
Show HN: Automatically delete your negative point HN comments - ransom1538
https://github.com/james-ransom/hn-delete-negative-point-comments
======
lubos
Please don't delete your down-voted comments. It is what it is. Own it.

For one, it's really annoying when seeing insightful reply but unable to see
the full picture because OP has deleted their comment.

Not to mention, when you go down that path by curating your posting history,
what does it tell about you? Being self-absorbed and depending on validation
of others are not exactly healthy attributes. You think you are helping
yourself in long run but in reality, you are hurting yourself more.

~~~
maxxxxx
Agreed. Own your mistakes. And don't judge others by thwir mistakes. Mistakes
are a part of life and nothing to be ashamed of.

A good idea may be to not show negative points to others but only to the
author. That way you know what got downvoted but it's not public.

~~~
rusk
Who said it's mistakes? Sometimes you can just be making a wholly correct
remark that goes against the grain.

If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes, then downvoters should be
forced to "own" them too by accompanying their downvote with an explanation.

~~~
maxxxxx
"If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes, then downvoters should be
forced to "own" them too by accompanying their downvote with an explanation. "

Maybe the whole voting thing should be abandoned and comments should stand on
their own. What's the benefit of karma?

~~~
krapp
I don't know about the benefit of karma, but the purpose of karma is to
enforce and reward conformity to guidelines and culture through operant
conditioning, with the intended net effect being only high-quality comments
(and commenters) wind up on top, and are engaged with, while low quality
comments (and commenters) are left alone at the bottom, unreadable, to
discourage both commenters and posters.

This is in line with HN's culture of aggressive curation and "quality over
quantity," though, so I don't see it changing or going away.

------
3pt14159
Sometimes I post something that gets downvoted and I'm wrong. I try to learn
from it. And hopefully others who think similarly learn from it too.

Sometimes I post something that gets downvoted, but I'm certain I'm still
right. I try to learn why I was an ineffectual communicator.

Sometimes I try again and it gets downvoted anyway. Sometimes there are things
people just don't agree with and that is ok.[0]

Trying to whitewash your comment history is like what children do with
instagram filters. It's a fake portrayal of what you believe or believed. The
only time I delete a comment is when a thread is still active and I had some
foundational misunderstanding or a momentary loss of empathy[1] for others.

[0] The NSA has this program where they try to predict what will happen in the
future. When they first turned on the program they tried to take the consensus
view of what experts thought. The program met initial failure.

What they came to realize after analyzing the data is that parroting consensus
opinions is a low-risk, low-effort mental activity. There's no extra signal.

What ended up making the program much more successful was focusing on the
opinions that experts had that were _outside_ the consensus view of their
field. They weren't more likely to happen, but they were much more likely to
happen than they were talked about. Further, because few saw these less-likely
events / realities materializing there were less downside mitigating plans and
processes.

I think of being downvoted online—but still believing what you believe—kinda
like that. You know that a good chunk of these comments are wrong, you just
don't know which ones. But it is worth it to think through these things for
yourself because you're adding real signal to the world.

[1] Empathy online isn't something that's come automatically to me. But once I
understood how actions cascade outward I came to appreciate how damaging curt
or bullying comments are.

------
typetehcodez
No. Don't do this. I don't want the comments here to have a chilling filter
like this. We need diversity of opinions even if some of them aren't liked.
That is part and parcel of healthy debate. There should be fringe opinions on
the sidelines getting attention - that's how we innovate. Tools like this are
chilling, sensor ideas that may be controversial but innovative, and stifle
healthy dialog.

~~~
jbob2000
Would you share the same thought if you had read my comment history? People
post dumb, uninteresting things all the time. I don't want a collection of my
dumb thoughts to follow me around.

~~~
typetehcodez
After reading through some of your older, down-voted comments, I noticed a
trend of rebuttals. Both your comments and their replies are valuable points
of conversation in the topics. While you may think some are

> dumb, uninteresting

That is a subjective opinion, and that's okay. If I was searching Hacker News
on a topic, I expect to see both sides, or multiple sides, of a topic so I can
try and make an informed opinion myself. Are those old posts, "dumb" and
"uninteresting" and merely because they are down-voted? I would argue that
while some may share this view, I do not, and I find great value in the debate
and multiple opinions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this regard.

If the down-voted comments are removed, the conversation becomes heavily one-
sided and it is confusing to the reader what is being argued. Just because an
opinion is down-voted or unpopular, doesn't mean it is wrong. As Max Planck
said, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." The discussion as a
whole has more value than the individual contributions, and we loose that
discussion with this kind of censorship, and with it a path to new ideas.

~~~
jbob2000
I really appreciate your reply, thank you. I agree that the posts are valuable
when framed with the context of discussion, but when you collect them as "the
thoughts of jbob2000", the context changes and they become dangerous to me
individually.

I think the problem is that my post history is public, actually. If I could
pick and choose which of my comments to add to my profile, I would be less
inclined to delete my old comments.

------
jacknews
Fitter, Happier.

I'm guessing this is tongue-in-cheek, or cleverly highlighting an actually
important issue. And if you're considering replying to the thread at all,
you're likely experiencing it to some extent - is one part of your mind
considering the potential 'HN points' implications of your post?

I'm all for a late-night grace period where you can delete possibly drunk
posts from the night before, or heat-of-the-moment angry posts, the following
morning.

But the danger is that 'reputation points' act as a self-censorship and muting
mechanism, and sometimes the truth is simply going to be unpopular.

Perhaps even the source shouldn't be able to unsay something just because it
proves unpopular.

------
rectang
No one should feel that they need to conform to the HN zeitgeist. No matter
what your perspective, the prevailing wisdom here will frequently be
objectionable -- and posts which represent a minority opinion, well expressed
and truly held, should be a source of pride regardless of how well they play.

At the same time, negative reactions may represent an opportunity to hone your
rhetoric and consider new angles to better reach your interlocutors.

~~~
resters
Yes. Exactly. I love to refine an approach to the same argument over time,
using the points as a guide. This helps the persuasive quality of the argument
but also helps refine my own thinking.

------
tablethnuser
Use this browser plugin which hides things like comment karma on HN and stop
letting these numbers affect your well-being in the first place

[https://github.com/a13o/disengaged](https://github.com/a13o/disengaged)

~~~
floatingatoll
MetaFilter has a built-in user preference for this, so that you simply see
“has favorites”. It’s really nice.

------
lettergram
Having built: [https://hnprofile.com](https://hnprofile.com)

Where it indexes and process all comments on HN in real-time, I've done a lot
of analysis.

I'd argue some of the most negative comments are not actually down voted. I've
had very pleasant comments get down voted as well, and even comments swing
from negative votes to positive.

I don't think this helps with any of those, or the poor comments you made.
It's just karma management.

~~~
CPLX
I typed in the word Brooklyn and my name didn't come up so I think your
machine doesn't work very well.

~~~
lettergram
Depends on how much you discuss it. HN is just an example, places it works
best are organizations with emails and slack. Basically tens or hundreds of
emails a week.

The top results for Brooklyn still contains people living or have lived there.
Mostly it’s an expectation thing... you expect yourself to be there, that
doesn’t mean the system hasn’t identified better people to contact about
Brooklyn. perhaps the system identified that other people had greater
“expertise” simply because there was a larger data set (or someone displayed
more knowledge)

------
krapp
I don't mind deleting comments without replies but as far as I'm concerned,
"deleting" a comment that's been replied to is an act of vandalism.

I don't know why HN allows that, but given that they do, it should be a
bannable offense.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I don't know why HN allows that

It doesn't seem to intend to, the delete link goes away when there are
replies.

> but given that they do, it should be a bannable offense.

If an action should never be allowed, then it should be systematically
prevented (since it can be with no other harm), not punished after the fact.

~~~
krapp
In this case I mean "editing by clearing all of the content out of a comment"
as deletion, or replacing it with a period, or something similar.

I don't know if you can literally delete after being replied to but I have
seen destructive edits happening more frequently here.

------
pjc50
You've reminded me that I wanted to build a tool for finding my highest-voted
ever comments and collating them.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
If you build it, please put in on "Show HN" or something. I'd like to run that
on my comments.

------
yodon
If you have enough negative point comments on HN that you're even considering
needing a bot to delete them, you're probably doing HN wrong. I wouldn't say
that about other sites, but HN karma drives good conversations way more
effectively than most places.

------
danso
Fun little script, though pragmatically, if you are posting so many highly
down-voted comments that you need to automate the process of tracking their
status, you should probably take a break from HN/Internet discussions :)

------
paulie_a
Honestly who cares about votes on comments? It's fake internet points. They
don't matter, post what you think is appropriate, don't be a jerk. Go on with
your life.

------
xvnl
The negative comments are often the interesting ones. I would like a script
that displays them in the normal black color.

------
jeletonskelly
"When people go through my HN posts I want them to know I only get upvotes. My
opinions are _so_ good that everyone always agrees with me. The truth is I
delete my negative posts so I can always claim to be cooler than Gilfoyle."

-Dinesh from Silicon Valley (he didn't actually say this, deleting your negative posts and comments is such a Dinesh thing to do)

------
interfixus
There's something unseemly about comment deletion as a function of downvotes.
Zeitgeist, meet Hacker News.

------
AndrewOMartin
Part of the fun of HN are the downvoted comments. Karma shouldn't be seen as a
score, but rather as a currency you've earned, to be spent on intentionally
provocative shitposts.

------
starbeast
There's a bot on reddit that does this. At least I assume it was a bot after
looking at its history, as one of the messages it hadn't deleted was it trying
to strike up conversation with the politics moderator bot. Either way, the
behaviour of deleting anything that goes negative was in itself as annoying as
the single line affirmations that seemed to be the limit of its programmed
output.

------
ransom1538
This script will automatically remove comments you made that go under 1 point.

* This was just to keep me typing ruby for a few hours. However, this post made it to the top 3 posts, then was removed from the top page by the moderators. It is demoralizing to have it 'hidden' for no specified reason silently.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I had some "bad comments", but they shouldn't be deleted. Everyone had their
opinion, you don't have to follow the group if you have a different one.

Ps. You should have the dignity to not do it while your drunk though :p

~~~
vonmoltke
> Everyone had their opinion, you don't have to follow the group if you have a
> different one.

I feel like discussions on this site started going downhill when PG decided
"votes == agreement" was acceptable. Expressing a well-structured and well-
researched opinion should not engender downvotes, while empty sound bites
should. Sadly, what actually happens now depends on which side of the mob the
post falls.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Transparency is the big thing here. And yet, HN is one big opaque pile of SV.

Scores? Nah we keep them secret from others.

Who downvoted/silenced someone? We don't discuss that.

Unpopular opinion, but intellectually interesting? Someone (mods or others)
silence and rate limit you. Your opinion does not matter.

Mods threaten you for "ideological rants"... Its because it was not in the
interests of SV/HN. How dare you discuss 'unapproved topics'.

We have better solutions right now. But at this moment, we have no clue what
these scores actually are- its information assymetry at its worst.

Reversing public scores would be a start. Publishing who up/downvoted would be
another. Showing flagged and killed would be a further step in the right
direction of transparency. And so would also getting rid of hellbanning.

But, we end up with mob justice, overseen by a trite dictatorship.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I don't agree and didn't downvoted. But it's simply not a good argument
though.

Eg. Who downvoted me? Let's check out there previous post and downvote all of
the comments. Put a HN alert on it, so I can make his life hell...

The mods do a good work though, eg. I would like to talk politics, but there
is a reason that it's ignored ( correctly so, for quality of the comments)

And please, don't let anyone discuss 10 threads why he's downvoted to go off-
topic. I would appreciate better replies if it happens, but that's hard to
crack.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
You've made good points why transparency wouldn't be good. And unfortunately,
like any sort of voting system _will_ have its flaws.

However, I think the abuses of everything being opaque is much more
deleterious. In the case of HN, speaking rights are directly linked to
groupthink. If you're highly +1'ed, you get to speak more. If you're -1'ed,
you speak less (rate limited).

But yet, +1 als means "agree" or groupthink. -1 is reserved for trolls and
flamewar starters. But yet, it's also used as a "I don't like you", "You're
wrong", "Disagree", "Not popular"... Groupthink. Sure, you can have strong
content converse to the article.. at -4.

Transparency allows us to see these groups in action, and shines a light on
the whole system. Sure, some bad actors can brigade specific users - but I see
that as the exception and not the norm.

------
Kiro
I always get downvoted because I have some opinions that are completely taboo
on HN (being pro Google/Facebook - just watch this comment get downvoted).

My tactic is to post my opinion and then delete it when I start to get
downvotes so this will come in handy. I want to get my message out there but I
don't want hurt my karma too much.

~~~
yodon
If your other posts are like this one, it's more likely they are being
downvoted for the arrogance and conspiracy-theory presumptions baked into
them.

There are plenty of pro-google and pro-Facebook posts that get upvoted here,
but there are very few arrogant conspiratorial-bias posts that get upvoted,
for good reason.

