
Ask HN: Are HN comments automatically downvoted by algorithms? - gull
I&#x27;m starting to wonder if comments posted on HN are examined by algorithms and automatically downvoted. Like an attempt to mute stupidity and block malice.<p>Has anyone noticed this with comments they&#x27;ve posted?
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brudgers
Personally, I downvote destructive comments and flag harmful ones. My
impression is that others do the same. I've never seen anything to suggest
that there is algorithm beyond those that affect community members under
shadow bans. My understanding is that people wind up in that state by hand,
but I have no direct knowledge.

~~~
gull
Thank you for this. I hadn't realized there is a difference between downvoting
and flagging comments until I read your post. I hope other HN users know of
this difference.

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rnovak
There are _a lot_ of people on HN, and _a lot_ of people with downvote
privilege, and there are _a lot_ of people who just generally downvote because
they disagree with something.

Even if your opinion is completely positive, if people disagree, and a lot of
people see it, you will get downvoted _just because they disagree_ (and no one
will reply to your comment to disagree, it's a drive-by-downvote).

There's also verification of this by HN mods: Several comment threads exist
where they keep increasing the downvote threshold (from 300, to 400, to 500,
and beyond). But it still doesn't solve the problem.

~~~
runawaybottle
Perhaps some random percentage of down-votes should require a response (every
third, or something).

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mschuster91
It's rather the upvoting of threads as well as their subthreads. Active
threads move to the top.

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lgieron
There seems to be an algorithm which demotes some posters (at least one)
voicing opinions unfavorable to YC.

EDIT: just got downvoted without any comment. I wonder if I am on the kill
list as well.

~~~
DanBC
HN mods repeatedly say that they do not penalise people who post negative
stuff about YC or YC companies.

But negative comments tend to get downvotes, (avoid gratuitous negativity) so
people posting negative stuff should try to support it.

~~~
lgieron
My own post was taken down before, so I'm pretty sure some form of censorship
exists. I don't know if it's enforced by mods or implemented otherwise, but
that's a minor point.

~~~
dang
We go out of our way _not_ to kill stories and comments that are critical of
YC or YC-funded startups. When such posts break the HN guidelines, we may
penalize them, but always less than we would if the story were about something
else. That's a pretty big deal around here—it's literally the first rule of HN
moderation.

Beyond that, we'd need to know what post you're talking about. If you'd like
to provide a link, we can look into it.

~~~
lgieron
This comment is shown as fine to me, whereas it really is dead:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245424)

I'd love to hear a non-malicious explanation for that.

~~~
dang
That comment was killed by a spam filter. Those generate false positives
sometimes. We've fixed that and also unkilled the comment.

In the future, please do what the HN guidelines ask and email such questions
to us at hn@ycombinator.com. I only saw this thread by accident.

~~~
lgieron
I'm sure you can see that the post linking to the (simplifying) anti-YC blog
being accidentally killed by spam filter can raise questions about whether it
was really an accident. I'm not saying it was not - I'm just saying the
bayesian probability of this being an accident doesn't look that great to me.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Imagine making a scoring system for domains that that takes into account flags
and votes on comments that include said domain. Also, your post had a word
written in ALL CAPS, arguably two. You can see other comments linking to the
same domain at around the same time [1] that aren't marked as spam.

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/)

