
Ask HN: Is the downvoting feature valuable? - ocdtrekkie
I&#x27;ve been a casual browser of HN for a few months now, and while I tend to find value in some of the stories (I particularly like browsing Show HNs), I find the community rather toxic. I&#x27;ve sworn off commenting here a couple of times, because of the behavior here, and then returned to it because I felt I could contribute a thought or two of value.<p>If your view is unpopular, even if well-stated, it will be downvoted into oblivion. Often, a post of mine will actually get 3-4 upvotes, before a certain crowd roves through hours later and sends it to -4.<p>One of the &quot;50 Lies Programmers Believe&quot;[1], featured on HN a bit ago, is that &quot;The tech industry is a meritocracy.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not, but unfortunately, HN&#x27;s downvote feature is extremely restrictive, only users with a high karma score get access to it, meaning it tends to be a way for popular users with popular views to suppress uncommon views. I suppose if this was only used to mitigate spam, marketing, foul behavior, and more, this would be okay, but it&#x27;s often used to simply express disagreement.<p>Social networks like Facebook and Google+ have long understood that &quot;Dislike&quot; or &quot;-1&quot; buttons lead to an unpleasant experience, which is why most social networks tend to go without them.[2][3]<p>Hacker News, in fact, recently announced a ban on &quot;gratuitous negativity&quot;[4], yet the downvote is heavily used on a regular basis.<p>While I won&#x27;t be surprised to see this downvoted or flagged, or labelled gratuitously negative in itself, I ask you to consider the value of the downvote button, and whether it deserves to exist. Or even, perhaps, if you should show more hesitation before the next time you push it.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tommorris.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;9317
[2] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Why-is-there-no-Dislike-button-on-Facebook
[3] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenextweb.com&#x2F;socialmedia&#x2F;2010&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebook-dislike-button-why-it-will-never-happen&#x2F;
[4] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9317916
======
brudgers
Writing better comments correlates with better comment scores. HN comnents
appear before an audience who can vote. If the voting presentss a problem,
blog your thoughts and submit a link, Otherwise treat downvotes as editorial
feedback on the quality of your writing. Perhaps your point was not made
clear, your reasoning was specious, or your audience was not taken adequately
into your account.

I find complaints about downvotes detrimental to HN.

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dragonwriter
> If your view is unpopular, even if well-stated, it will be downvoted into
> oblivion.

This is not my observation; I have not seen well-stated posts making
substantive contributions without excessive irrelevant meta-commentary (e.g.,
on downvotes when that's not the subject) or abuse frequently downvoted
(except transiently -- a few early downvotes that are soon offset by upvotes
isn't uncommon), regardless of popularity.

I do often see well-stated points _that are not relevant to the context in
which they are offered_ downvoted, and that does seem likely to be somewhat
influenced by popularity. But it seems a lot more that otherwise _bad_
comments that happen to express a popular opinion sometimes _avoid_ downvoting
than that otherwise _good_ comments that express an unpopular opinion tend to
be downvoted.

------
minimaxir
Er, I checked your recent comment history and only found one comment from you
which was downvoted
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760439))
which is the correct response since it's off topic.

What other examples you have of unwarranted down voting?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
In some cases I think they've gone back up since the downvote crew rolled
through. In some cases I've deleted things too. A lot of times as I said, I'll
get up several votes, and then be pushed down to 0 or negatives, and then
perhaps end up back at 1 in time.

(On a discussion about Google, I managed to end up +30 karma for my comments
there, then back down to where I was, then back up a bit, before getting -50'd
and threatened by a moderator. Anything touching Google is a particularly
sensitive topic to the folks who use downvote heavily, I imagine there's quite
a few Google employees who participate here.)

I disagree that the comment you linked was off-topic. It was an issue with the
link provided, and a discussion of possible solutions that followed it.

~~~
dang
> threatened by a moderator

Where did we do that?

~~~
dwwoelfel
Are comments usually heavily downvoted after you caution the commenter? Maybe
you could set a lower limit on those comments. Getting downvoted to -50 seems
excessive.

------
DanBC
Some people can downvote. Everyone with a logged in account can upvote. So
your problem is not just that a few people downvote your posts, but that other
people do not upvote your posts.

To go from +4 to -4 is not normal. You have to try hard to craft a post that
has that vote pattern. Have you considered just avoiding those types of
threads? (Apple, Google, or MS threads have that kind of voting. Or if you say
anything critical and also wrong about OpenBSD).

Do you have any examples?

------
iknewit
Of course yes, it gives distinction between the good or bad comments.

But also its has controversial existence and this is a dilemma we can't answer

unless there is voting system on HN policy

~~~
ocdtrekkie
If that's what it was used for, I would have less of an issue, but often it
really just seems to filter popular/unpopular views. Creating an echo chamber,
where only the views shared by moderators and high karma users are allowed to
exist.

~~~
sjs382
Can you show us examples of this echo chamber in action?

In my experience, low-quality posts and comments get downvoted, high- (or even
okay-) quality posts and comments get upvoted.

Also, why is there all of this focus on votes? Don't get worked up over magic
internet points that people give/take without a second thought.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
My particular issue with extreme downvoting, is it seems (at least from my
observation) to be tied to rate-limiting your ability to comment on posts. I
was unable to comment on this thread, for example, for a fairly decent period
of time. The other contention is that it sucks to be downvoted (a system I
dislike in general) while being unable to downvote comments you believe are
low quality yourself.

The actual magic internet points, as you say, aren't really a big deal.

------
krapp
Using downvotes to express disagreement is, unfortunately, not against site
policy. So what you observe is the system working as intended. It is valuable
to users who want to preserve that system, and who believe there is a strong
correlation between karma and content quality (which is an assumption baked
into all such ranking systems, and fundamental to HN's own culture.)

