
HN Rant: Come and Go Voting - DanielBMarkham
So I log into HN and read the wonderful essay about healthcare and end-of-life costs. I was going to comment and vote on some of the comments, but I can't downvote.<p>Must have ticked somebody off, I guess.<p>I upvote a few of the better comments and move on.<p>Then I go and read about the new Chrome HN extensions. Nice job!<p>Now I can upvote and downvote.<p>I go back to the healthcare essay. Still no ability to downvote.<p>Does anybody here besides the coders of HN want to support the idea that the user can have abilities come and go on a whim and this is going to make for a enjoyable user experience? HN keeps getting more and more nuanced about who can do what when, and, quite frankly, all it seems to do is intermittently piss me off. If it's making things better I can't see it. And even if it is, you don't screw around with system behavior without notifying your user of what's going on.<p>I'm sure somebody will point me to some thread somewhere or another where pg explains that for condition X we're not allowing users to downvote. And also frankly, that's part of the problem. Understanding the system shouldn't require extreme devotion to every little thing said about it over a period of years on every thread related to HN. A system should be simple to use and understand. HN is still simple to use, but beats me if I can understand it any more.<p>So am I out here all alone in this feeling, or is it bothering other HNer's as well?
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swwu
The entire source of news.arc is open - eg
<http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc>

Lines 1095-1098 control whether the downvote arrow is displayed or not.

So, to answer your question, yes, it bothers me that there's very rarely a
clear enumeration or description of features.

On the other hand, it's been a wonderful opportunity to learn Arc.

(I'm only half joking - Arc was actually my first stab at functional
programming and I probably wouldn't have tried it if pg had bothered to
document HN's features)

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daleharvey
downvoting is disabled for users comments after a while so people cant go and
downvote all of a users old comments, as comment threads get deeper it takes
longer for replies to be enabled to disuade arguments.

Since hacker news has managed to keep a relatively similiar experience despite
a large increase in users, its pretty clear(subjectively) that some of these
measures are working.

You should probably worry about it less.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is the user. This is the user telling you the application pisses them off
at random intervals and for unknown reasons.

Worry is not part of this conversation.

~~~
daleharvey
if you stopped worrying about exactly how and why these features get enabled /
disabled and accept that pg will and can experiment with features and isnt
particularly worried about documenting them, then you will no longer be pissed
off.

the way hn is developed is very open, and I dont imagine becoming the most
easily understandable news site on the web is a particular goal for this
place, so speaking in truisms like "dont modify users behaviour" doesnt mean
much.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Once again, you're taking this conversation somewhere that I'm not going.

Nobody is saying pg can't experiment. Nobody is saying that the site isn't
great, open, wonderful, etc.

Just pointing out that inconsistencies in experience -- even to people who
like the app and enjoy the benefits -- piss off the users.

You can care about that or not. Fair game. You can "worry" about how the
system works or not. Still ticks people off, and people are still going to
point it out.

Telling the user that their feedback isn't as important as the overall purpose
of the site may also be true, but that's also not the point.

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RiderOfGiraffes
No downvote arrows appear for me either, so it's not just you. They appear on
other items, so it's not just me. The item is only a day old, so it's not the
"stale-out" feature. It appears to be just that item.

As with other measures PG takes to try to prevent abuse of the system, and
occasional abuse by people of people on the system, it may be that there is a
mechanism by which he can disable downvoting on a given item.

In this instance it wouldn't surprise me. Completely guessing here, but
healthcare is one of the topics that can provoke intense reactions, and people
can get very heated, and downvoting can pile on, even when it's not really
justified. Replies and comments can get unpleasant, so disabling downvoting
may be a defence.

I'm not defending the way the system works, and I occasionally wish it were
more open, but this site is still working reasonably well despite its
popularity. I think that is mostly because of the occasional draconian and
obscure measure.

I've given up worrying about wrinkles like this. They still annoy me on
occasion, but I shrug and move on. The site continues to decline, but less
quickly than others I've been on. I accept that I won't know everything about
the way the site works, and part of the reason for that enables it to continue
to do so.

~~~
mbrubeck
_"The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature."_

I was pretty sure that downvoting is disabled as soon as a comment is one day
old. Check out the "bestcomments" list and you'll see that you can only
downvote the ones that are less than 24 hours old.

I can currently downvote several of the <1-day comments on the healthcare
story. But maybe I'm seeing something different from you, or it has changed
since this post was made.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
It appears that you're right - good call. I thought it was 2 days, perhaps
that's been reduced of late.

------
pg
Nothing has changed for a long time, either with HN or your account.

~~~
akkartik
When _can_ we downvote a comment? Remembering this feels like remembering perl
syntax.

------
ugh
Relax. The central thing about HN is not the ability to up- and downvote, the
central thing are the submissions and their comments. Be annoyed if HN
randomly disables your ability to submit or comment, don’t be annoyed if you
randomly can’t vote.

Voting helps to create a useful structure for the content but it's not why I’m
here. It’s not what’s fun about HN.

~~~
Perceval
I think the Wikipedia folks are generally right that voting/polling has a
poisonous effect on conversation--people get too wrapped up in voting up/down
and score. The most important part is the article content and the substantive
conversations that they create.

<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Polls_are_evil>

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Tichy
The recent thing about average voting score bothers me a bit. It seems to make
commenting a risky business, and overall comments seem to not be welcome.

In fact, thinking about it just gave me an idea for a feature request: I might
be better off if commenting was disabled for me for good. Overall I am mostly
embarrassed that I wrote so many comments, and commenting wastes a lot more
time than just voting.

I like to read people's comments on subjects, often there is useful additional
information. Not sure what I actually gain from commenting myself, other than
the "someone is wrong on the internet" effect.

~~~
dminor
I think your average karma is only visible to yourself. Or at least, I can
only see mine.

------
Mz
Sorry to interrupt, but can you give me the link to the healthcare essay? I
can't seem to find it.

Thanks in advance (and please don't shoot me -- I tried to find it, really).

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Seems like it was on page 3 or 4.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1168065>

or the direct link:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avRF...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avRFGNF6Qw_w)

~~~
Mz
Thank you!

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KirinDave
I'm confused why downvoting for comments matters. Or upvoting. It doesn't bury
comments. It doesn't really change the conversation that happened. It doesn't
really do much but give a bigger useless number to people you agree with and a
smaller useless number to people you disagree with.

News.ycomb could get rid of all comment moderation and it would probably be at
least as good. Maybe better. Suddenly what "Karma" means would become clear.
It isn't some mixture of popularity poll and story contributor, it's just a
measure of how popular the stories you've contributed would be.

My karma is over 2000, and it's almost all from comments. Maybe 100 of this
karma is from stories. I consider it to be very artificial and meaningless,
because most comment voting is basically "I AGREE!" or "I DISAGREE!". I wish I
had karma from contributing stories that people wanted to share.

~~~
pg
There's a lot in what you say about comment voting. It used to be useful, or
at least harmless. But now HN has grown so large it has become an injection of
dumbness (and often ill will) into the conversation. I plan to try to some
design changes to deal with this when I have time, maybe in April. I'll
probably get rid of the display of point numbers on comments.

~~~
lotharbot
I find comment voting tremendously useful:

\- It gives me direct feedback on whether other users found my comments
insightful. I find it encouraging when I put some effort into explaining
something and I get a bunch of points for it. I'd much rather get upvotes than
a bunch of meaningless replies like "I agree", "good post", or "x2". (Getting
substantive replies is even better, but not always warranted.)

\- It gives me an easy way to find comments others have found insightful, even
if they're nested deep in a thread where they don't get auto-sorted to the
top. I was actually planning to ask for highlighting on highly-rated comments
-- something unobtrusive like bolding the number.

\- It gives me a way to reward/encourage those whose comments I found
educational or insightful.

Downvoting can also provide an injection of dumbness or ill will into a
conversation. But I would take the dumbness of downvotes over the dumbness of
people saying "you're an idiot" any day.

~~~
ericd
And with voting, I don't have to say "I second this" to everything I strongly
agree with or that I find very insightful.

But in case PG doesn't look at scores, I second this.

~~~
KirinDave
You don't have to say "I second this," even without voting.

If someone says something you like and agree with: congratulations, you have
found a kindred soul, enjoy this moment of warmth in an otherwise dark and
unforgiving universe. If someone says something you dislike or disagree with:
if it's not worth posting a rationally and carefully written rebuttal to the
post in question then it's probably not worth your time or effort, the
internet is full of people who are wrong.

In general that tiny number next to posts is more an indication of things
other than the quality of the ideas expressed in posts. In fact, I'd say
they're not well coupled. Usually, it's more correlated with political
alignments or writing quality.

~~~
ericd
Well, the idea of HN's scoring is to bring the most insightful comments to the
top while burying the noise, correct? I think it generally does a decent job
of this, though the scoring seems to be somewhat noisier than it used to be.

------
ique
On a slightly different but related topic: I've never been able to downvote
anything, neither posts nor comments. Why is that?

~~~
daleharvey
there are karma threshholds on doing somethings, like downvoting, flagging,
and changing your top colour

~~~
prawn
For downvoting, I think it's 200.

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adharmad
If you want to "come and go at a whim", you are not a part of the HN
community.......simply a surfer. In that case, why does upvote/downvote/karma
matter? I believe HN functionality currently disables the "hit and run"
attitude.

~~~
gjm11
You misunderstood the OP. He isn't saying that _he_ wants to come and go at a
whim; he's saying that _what he's allowed to do by the HN software_ comes and
goes at a whim. (In this case, presumably Paul Graham's whim.)

