
The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - Kinnard
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/
======
gue5t
The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive. For one thing, it
establishes a mindset of "internet points" which encourages grubbing for
upvotes, especially on HN where you must either grind out 500 points worth of
relatively meaningless comments, or wait until you have the time to post 500
points worth of useful messages, which takes much longer, before you can use
downvotes. If your opinions don't match the overarching consensus of the
community, it may take forever because people downvote those with which they
strongly disagree.

The goal of user feedback on submissions and comments should be to gain
information about the comments in a more nuanced system than the linear
"good/bad" scale, so that the site can make use of this information to help
users achieve their browsing goals. The other problem with up/down votes is
that they're used to decide ordering, i.e. visibility, and everyone wants
their comments to be read (that was the motivation for posting them). Thus
there's a natural incentive to try to grab the screenspace with the most
eyeballs. People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or
reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and
to downvote other "siblings" in the tree. These are noise votes that provide
no insight into any inherent property of the content, but simply fall out of
the misaligned incentives. I'd like to see a system which lets HN answer the
following questions: Is a comment well-written but trollbait? Is a comment a
simple request for explanation, or a brilliant informative summary of a topic?
Is a comment accidentally on the wrong post, or is it someone mistaken about
matters of fact? Is a comment political or technical? Is it a first-person
account from someone involved in the article? Is it anecdata? Is it an empty
"me too"? There are many roles comments can be playing and if you're reading
HN with a particular goal in mind, sorting user content into these buckets
would be very useful.

Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The reason HN's is so
poor is because the incentives are misaligned and pg does not actually care
about the quality of discourse here, but merely the quantity and subject of
discussion (because HN exists to farm cultural capital for venture
capitalists). I do not believe much thought has been put into optimizing HN
for the people who read and comment on it.

Edit: I can't believe this article got flagged and is no longer visible on the
HN frontpage. This system is so dysfunctional.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive."

> "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago."

Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system
that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata?

> "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to
> the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to
> downvote other "siblings" in the tree."

I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy
to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to
substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd
definitely add to the overall HN experience.

~~~
gue5t
Metadata is useful! The problem is that 1D "good/bad" being used to order
comments is not a reasonable approach. In a more nuanced system there's less
incentive (other than wrecking) to inaccurately mark comments as being
"informative" or "technical" or "political", because instead of changing
global comment visibility you're only changing it for the subset of users who
are using that attribute to guide their reading. There are honest differences
of opinion as to whether a comment fits in certain categories, but these are
more specific and less contentious than "good/bad" and so I'd expect a much
better SNR on them.

Collapsing threads is nice but the importance of defaults to the user
experience is hard to overstate. At each step of an interaction chain more
users will fall off and not end up at the goal. Lots of people will never use
comment collapsing if they have to manually do it.

------
Kinnard
Of note: hacker news actually does have downvoting, you have to reach a karma
threshold that keeps getting moved. Last I heard it was 500.

~~~
galfarragem
501\. I reached it this week. Too low (1000 would be more reasonable), anyway
I don't plan to use it.

~~~
realusername
You still need quite a lot of time to reach it, I've reached it in maybe 7
months or something, it's another level compared to reddit.

~~~
galfarragem
I took years. Only users that added a lot of value to HN should be allowed to
'shape' it. The community needs that people to feel like to continue to add
value. In the end everybody wins.

------
rnhmjoj
I'm ok with downvote for stories but it seems the system works pretty good
without it: good posts get somehow noticed in "new" and appear in the "top",
the inappropriate ones are ignored or flagged.

As for comments I would remove the feature entirely: I have never felt the
need to downvote a comment even when I strongly disagreed with it and when I
think something is stupid I just ignore it: there is no need to tell everyone
else it's stupid. Also it really annoys me when I see someone's opinion grayed
out and crashed by users that sometimes don't even bother to comment on why
they downvoted.

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dawnbreez
How about three buttons:

>I agree

>I disagree

>This is spam

The total votes in the first two are used in the ranking, but then you also
get "recommended friends" based on who else has agreed with what you've agreed
with, and "advocated devils" based on who disagrees with what you agree with.
These two groups are then used to alert the user to comments made by these
people, which may indicate a discussion worth joining.

~~~
Tiksi
The first part of that is more or less the slashdot system, which I think
worked pretty well. However the recommended friends / advocated devils seems
like it would encourage groupthink / witchhunts / voting rings, etc.

Personally I think the best way to modify the current system would be to have
up/down votes only affect the comment's position on the page and nothing else,
no persistent or visible score for users or comments.

------
Shivetya
With regards to submissions we can always flag that which isn't suited for the
site. With the upcoming elections sure to contentious there will be many
stories masquerading themselves but in essence they are nothing more than
political attack pieces.

We have already seen a few posted. They start out with an interesting headline
about a technology everyone is interested in and then suddenly go straight to
politics with attacks against one candidate or another without calling out the
other side.

As for down vote costing, all for it with a caveat. If a post is universally
down voted then the cost is refunded.

~~~
Kinnard
I think the interesting/compelling point is that there actually IS downvoting
on hackernews.

~~~
detaro
What is the interesting point about that? That the author didn't notice it
while looking at the site, and had to be told afterwards? That some of the
arguments don't work/still work? I'm not sure what you want to say (if you
want to say something, and not just see what others say)

~~~
Kinnard
I think it's a significant hidden feature which affects the shape of the
community and also how the rewards of making it to the first page are
allocated. There's essentially a class of hn users with more power.

~~~
detaro
Submissions can't be downvoted, so entries appearing on the frontpage is not
affected. (Ignoring flagging, which admittedly can have a similar effect. I
don't remember what the threshold for flagging is, also 500?)

EDIT: ... and of course this submission becomes an example for flags as
downvotes...

~~~
Kinnard
Apparently you are correct. My bad.

------
ajb
I wonder if it might be a good idea to disable the vote buttons until they've
been in the viewable area for a minute or so, to allow for more time to think.
Has that been tried anywhere?

~~~
detaro
Only thing I can think of that is somewhat related is the fact that in deeper
comments on HN it takes a while for the direct reply-link to show up, so you
have to go via the permalink to respond immediately.

~~~
Kinnard
I just noticed this for the first time. There are so many little subtle things
about hacker news.

~~~
ZenoArrow
If you click on the time of post, you always get the Reply link, no need to
wait.

------
lightlyused
I had a comment down voted because I pointed out that the tile of the post
didn't match the title of the article at the url. The title on HN was changed
to make the link more inflammatory (negative) towards the subject of the
article. HN needs meta moderation.

------
detaro
From 2009

------
dhimes
This is old (2009) and wrong (there _is_ downvoting). Flagging.

~~~
Kinnard
How do you feel this merits a flag?

~~~
ZenoArrow
Ironically, they're probably flagging because they can't downvote stories.

As for the article, I disagree with it. The 'New' section moves so fast that
there's no need for a story downvote, if it reaches the home page it's because
there's enough people interested in it. The mods are also good at managing
incoming spam (which you can see from the Dead stories in the New section).
Furthermore, whilst it may have been true to say comment downvotes were rare
in 2009, they're certainly not now.

~~~
dhimes
_Ironically, they 're probably flagging because they can't downvote stories._

In some sense, yes. That is what flagging is for.

~~~
ZenoArrow
That's not what flagging is for. Flagging is to alert the mods that content
needs to be removed, that is very different from downvoting because you
dislike something.

~~~
dhimes
It should be removed. It is irrelevant. That's why I flagged it. The concept
applies to more than just spam. It also applies to, for example, political
pieces or celebrity gossip.

In this case it was a simply incorrect and outdated article. I would expect
that the author would be embarrassed to see it come up here (probably forgot
about it).

I don't particularly dislike the article, it just shouldn't have been posted.

