number of tags on the post. So, for example, if I felt your post was factually incorrectly, I could add a "factually incorrect" tag (or add my +1 if the tag already existed). This was only for posts though, not comments.
I think sites would benefit from having more rich voting options, for example: agree but weak-argument, disagree but well-stated, changed my view, etc.
Would yield some more interesting ways to sort and rank comments.
So basically, like Facebook Reactions and those post ratings plugins you can get for various forum scripts now.
Yeah, I think that would work. Especially if 'disagree' is a neutral reaction rather than a negative one, so downvoting for disagreement stops being a thing.
I agree with you 100%, I love HN and have been here for years but the downvoting feature disgusts me. Either allow a post or don’t, but this weird “fading” of someone’s post just because some people don’t agree with what someone has to say strikes me as petty and cheap. HN should be bigger than that.
It gets faded to signal to other people "this has been downvoted" because you can't see the karma score next to the comment anymore like you could in the early days. One of the things this signal does is it provides the opportunity for corrective upvotes by people who feel "That didn't deserve to be downvoted" which is one of the cultural traditions here.
I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a very big problem to never allow any kind of signal of disagreement or whatever and the system here is intended to keep singal-to-noise ratio high.
It's a big forum and anyone can join. There is no fee to join. You don't need an invitation to join.
You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." to try to keep Eternal September down to a dull roar so HN can do what HN does better than any other forum I have ever seen, which is why I hang here so much even though it's never been an easy thing for me to be here.
> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here."
Can we use flags for this purpose?
Problem is even though a comment does not violate any rule, it gets down-voted as hell if you say something that majority of people would not like. e.g there are posts about hyped programming languages, go check out down-voted comments, most of them does not deserve to be down voted.
There some topics, these topics have “fan-boys”, so even a comment is constructive, it gets down-voted.
You already show disagreement with comments. If a comment violates a rule, we can flag it. If a comment does not get up-votes, it moves to bottom of the page. So, I think down-votes don’t add any value to HN.
As someone who gets downvoted probably more than average, I don't agree with you. Downvotes are the least problematic way for people to tell me they have some problem with my comment and minimizes the fallout from me having to try to navigate gender politics as part of the mix.
It would be vastly worse for men to only be able to express sexist garbage by openly attacking me and trying to find some plausible excuse for hostility that is sometimes rooted in "She won't date me!" basically.
I'm a very controversial figure in part because I am getting healthier when that is not supposed to be possible and the world generally has a big issue with me because of that reality. HN has handled my "disruptive' presence better than any other forum I've been on. I've been banned from several forums and I've had mods elsewhere tell me that the abusive treatment heaped on me by others that was a clear violation of the stated rules was not the problem, the problem was somehow my behavior.
Since I'm not making any of that up, I'm kind of painted into a corner here socially and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to not end up essentially murdered over it, like Semmelweis was.
I do everything in my power to behave in accordance with the rules and blah blah blah, but I'm a woman and HN was as much as 98 percent male when I joined and I'm getting healthier when that isn't supposed to be possible and so forth. And HN is the only forum that is able to cope with that constructively and help me talk to people who are knowledgeable about areas of science that are pertinent to my needs as someone trying to survive in the face of an incurable genetic disorder.
I say all kinds of things that are not "popular" or even socially acceptable and as long as I am not violating the rules of civility, the mods here don't have a problem with me being here and that's extremely unusual. Most mods are all too happy to just get rid of me as the easy answer to their problem while not caring that this is de facto a polite way to quietly commit murder against someone whose crime boils down to "I am a scientist who is doing cutting edge work and my credentials include I'm a former homemaker and spent years homeless."
It sucks to be me. It sucks majorly for a long list of reasons.
And most forums find me intolerable and HN is willing to let me stay and that's literally life saving for me.
So I feel strongly that I am the ultimate test case for how well their rules work. The entire forum can literally think you are nuts and you can say things here that people literally believe is you being a deluded fruitcake making shit up, and if you behave you can stay.
So I think they are doing something amazingly well that's incredibly hard to do and I'm a huge fan in part because it has helped to save my life.
I'm sure there is room for improvement. I'm also equally sure no one else on the planet does it better.
Even though I find myself in disagreement with some of your posts on here, I still value and enjoy your presence here. The internet shouldn’t be an echo chamber. HN has meant a lot to me too, so I can relate with you on that. Have an upvote, and an amazing evening!
> I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a very big problem to never allow any kind of signal of disagreement or whatever and the system here is intended to keep singal-to-noise ratio high.
It certainly is not, one can verbally signal one's disagreement with a reply. I very much do not believe that it has anything to do with “signal” and “noise” which of itself are rather vague terms and I find that very often people will consider something “signal” simply because they already agreed with it before they read it.
I see no reason for comments to be “rated”, and I certainly see no reason to pœnalize users for lowly rated comments as I see plenty of them that otherwise provide an interesting perspective.
> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." to try to keep Eternal September down to a dull roar so HN can do what HN does better than any other forum I have ever seen, which is why I hang here so much even though it's never been an easy thing for me to be here.
“This is not welcome.” means “Ðo not disagree with what the nonrepræsentative portion of H.N. that votes thinks says.” and I stress that it is not repræsentative. — it yields more power to those that are willing to downvote something for mere disagreement and gives lesser to those that would not do so, in my opinion very much the type of person whom one should not yield such power to to decide what is and isn't welcome.
Visually, the low contrast from downvoting is tiring to the eyes if it's longer than a short sentence or so. As the reader, I do not see why my eyesight should be punished for this purpose. There are some really good decisions in HN, but the visual representation is not one of them.
I get eye strain from looking a bright white pages, so I use a Firefox add-on called "Dark Background and Light Text", which lets me override the foreground and background colors of pages with my choice of colors. As an added bonus, it prevents the annoying graying of comments on HN. (Use the "Simple CSS" option with HN, otherwise the up/down arrows will not display.)
I can't speak for the person you are talking to but this site has much less tolerance for deviation from cultural norms - which is both a good and bad thing.
Compared to even niche subreddits there is much less room for "freewheeling" (can't think of a better term for it) comments. It has costs but what for what you pay, you gain in a more serious and sober environment.
Wow, I think my experience has been different. Redditors seem to pile on a 'wrong' opinion and downvote to oblivion, whereas HN seems more evenhanded to me. I'm sure it depends on the subreddit though.
Its not serious at all, its a news aggregator that by very silly means filters stuff to the top that is worth reading. Serious is when you have skilled professionals pick the topics and an interesting debate is when preferably everyone disagrees.
I initially downvoted this. I've reversed that and decided to reply.
HN is bigger than it used to be which has helped introduce an Eternal September effect, but HN is the funnel for YC. You need an HN handle to apply to YC.
For people interested in starting a business and applying to YC, there is potentially millions of dollars at stake. Especially in the beginning when it was smaller, your comments here were used to help them evaluate your application to their seed funding and business mentorship program.
Lots of latecomers seem oblivious to that function and think it's just a silly discussion forum. But there are people who still know better and the people who understand that what you say here can make the difference between becoming the next Reddit (a YC company) or Dropbox (another YC company) or never getting anywhere with your business dreams help skew conversation here in a more serious and respectful direction than you are going to find on most forums that really are just discussion forums and that's it.
That's not what HN is. HN is the foyer you have to get through to have any hope of joining a large and powerful "old boys club" that has created many millionaires in a relatively short period of time.
Being an ass here is a good way to be politely turned away without ever knowing why: "Sorry, not YC material." Because they pick which applications to approve and fund primarily based on the people, not the idea.
That's not a secret. They talk about it incessantly. Anyone who doesn't know just hasn't paid attention to the huge volumes of info they put out about their application process.
> your comments here were used to help them evaluate your application [...] Lots of latecomers seem oblivious to that function and think it's just a silly discussion forum.
I see, it [apparently] may still have serious implications. I still consider a serious discussion to be one where you can be right and I can be wrong - politely. It is then up to you to enlighten. Next round you get to be wrong and ill be there to point it out.
> I initially downvoted this. I've reversed that and decided to reply.
The exception not the rule. Normally I don't reply if I disagree and you downvote.
Now that I think about it the downvotes should make an interesting data-set to judge the founders by.
I still consider a serious discussion to be one where you can be right and I can be wrong - politely. It is then up to you to enlighten. Next round you get to be wrong and ill be there to point it out.
That still goes on here. It just is a smaller percentage of the discussion than it was when I originally joined in 2009. It's less obvious, but still possible to find that here.
There are more people here who don't participate that way, so you need to be a bit more careful about whom you try to engage that way to avoid having it go pointlessly sideways.
It's harder to stick your neck out about such things than it used to be and I don't know how to remedy that. It used to be much more possible to have a vigorous debate and have both sides remain civil in a way I have never seen anywhere else.
I see what you mean, but I think the “fading” is meant to systematically steer downvotes away from meaning plain disagreement. Whether it succeeds is another issue.
The fading indicates that what an HN downvote means is “I think people shouldn’t see this/this shouldn’t be part of the thread”. Whether it’s bc the post is off topic, flame bait, trolling, just plain boneheaded, etc., is kind of beside the point, although ideally it isn’t simply disagreement.
But that means replying to a post you downvote makes no sense. Why further a conversation you’re trying to bury?
Also, if an opinion is so unpopular it gets downvoted into oblivion, maybe a forum based on votes just isn’t the right venue for it. Start a blog.
It's more about the opinion relative to the overall context of the thread. As an example, if you try to defend or contextualise Facebook (the company's) actions in a thread about how much they suck, you'll get downvoted.
The same opinion in a different thread will probably just be ignored, because people self-select into threads based on what they care about, and the FB dislikers won't be so concentrated.
Nastiness and "can't you just" statements tend to get downvoted regardless of context though.
I have come to see this "fading" as highlighting. Here as well as in the world at large. To be fair, most of the time the downvoted comment here is trash in one way or another, but sometimes it's gold. Often times it's neither and should be left alone.
I've long held that you should have to reply to the comment when downvoting. Even if it's just a "no", that's better than the ability to hide a comment you don't agree with
The problem is that extremely low-quality comments (e.g. anything from "agree" and off-topic memes to irrelevant political sledging to the kind of thing that will get the user banned when a moderator sees it) are the majority of downvoted comments. Requiring a reply would give them long chains of unnecessary comments until they hit the threshold to be hidden.
That's the horse of twenty-somethings, and their "older" cohort, who think being a jerk is funny. I've definitely done that way too much here at times, oops.
Still, it falls on the creators and maintainers of HN to do something about it.
I'd be interested to read any discussion in suport of down votes from the crew who run the site.
While the downvote feature is there, you don't have to use it. I only upvote, but I wouldn't consider campaining to remove the downvote. Having a rule to require a response in order to downvote is not a good idea - we just don't need more roles. But I think that is is proper and respectful to give a comment explaining why you downvoted. I often see such comments in response to my downvoted comments. But I might make this suggestion. Have upvotes and downvotes public. If HN has this information then so should we.
> endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive
If you habitually find yourself on the receiving end of this it's worth re-examining why you think it's not offensive and if it looks like everyone else actually agrees with you. To a certain extent you are correct: It is to be expected that when you say something that's too "nice" you get a ton of downvotes (and the same goes for something too "rough", probably), that's just how things are. On balance though, you get so many more upvotes for constructive posts on issues that aren't loaded at all (or where your opinion is so centrist you don't post anything controversial) that it ends up not mattering.
I'll allow that none of this applies when you are an extremist, but to my mind being an extremist means that unfortunately a lot of what you say will be offensive. That loops back to the beginning of my post :)
I'd argue HN isn't a cohesive whole, there are factions / demographics what have you, along with timing. I've seen comments get pounded and even flagged to a death only to later see them revived and constructive conversation below.
I agree with you though, down votes are a net-negative.
I always make sure not to voice a position that goes against the HN group think. Often the discussion really needs it but why bother if it vanishes into the void(0)?
As a funny experiment, make 2 accounts - one for your actual opinions and other that posts only things aligned with the hive mind (e.g. praise anything mentioning Rust, hating on US, etc.)
Results are .. interesting :)
There's certain number of "tar-baby" subjects/opinions that can get someone downvoted on HN really quick... like suggesting Peter Thiel is an asshole, or saying anything negative about crazy libertarians.
But HN is ALL about discussion. It's a relatively safe place to float an idea and hear some provocative opinions. The techno-libertarians don't actually bite.
Stackoverflow, on the other hand, has higher stakes. People are trying to figure something out at work and running into a brick wall. If they make the mistake of posting an earnest question they make themselves vulnerable and have a good chance of being humiliated and made to feel like shit by some smug prick who's having a bad day. You really need to put on some psychological armor before attempting to question or answer on Stackoverflow. It's an intrinsically toxic environment.
Case against it being all about discussion though, my original comment has been voted down for some reason.
Please folks, just debate me or post a counterpoint.
I think at the very least tie ability to vote down with commenting. In other words, once the user has replied to the original comment, they can vote it down if they desire.
You might think this is a safe place, but I've come to just avoid commenting anything like this that might get "hive minded" into oblivion. I'm sure I'm not the only one. In that sense, it's safe place for a certain "kind" of people with a certain "kind" of opinion.
> ‘I've come to just avoid commenting anything like this that might get "hive minded" into oblivion.’
that’s exactly when you should be commenting, otherwise the community is lulled into false conformity. contentious topics require more diversity of thought and more considered words, not less. internet points don’t matter, just the food for thought that comes with broader discussions.
I know, that's why I'm suggesting it be tied to commenting. No comment, no voting down available.
The reason why I don't bother as much anymore is I assume if my overall points get too low, I probably get shadow banned (I can comment, but no one will ever see it, or something to that effect).
one of the neat little things about slashdot was that voting included a short reason, like 'insightful', 'funny', 'redundant', or 'offtopic'. then as a user, you had some control over the visibility of comments based on those standard evaluations. that seems more viable to me than requiring a full comment on each downvote (though i like the idea in principle), which would likely devolve into these one-word evaluations as comments anyway.
i wouldn't worry about getting shadowbanned unless you're constantly posting thoughtless and provocative craziness (which doesn't seem likely based on a very quick perusal of your comment history). i read with showdead on and find very few accounts being shadowbanned, and those that are continuously and blatantly violate hn rules (nevermind common courtesy).
In my experience those comments are often paired with tone problems, such as arrogance or aggressiveness. I always try to vouch or upvote any that seem unwarranted to me.
> But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively harmful.
I think this ignores the concept of purpose. If you are optimizing for popularity, then this works. But a lot of forums (including Hacker News, theoretically) intend to optimize for relevance, which is contrary to popularity in many cases.
For a really clear-cut example, Kim Kardashian's Instagram posts get far more likes than pretty much any post on Hacker News. Would Hacker News be better if it were replaced with a redirect to Kim Kardashian's Instagram feed? In terms of how popular the content is, this is an unambiguous yes. But that would not be a better Hacker News, it would just be more popular because you've replaced Hacker News with something completely different.
That's an extreme example, but the same applies for content that's more relevant than Kim Kardashian's instagram feed. Popularity measures breadth of appeal more than anything else, so if you're trying to appeal to specific interests or cultivate some kind of niche content, popularity can be a negative. Downvotes can function as a way for a site's userbase to say, "Whoa, this is not what this place is supposed to be about, even if it is broadly appealing."
> Downvotes can function as a way for a site's userbase to say, "Whoa, this is not what this place is supposed to be about, even if it is broadly appealing."
Can be. I'd argue it would appear to me down votes here are overwhelming used for simple disagreement.
It's fun to discuss what a thing could be, spherical cow in a vacuum, it's probably more useful to discuss how that thing actually gets used and how each of us weight the value of those uses.
Atwood is smart, but the social sophistication of StackOverflow mostly came from Spolsky. I don't know if they are still available, but Atwood and Spolsky had a regular phone call that went out as a podcast from the earliest days of the StackOverflow project.
In terms of the social structure of Spolsky thought "How do I move the Turtle in LOGO" [1] was a good question for the site (he wrote it).
Atwood thought it was a bad question. Judging people's character by the questions they ask became standard. And people have an excuse to be rude and abusive on the site.
I think it's worth wondering whether or not he still holds any of the opinions expressed in the article. It looks like it was written over a decade ago.
The content of the article still stands if you take it about social voting systems in general. I guess you can apply it to like... Twitter or something.
I fear required responses would be similar to checked exceptions. They're great in theory, but in practice, without a lot of discipline and actively maintained culture of quality, they both tend to devolve into low-quality boilerplate.
You seem to have missed the point of the up vote requirement for downvotes though. It exists to restrict downvotes to those who are more active, and thus more "invested?". I believe that this was a very deliberately chosen barrier to entry here.
I definitely did not miss that point. I understand the idea behind a barrier to entry. However I am pretty active. I read HN every day, and I've even written a few submissions, one of which made the front page. So wouldn't you say I'm invested? I just don't comment very often.
I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order.
In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is the death-knell.
HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.
There's a lot more. You shouldn't be able to downvote replies to your post. Rate limits. Metamoderation. Hell/shadowbanning. Most good forums rely on an active superadmin moderation a lot - when that goes away or is unreliable the site dies.
I think people tend to downvote out of negative emotion but more likely upvote out of genuine interest. All it takes is one bad actor to downvote a comment early and it may never again gain enough visibility to get the position it actually deserves.
On the other hand, the absence of upvoting keeps the comment at a neutral level. Its speed of losing visibility can't be unfairly accelerated, and so it has a chance at competing with comments of the same level.
If a new account can neither upvote nor downvote, then wouldn't it be a catch 22 where no one ever gains any karma? Also as someone else pointed out, people often downvote for political purposes whereas the only reason I can think of someone abusing upvotes would be for spam which gets handled by HN's filters pretty well.
Well, you can use a bunch of troll accounts to downvote people who disagree with you. Meanwhile, troll accounts up voting a bad post would put it neutral or slightly positive, I'd guess.
The bias in favor of Apple is extreme. I genuinely don't know if the mods are actively paid off, if Apple astroturfs, or whatever. But it seems those threads are disingenuous. It's impossible to form evidence because good criticism of Apple is often deleted.
People with the opposite view see the opposite "extreme" bias. It's basically entirely in the eye of the beholder.
What's odd is how common it is, and how absolutely people are convinced that their particular strain of these contradictory generalizations is the accurate one.
There’s a similar dynamic on Nextdoor in my neighborhood. You’re basically not allowed to disagree with the OP. Commenters will say things like “this isn’t the place for it” without addressing the content or actual appropriateness. Usually you’ll be drown out by a bunch of “compassionate” posts or stupid questions[0] as well.
If you want to disagree with someone you can start your own post and many of the same people will “protect” your post from disagreement as well. It’s basically impossible to have an actual discussion in that environment.
[0] - Stupid as in the answer to their question is literally in the text of the post they’re responding to in the first place.
This is clearly a minority opinion, but in my view well-stated factual anecdotes that the majority find uncomfortable deserve upvote, always.
But that's not what they get, not even here on HN.
The high karma threshold is helpful, but I doubt raising it further would do much. Some qualitatively different vetting mechanism is wanted. Thought about the problem a lot, but so far reached only a few inchoate notions.
Are static ips a common thing in the US? Here in Germany getting a fresh ip is as easy as restarting the router unless you explicitly pay for a static ip.
For some people, simply rebooting their router gets a new IP. Others have to explicitly tell it to release the IP and then renew it. Others have to change their router's MAC address.
I know that personally, if I release it and renew it, I'll get assigned the same IP. Though my IP is technically dynamic, it hasn't changed in the 5 years I've been in this house. I haven't tried changing my MAC address, but with a previous ISP, I had changed my router's MAC and it wouldn't even get an IP at all until I changed it back. Makes me wonder what would happen if I had changed it to the MAC of a router being used by another customer...
I think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way to resolve political downvoting today—-new accounts were unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or downvotes having to fit categories like ‘insightful’ or ‘offtopic’.
I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.
Agreed, though personally I think that the complement is also true, and maybe more insidious: A lot of comments get upvoted because they state an uncontroversial, obvious position that everybody agrees with already.
This is insidious because it encourages people to be the first to say the least interesting thing in order to get rewarded with comment karma. Those comments bubble up to the top of the thread, where they're held aloft by more and more people who see their existing opinions restated.
Ultimately the reward structure encourages discussions where people are indulged, in the same way the punishment structure discourages people being challenged.
I'd say this effect is more pronounced on Reddit than HN, but you can see it here too.
I'm not looking for "edgy" comments, I'm just saying that it's more useful in the long run to upvote comments that provide new information or perspectives, or at least state a common sense position in a different, compelling way.
Some of my stupidest posts get upvoted through the roof. Posts which I put in a lot of work on? Mixed bag.
Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.
I've noticed that when I comment against the status quo, my comments quickly dip to -2 or lower from rapid fire downvotes, then slowly tick upward into positive territory over time as the more patient readers come through.
It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they could possibly read them?
> It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal.
Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes happen and the downvotes don't).
Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term issues, though.
Except that once enough negative votes have been received it becomes impossible to upvote. It's like sumo -- pushed too far and it goes out. However, the number is much too small, 3 or 4 downvotes.
Flagging operates similarly; as there is no reason attached to the flag it is simply 'dislike'. Slashdot's tags were much more nuanced.
It does make the downvotes irrelevant in a way, it only signals strong disagreement which I think it's good to know. But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as correction method for yourself because it only leads to more echochamber.
Long wanted to see “spark graphs” [Tufte] next to vote totals, indicating the dynamics of up/down votes over time. I’ve had comments generate lots of activity, yet votes balance out to something mundane (like +2) despite wild fluctuations.
Isn’t there supposed to be a vouch system? I’ve seen comments that were flagged to death that shouldn’t have been (and a lot more vice versa) but I never seem to see the vouch link whether I have showdead on or not.
I suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they rapidly go downhill.
> down voted simply because they went against the status-quo.
Every tool will be abused sometimes.
I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure.
Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).
Agree.
And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints or promote indirect pressure over the members will result in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.
> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo.
It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments? Because I think that actually one of the strongests points of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be flagged though)
I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that.
They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was largely ineffective.
I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in.
Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc.
I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything.
There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk.
These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.
I’m not a fan of meta moderation. It lacks context. I upvoted or downvoted for reasons and without knowing that reason how can someone determine whether that was appropriate? When I metamoderated I was extremely forgiving for the same reason. Unless it was clear abuse I “okayed” it.
Incidentally at some point I stopped getting moderation points even though I was a frequent meta moderator. Whether that was due to meta moderation of my mods, I don’t know.
There were rumors of a blacklist and there was a thread which was closed down critical of either an admin or the site. I participated in the thread rather moderately IIRC, but that was around the time I never saw another mod point.
At least on HN, dang will tell you what he didn’t like about your behavior. dang is also outwardly cool with disagreeing with him, which isn’t true with everyone.
A lot of people were pretty upset about the redesign. They also sold to Conde Nast and started adopting a different (more intrusive) model of advertising. I can't remember details but the site started feeling more.... slimey over time.
Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional.
This is one of those things that I did not realize kills discourse until I experienced a community that mainly posts serious content and discussion. Reddit now is particularly bad as each thread is sea of quips, one-liners, and trashtalk which pretty much floods out the pond of interesting discussion. "Funny" can be a great thing, but if that's all anyone ever tries to offer, it becomes very tiresome.
To be fair to reddit, there are plenty of subreddits that have similar policies (e.g. /r/science). It works most of the time apart from when a particular post ends up x-posted or on /r/popular or something similar.
I vaguely recall that there was a way for each user to set a bias for each moderation tag, so you could put -5 on the "Funny" tag and effectively hide them (or at least move them to the bottom of the comments).
to my recollection you didn't gain karma on funny mods. So a completely boneheaded comment may net -8 karma, but still show up as +5 Funny which would be the "ironic" Funny comment.
Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having intellectual discussions on the open internet.
That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like.
I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then. Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to me.
For what it's worth, I would normally downvote this post because it essentially opens with "I'm absolutely right", goes straight into "I will be downvoted" and closes with "I don't need attention". What is the point of that? All that you've come here to say is apparently that you don't need to be read and you're successful regardless of what anyone thinks. Great, I'm happy for you. What value have you added to this conversation? You're not helping on an emotional level and intellectually I'm really struggling to see the insight I'm supposed to be deriving from this as well.
Personally, I left slashdot when I felt the community changed. It started to feel less like excitement, and more like cranky libertarians complaining. I remember CmdrTaco leaving the helm, so maybe it was his steering that kept it good to me? No idea.
When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN! That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!
>The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse.
You've quite well described my latest experienced with StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer" that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted and given quality answers.
I've had similar experiences on ServerFault part of StachExchange. If I simply answer a question with the correct technical answer, my answer is basically ignored. If I take that exact same answer and add a bold title, some cute paragraph formatting, some no-format text boxes, add some flowery wording like I am giving a Ted Talk, then people love my answers. So that is what I do and why I rarely answer questions any more. They also try to encourage me to edit other peoples posts, but I already have a day job.
I feel like a lot more people qualify to do metamoderation in the SO network than ever do it. This is essentially sabotage in the form of benign neglect.
It's true, but the gamification and rules, IMHO, attract personalities that take that stuff really, REALLY, seriously. Even to the point of being absurd.
I suppose it's a kind of power trip to go around and mark questions as "duplicate" for even the most superficial nonsense-- I am looking at you, @gnat !
Very true and it gets even more complicated when there are small circles of full time editors that invoke elitism around document writing styles as well as chiming in on highly subjective answers and invoking dogmatic principals. In Unix/Linux, there are millions of ways to solve a problem, but the solution must fit into their perceived right way. Before long, people not in those elite circles or who do not get the hint are discouraged from editing or answering anything.
Fundamentalism and tribalism seems to exist in any subject. - I find incredibly annoying, disappointing, saddening and infuriating — yet can’t help but wonder if it’s the necessary evolutionary byproduct of our species to collaborate and overcome obstacles too large to tackle alone.
The broken concept is downvoting for others. Instead, it should be downvoting for yourself. If somebody downvotes of flags something, I don't want that something to be hidden from my view, unless I've upvoted the downvoter in past. The "global downvoting" model feeds the wannabe censors who feel entitled to impose their opinion on others.
Be the change that you want to see in the universe. HN has a super easy to use API and I have downloaded the entire history of the site before for a past project. If you don't want to do the leg work yourself I am positive that the data set is out there for download somewhere if you google around.
Data analysis note: the public datasets only have submissions and comments, and just because a HN user has stopped submitting/commenting doesn't mean they quit HN. Lurking is fun.
My old handle unfortunately and innocently looks like (or can be interpreted as) "I'm just here to start shit!" It did not occur to me it might be misinterpreted a certain way until six weeks after I started it and I didn't think it important at that point. As I gained more karma, I did a blog post at some point explaining the completely innocent origin story for it (typo and all). After I hit the leaderboard, I decided, basically, "Oh, brother. This is so not worth the hassle involved. Yeesh." And changed to my actual first and middle names.
That would give no information about the reason someone left: there are a lot of reasons to stop interacting with hn that have nothing to do with the “best people leave in short order” theory.
I used to be incredibly active on here, and then I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons. I have all but stopped commenting compared to my previous activity. It just stopped being fun. Even posts I make that have nothing to do with politics, that only point out provable, factual information, get downvoted. I have over 13K karma, even after losing a few thousand points over the last 18 months or so. So the things that I have to say weren't always unpopular. I didn't change - the community did. It became a hostile, vindictive place.
I still visit daily because HN does a good job of surfacing interesting articles, but I used to find the comments more interesting than the stories themselves. That has changed in the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold. I can now accurately predict the content of many of the comments on a given story by simply reading its title. It's sad to see.
Browsing your recent comments, have you considered ... not commenting about downvotes?
I see a lot of "Why am I getting downvoted for this?", "Group think, downvotes, blah blah blah.", "I'm going to get downvoted for this but...", all of which are just magnets for more downvotes.
I think if you just stopped commenting on the downvoting, well, you'd still get the odd comment downvoted from time to time, because hey, you say things people don't like, you're going to get the downvotes, and yeah, people don't always explain why, which I know is annoying ... but you'd at least no longer be compounding it with the three or four follow-on comments that also all get downvoted, and your net karma would probably be fine.
You saw a recent thread about it in my history, but that is not something I normally comment on. I’ll bring it up every now and then when I say something entirely factual because I find it funny that people will downvote indisputable facts simply because they don’t happen to like what the fact says about their preferred narrative. But this was happening long before I ever started talking about them.
It’s appropriate to talk about here because the voting system is the topic of this article.
I was reading a somewhat controversial comment from you and then visited your account page probably to check for sibling comments in the same post. Your about me definitely changed how I feel about your comments and probably the source of your recent experience.
My about me is based upon my experience here over the last few years. I updated it at some point in the last 6 months, long after all this started. So it is a symptom of my experience here, not a cause.
It being based on your experience doesn't change the fact that it looks like it was written for the explicit purpose of getting under people's skin. Essentially, the responses you are getting (here) are the ones you are angling for.
I have briefly perused your comments and most of them seem to be interesting contributions. Some of them were definitely downvoted for no real reason AFAICT other than offering up unpopular opinions, and still others appeared to be downvoted for being what I think is a combative tone. You do, in general I think, come across as a bit combative. You have interesting, relevant, and/or factual things to say, maybe consider how what you are saying comes across.
I think you're using an overly broad brush. For example, you still feel it's worthwhile to comment sometimes which implies that there are bastions of useful content, which you don't list. I'm sure we disagree on things, which limits the extent of groupthink.
Beyond that, there's the relative difference between HN and places like 4chan. Nuance is helpful.
When I first put that up, I actually ended it by saying "Be part of the solution" or something along those lines. Then, as the downvotes kept coming, I came to realize that most of the people checking my profile had just downvoted one of my comments, and were there looking for additional comments to downvote. I have watched the downvotes come in batches, across threads. That's why it has a pretty negative tone.
I don't actually know. I am who I am, and have been responding to things in the same way since I arrived on the site. I took a lot of flack for criticizing GDPR, which I agree with in principle but believe was very poorly implemented. Also people seem to have confused me for a Trump supporter, even though I am middle-of-the-road politically - which is why I suspect that I get many automatic downvotes regardless of the content of my comments. I try to call things as I see them, and any criticism of left-leaning principles/programs/policies on here - even the most misguided ones - tends to meet with instant, harsh rebuke.
> I try to call things as I see them, and any criticism of left-leaning principles/programs/policies on here - even the most misguided ones - tends to meet with instant, harsh rebuke.
Something to consider; is it a harsh rebuke or just other people calling it as they see it?
If you will forgive the armchair psychoanalysis, perhaps "call things as I see them" is not a good approach? Does that not indicate a lack of engagement with the discourse? You seem to respond negatively, with accusations of bad faith, to a number of respondents who I thought had valid responses; this is builds antagonism.
I have stopped being offended by downvotes -- I am better at accepting them as opposing my viewpoint without having a better counter-argument. If a topic is controversial, I know it will attract downvotes, and I'm fine with insulting people who hold abhorrent views.
If you tone down the hyperbole a little, and write with less of a conspiracy minded tone, I suspect you will have far fewer downvotes; HN is rather libertarian leaning overall.
> I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons.
That could well be because a lot of the downvotes I saw in your recent comment history were on outright political topics (Parler/Trump‘s ban from Twitter/…) It might help if you just stayed away from those if you otherwise enjoyed being active here?
It's hilarious how your comment got immediately downvoted for sharing a personal anecdote about the very same thing. Must really be rubbing the people who downvote for political difference reasons the wrong way.
The value of downvoting, or how Stackexchange gets it wrong about HN's voting system.
It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.
If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.
What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.
12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.
It's gross how in the Reddit redesign comment threads longer than a couple levels deep are actually hidden, even if there's only a single thread on the post. Apparently deep discussion is something they now want to discourage.
If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.
I have come across flagged stories that looked like they would form the basis of an interesting conversation, noticed a string of problematic comments on the story, and agreed with the story being flagged.
Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.
The notion that HN is well-moderated is bizarre. HN is exceptionally hostile to those who hold beliefs contrary to HN-acceptable norms.
If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies
I've done that. Not been banned.
> point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite
Well, I mean, aside from being false, that’s also going to often be a specific labelling of something here as “white supremacist” or “hate speech”; flagging exists pretty specifically to deal with content where that description actually applies without sidetracking conversations with incendiary debate about whether it does. So, yeah, comments doing that will be flagged and moderated and, if thet persist, will likely get you banned.
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this.
If it was banned, you couldn’t post from it. So, since you obviously can, I assume you are misrepresenting the facts when you call it a banned account.
All their comments start dead. People call it shadow banning or hell banning. And some other accounts have [banned] after the name but keep commenting.
Comments by banned accounts are killed by software, but other users can vouch for them to unkill them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). That's what happened in both of those cases.
I'm not sure about the companies but pg's stuff regularly gets criticized on here (even harshly sometimes, I think). Just a few days ago, there was one such story (highly upvoted) on the front page in response to one of pg's essays.
> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
I don't think this is true, or I just don't see any evidence it. Take a look a this HN yesterday thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26782031. Neither PG nor his YC companies are immune to criticism.
If you express some completely heinous ideas in polite, mostly grammatical writing then normally you will not be banned. This is based on my experience of over a decade of various accounts and occasional banning on "Hacker" News.
>point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
To be fair, much of the overtly racist and bigoted content I've seen lately has gotten voted down and flagged, and I've seen Dan step in and stand against it on a few occasions. I don't know if this is the result of a shift in my perceptions or in the community, but to me it seems like things were far worse a few years ago, and now at least a few of the notorious bad accounts have been banned. It's certainly not a paradise, God knows any time race, religion or gender comes up this place often winds up validating its execrable reputation, but I do think the mods are trying. It's not their fault the tech community is being taken over by incels and neo-reactionary fascists.
> These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the most. The assumption of good intention on the part of someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
There are definitely points of view here, no matter how well articulated, that will be buried in low-contrast purgatory very quickly. And I'm not just talking about "white supremacy" type stuff.
> Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.
This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.
Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.
There are many commenters who post abusively, but in my experience it is not the case that they're posting in bad faith. I think that is actually rather rare. Users are far too quick to assume this about each other.
> The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
Yes, but at least unpleasant discussions usually just stop at that, unlike Reddit or even worse Twitter where you get a shitstorm of insults.
I think that decline of willingness happened in society at large. It's simply now reaching hackernews. There is very little that can be done to fix this at the level of HN. It will probably require a shift in broader society.
As someone that just stopped lurking, it's clear downvoting is used primarily as a "disagree" button. Case in point, this comment I'm replying to. I believe they're making a meaningful contribution to this discussion. Yet the downvotes have already commenced.
No the problem is that he makes accusations that are not backed up by any data and this is contrary to the guidelines.
I consider myself more of a leftist than your typical hn user and when I have been abnormally downvoted I never felt it was because of my opinion but rather because I was too hot headed or too ignorant about what I was talking about.
So I am very concerned by those claims but without any data about presumed tolerance to bigotry stuff, they are of no value too anyone. Anybody could feel sore and angry about how some social online gathering is not as X as he wish he was. Heck, that's my life on Reddit.
Gimme data, gimme sources, I'll vote you up.
The person you're replying to is shadowbanned, and their post actually got vouched for, but still (I think) starts off at a deficit.
Looking at your comment history, it looks like you enjoy wading into political conversations with strongly-held opinions. Food for thought, I'd have downvoted some of your comments that I agree with because they bring down the quality of the conversation.
Just remember that that will only give the part of the story which is linked to that one username.
Commenters who post grand narratives about why they were banned typically have a long string of past banned accounts. The giveaway is that they never link to them. That would let readers make up their own minds about why they'd gotten banned, and how accurate their story really is.
You're going to get downvoted and flagged to hell, but I mostly agree with your comment - there was a precipitous quality drop that came with the heavy moderation that people now think of as the identifying characteristic of HN. That being said, I think that after a few egregious missteps (such as the test ban on "politics"), the heavy moderation has been open and kind. I also suspect that there has been some mod meddling to keep my lefty-ass comments visible more than once.
I would like to point out that this is a silicon valley/SF tech forum; considering the demo, to mod out all of the vile sexist/race-realist objectivist bleating would be crushing. Just argue back. The left-liberal addiction to manager-calling is ruining their ability to defend their positions, heavily moderated "safe spaces" really become places where people can repeat their beliefs by rote, free from challenges. The reason libertarians are wrong is because their philosophy is intellectually bankrupt, not because it's upsetting. Practice in putting them down refines your own beliefs.
> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
>
> The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
>
> These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
>
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
This entire comment is one of the most closed-minded, "lower value" comments I've seen on HN recently.
Complaining about how comments aren't open-minded, and also that "hate speech" and "bigoted shit" is the norm is something of a contradiction. If one is open-minded, he should be tolerant even of "hate speech." He should also be open to the ideas that hate speech is both very real or not real at all. Censoriousness is inextricably closed-minded.
I can't speak to PG portfolio criticism, but I think dang does yeoman's work in moderation. Only once have I seen a decision that I thought was harsh, and I think everyone is entitled to a bad day every now and then.
If you walked into my house and started berating and insulting me, I'd probably have a dim view of you, too.
Also, how are you posting from a banned account? That seems to go against the nature of being banned.
Hate speech is a priori not very reasonable so getting rid of it is not a matter a censorship but of getting rid of what stand in the way of thoughtful discussions.
Also I don't think "in my house" metaphor has had much success. Which seems fair : Hacker News is not PG's house, although it is his baby, he handed moderation power over to the users, the algorithm and the moderators. Which is why we like it and trust it and use it. You can't just compare anything to one on one relationships, it does not work like that.
Given your claims of "white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed [...] extremely bigoted shit" being both completely inconsistent with my experience, and the specific things that you are claiming are present, it seems far more likely that you've been banned for the kinds of social authoritarianism (trying to control the speech and thoughts of others) that is particularly popular among a certain political faction lately than those things actually being prevalent and accepted.
Reddit shows up/down totals on users, comments, and stories. It's really in your face. HN has a subtle little arrow or two, and you only see the sum of up/down on your own comments. We know when things have been downvoted, but it's much harder to tell if something has been upvoted. And when things do get downvoted, they're grayed out -- it takes more effort to read downvoted comments (click the date), so if you're skimming you'll just skip unpopular comments until it gets relevant again. So display-wise, I like the cleaner HN over the noisier and visibly gamified Reddit.
Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying small means dang can generally be expected to read most of the comments on the site.
And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely worth wading into. If a million people started using HN, then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.
Do title submissions also start at -4? I noticed that there is often almost a hard line where article submission gets much more visibility if it goes over 4 points.
I always assumed SE got voting right because why else are they the top dog? I never felt any need for them to exist because programming forums (or usenet groups earlier) exised since forever and once Google give us usable search(sorry, Altavista) I could find an answer for basically any question.
I think SE has terrible voting. Voting fundamentally doesn't work for what they're trying to do, because if you want wiki-style best-of answers to specific questions you cannot use a simple counting algorithm.
For one, answers change over time. The best answer five years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The most current and correct answer will never be able to catch up with that.
Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a collaboration brings out the worst in some people.
Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are the ones that look plausible. They're not necessarily definitive, or ideal.
Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they don't.
Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed and duplicates aren't really duplicates.
I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki, or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the problem.
They introduced it to gamify the whole charade without any deeper thought. At the beginning they had a lot of people addicted to answering questions and displaying their points on blogs which to me always looked ridiculous.
They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope, it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I quit before long.
It's worth noting that 2009 was a eon ago in internet time. Almost nothing from that era is applicable to social media behavior in 2021. Especially Hacker News, which IMO was much more elitist/hostile at that time and fortunately has improved in that aspect over the years.
Seemed friendly enough in 2010. There was a lot less news cycle discussion and more tech (but less product) discussion, so that might have been alienating. Also a lot more YC specific stuff, so maybe that felt elitist.
HN definitely moves in the proper direction on this one. The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation. If, contrarily, a user wished to provide a form of disagreement they would do so with a reply. Why? Because votes are a means of action to express an appeal to agreement/disagreement.
I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.
> The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation.
This assumes all conversation is equal quality. That particular point has never been true in social media, and has actually become worse post-2016, with increased partisanship and bad faith arguing.
It's impossible to run a high-quality discussion forum without some sort of check on bad behavior. That said, it's up for debate whether downvotes are the best answer to this problem.
First, your point implies down votes are a check on bad behavior as opposed to a form of disagreement. I suspect many users use social media voting for a variety of different reasons.
Secondly, there are two solutions to that problem:
1. If you believe the environment, group, or social body of a particular conversing venue is heavily biased, whether deliberate or not, you don't have to participate there. Simply leave.
2. If you believe a particular user is deliberately exercising some form of bad behavior or displays an inability to follow the conversation you don't have to reply to them. Simply let it die.
For example: whether or not I ever liked or voted for President Trump I would never spend time on Reddit at r/theDonald because I know conversation there is biased like a form of cult worship. Why bother conversing where you are not allowed to disagree on any matter?
It is still wrong. But even brilliant people/groups/institutions can get it stubbornly wrong. Let us say that HN thrives despite the disutility of the downvoting regime.
Those are mostly out of date. Maybe stop self-celebrating past victories, it's not very becoming. ;)
Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly
controversial and important topics are being removed with this mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.
Flagging is necessary to keep the site on-topic in my opinion. People will happily upvote controversy that has little value or importance to this site.
I agree that flagging has value, but it is grossly misused to suppress discussions that are on topic but are outside of the overton window.
Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin (that's a problem on all sides by the way).
Individual comments are rarely flagged for anything other than outright spam or harassment. I browse with "show dead" turned on.
I have seen entire heated topics killed but that kills both sides of the argument equally. What value is a 500-comment talk-over-each-other argument, fundamentally about politics even if on-topic, on this site? I doesn't seem like something we should waste time on.
I agree with you, my opposition is actually regarding posts. I have been active on a number of posts over the last couple of years that were very much on topic but were on controversial issues, and they will get flagged to death after being on the front page for a few minutes, and at that point further conversation is dead and the post sinks into irrelevance.
I have recently found a whole lot of value in figuring out what everybody agrees about. A lot of the time that is right. And when it is wrong, it is good to know, and encourages (me at least) to really figure out why the fence is there before I remove it.
Rarely does anyone ever comment to agree on something. And merely being contrarian is not valuable in of itself.
If a few things are over-moderated I might be mildly missing out. So what? Humans are fallible. There is no perfect system. You're not arguing that HN is so moderated that it's completely worthless. You're not even getting close to that.
So what do we do about a system that isn't perfect but is doing a pretty fine job?
> if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship,
The rules to stay on topic is not the same as censorship. Often I noticed people talk (write) past each other and get into misunderstandings; it happens to me I'll admit.
> controversy that has little value or importance to this site
What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.
> Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.
And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has different niches :).
You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.
> HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.
That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom.
HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker would find interesting, but who is to say what that is? The guidelines basicly say that what's on topic is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Again, what I think is that the "good hacker" is us. We shouldn't nitpick topics. We should take care to have good discussions. We consider technology important and relevant, so we discuss it. Same for everything.
I think we don't differ all that much. I also find the people and quality of discourse the most valuable thing on HN. However, I also claim that these things are not orthogonal to the topics of discussion!
Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discourse gets, and the faster good people leave - it's a feedback loop that quickly grinds a community down to the lowest common denominator.
That's why stable, quality communities either expel (like HN) or contain (like plenty of forums limiting politics to only the Offtopic board) such topics. And it's not like it's a new invention - a lot (possibly most) societies have a long-standing custom that says not to bring up politics and religions in typical conversations between strangers (or at dinner with extended family).
I sympathize. I used to actually choose technologies (up to a point) based on what kinds of discussions were to be had in their IRC channels.
I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
When I see that a conversation is going south, I try to bring coolheadedness to it, or point out how it could be made better. I think that's the way to a good forum.
I spent a lot of time in my teenage years on IRC, talking about technology until late hours, so this resonates :).
I think I see what you're getting at, so let me reassure you a bit, and correct for any miscommunication I may have caused:
> But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
HN doesn't strictly forbid controversial topics. The guidelines[0] outline what is and isn't considered on-topic, provide heuristics for good behavior and pleas to avoid certain bad patterns. They don't say, "these topics will be automatically removed", or "these topics will get you insta-banned". They're just guidelines, a description of what this place should strive for. They work as a Schelling point[1] for individual participants.
So what happens in practice is, when you post a clear-cut intellectually stimulating hacker topic, it'll get upvoted. If it's boring, it'll get ignored. If you post a completely garbage submission, it'll get flagged faster than you can refresh the site. If a topic is on a fence, the balance of upvotes, flags and vouches will lean one way or the other. It's an organic system, but the direction it's leaning is strongly shaped by the guidelines - the one thing everyone knows everyone is expected to know :).
It's also easy to observe that whether or not a given topic stays on the front page or gets quickly flagged out of it isn't just a function of the topic and the source - but also the context (and I think sometimes the timezone). For example, political news aren't very prominent on HN, except when something really big happens, and HN briefly turns into a 24h news station.
And on the controversy itself, the general principle is - it's not the topic being controversial itself that's the problem. The problem is if the discussion around it decays into low-quality bickering. For some topics this is almost a law of nature, so people flag them on sight. But others only get flagged down if and when they evolve into actual flame war.
I've expanded about what I think about this in the neighboring comments. I'd like to ask this though. When you feel that a thread is going off-topic, to the detriment of the forum, please post a comment pointing that out. Others might disagree with you, or they might see your point. What I find really problematic is when a discussion that I care about is flagged without any input. I perceive it as spiteful, because usually it's me having a controversial opinion, and I'm more likely to be spiteful in turn, though of course I try not to be. I don't mind people questioning the quality of my contribution. I actually welcome it, because I care. Just don't reject it off-hand.
I've seen purely technical discussions being removed from page 1 just because some people really wanted that stuff to go away, and had the power to make it happen.
Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it. It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting down discussions for everyone.
I think dang was being facetious here when he said "getting it wrong." He knows damn well that downvoting does no good for a platform since it is so easily abused to suppress ideas.
Yes, facetious and a little smug—but the rest of your comment is wildly off base from my perspective. Saying that downvoting does no good for HN is like saying white blood cells do no good for an organism. It's critical to the immune system. Yes, downvotes can do harm, just like white blood cells can. But try living without them.
I'm a huge fan of no downvote button, so much so in fact that I don't think users of any karma level should be able to do it.
Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.
I feel like downvoting on HN is a way of saying “No. We don’t behave like that here”. It’s one of our community’s tools for preserving, teaching and enforcing our values with newcomers. Yes, it’s open to abuse. But it fills an important social function. And from that perspective, of course it’s limited to people who’ve been involved in the community awhile.
Flagging is for spam, at least that what I use it for. I reserve my downvotes for conversational indecency: bad faith arguments, personal attacks, not acknowledging/engaging the parent post's points.
I'm not sure why spam should be treated any differently than conversational indecency (personal attacks, bad faith arguing); in theory it could all fall under the bucket of "this doesn't belong here", right?
Personally, I flag for blatant rule violations such as comments that are filled with personal attacks or spam.
I will downvote comments that are simply low quality, like comments that merely say "^ This!". I don't usually downvote bad faith arguing because it's hard to prove when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.
> when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.
Sometimes the person just misinterprets the conversation, especially if not being a native english speaker, but the responses could get overly harsh and that's a pity because I'd like to see more international discussions here.
Don’t use downvotes to signal disagreement. It goes against the implicit and explicit guidelines of HN. And it drags HN closer to reddit.
Even if you see other people using downvotes for disagreement, that doesn’t make it ok for you to do the same.
Downvotes are for when people violate the norms and values of our community without thoughtfulness or self awareness.
The difference is subtle sometimes, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing I downvote. Low effort, dismissal / rejection of the community’s norms without nuance or justification beyond “well other people do it too so that makes it ok”.
> Don’t use downvotes to signal disagreement. It goes against the implicit and explicit guidelines of HN. And it drags HN closer to reddit.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN! There has certainly never been a guideline against it, and the case law is clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.
I think the idea that things should be otherwise actually comes from Reddit (no?) which takes this to a triple back flip level of irony.
I use downvotes to signal disagreement when, from my perspective, someone is giving bad advice, not accurately representing the truth, speculating in an unproductive way, distracting from the discussion with completely unfounded claims, etc.
I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent. Certainly part of that continuum warrants downvotes. "Don't use downvotes to signal disagreement," is meaningless in that context.
More concretely, the HN guidelines say nothing about why to downvote. They only say, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
> I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent.
Yeah, I like this perspective but I think there's two axes we can separate a little. One axis is disagreement. (I agree with you <-> I disagree with you). the other axis is effort / coherence. (I'm going to invest significant effort to clearly articulate my point of view <-> I'm going to make a flippant off-handed comment).
Disagreement alone isn't the problem - I've had some lovely conversations on HN with people I disagree with. Eg, a couple weeks ago I had this interesting exchange[1] talking about RMS on the FSF board. But the conversation worked because everyone was careful and articulate. When someone says something I disagree with, but they say it in a thoughtful, well articulated way, I learn something new.
There's probably more factors at play, but as a rule of thumb I suppose downvotes are in the low effort + strong disagree quadrant. In that zone I feel like there's no implied intent to even talk it through. And absent conversation, why are we even here?
I like those axes. I also enjoy conversations with someone where I disagree, and I wouldn't downvote purely based on disagreement, but generally due to some other factor.
Perhaps I'm only acknowledging that I'm less likely to downvote someone that I agree with? For example, if someone speculates wildly but it's consistent with my own experience, I'm not likely to downvote. If someone speculates wildly and it's inconsistent with my experience, I'm far more likely to downvote.
Probably where we disagree is whether it's OK to downvote a comment that someone put effort into. I've seen someone ask a question about a particular technology, and someone who clearly has very little experience with that technology posts a long screed where they're ~~talking out their ass~~ sharing their opinion in a way that sounds authoritative. Or maybe they're repeating business-level talking points instead of getting down to technical brass tacks.
I hope that gives an idea what I mean. I don't want to see comments like that on HN, regardless of how much effort or how well-meaning the comment is.
> I use downvotes to signal disagreement when, from my perspective, someone is giving bad advice, not accurately representing the truth, speculating in an unproductive way, distracting from the discussion with completely unfounded claims, etc.
This seems to be a really wide net for downvotes, and almost certainly won't match other people's use cases for downvoting. I don't think downvoting should be open to interpretation like this, hence why I think it should be removed. The alternative? Just don't upvote, or flag if something is truly inappropriate.
Actually, I think you completely misunderstood. I agree with you 110 percent that downvotes shouldn't be used to signal disagreement; I disagreed with you because that is, in fact, exactly how it is used most of the time. My downvote of you was ironic, illustrative of just how stupid down votes are. I was making a point. I think HN should remove down votes entirely, or make them costly, or required a tagged explanation.
> update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized.
But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively harmful.
And then this:
> Is it realistic for users to expect to post in an environment where there are no penalties at all, no way for their peers to express disapproval or disagreement with their post?
Huh? Peers express disapproval and disagreement by commenting within the post. As I am doing precisely right now. ;)
Jeff Atwood is a super-smart guy who's done amazing things but this particular piece leaves me quite baffled.