
Dear PG: Make up/down voting reversible - vishaldpatel
I think I just down-voted someone by mistake, I think. It was by mistake - a misclick. I didn&#x27;t mean to downvote or upvote the entry. Surely I&#x27;m not the only one.<p>It&#x27;d be nice if voting was un-doable.
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antirez
People saying statistics filters out the few errors, I don't think this is
true for the single news. User X posts a news that gets 2 points in a few
minutes. With point 3 the news would stay a few seconds in the home page,
enough if it is interesting for other users to be upvoted and end stable in
the home page. If the third vote is down for error maybe this will never
happen again since now even another upvote will not be enough, and goodbye.
Moreover every news site out there has the ability to undo votes and is
unlikely that everybody is wrong but HN.

~~~
DanBC
HN has submissions and comments.

Submissions can be upvoted, or they can be flagged. They can't be downvoted.
No one confused the upvote button for the flag button.

Comments can be upvoted, or downvoted, or flagged. People sometimes mistake
the up and downvote buttons.

> User X posts a news that gets 2 points in a few minutes. With point 3 the
> news would stay a few seconds in the home page, enough if it is interesting
> for other users to be upvoted and end stable in the home page.

This doesn't happen. People can't downvote submissions. Comments don't get
ranked like that on /newcomments.

~~~
antirez
You are right, flagging is reversible, so what I said only applies to
comments. Still I can't see good reasons for not making users able to undo
their votes.

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anigbrowl
It's just not that important. Accidents happen but cancel each other out due
to statistical noise in busy threads. No single vote is going to doom a worthy
comment to undeserved obscurity, or a crappy comment to endless notoriety.

~~~
birken
The problem is the visibility of comments changes their potential for future
upvotes or downvotes. If you have a comment sitting on top of a thread, it
will get much more visibility and opportunities for a statistically good
sample of upvotes and downvotes. But if you downvote a comment and relegate it
to the bottom (or _gasp_ , the faded out text), then it can be very difficult
for it to recover.

A more out-of-the-box solution to all of these problems is to have both
comment order and story order be probabilistic rather than absolute, which
could help guarantee everything enough visibility to get the fair compliment
of upvotes/downvotes. But then again that is much more complicated than other
potential solutions (assuming the problem is even large enough to care to
fix).

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tptacek
It would be nice, especially for mobile users, but as a "cost of doing
business", it's not worth a lot of effort. A better strategy: think of comment
scores along a log scale, something goofy like log3.

It's not 'pg anymore, BTW: it's 'dang and his team now.

~~~
comex
This can be used to justify basically any missing feature though. Not
incorrectly, per se - the site clearly works well enough in the exact state it
is today - but it would be unfortunate if random papercuts (that could
probably be fixed pretty easily) stayed around forever because fixing them was
a "cost of doing business".

~~~
tptacek
Sure. I guess the subtext here is: this has been a complaint for years and
years, so presumably, it's not all that straightforward to fix.

It would be better to eliminate karma altogether.

~~~
krapp
>this has been a complaint for years and years, so presumably, it's not all
that straightforward to fix.

If only there were some pool of talented programmers with obvious time to kill
who would be willing to take a crack at it, almost certainly for free ...

~~~
tptacek
That would be tricky, because YC has business processes (applications, IIRC)
that run through the same code.

~~~
krapp
Plenty of other sites manage to use open source code and even take pull
requests without spilling their business secrets.

Then again, those sites are built on frameworks designed with modularity and
separation of concerns in mind, while HN may not have been, so fair enough.

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joshstrange
This comment appears to hint that PG is onboard with this feature
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984221)
It's in reply to this
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388)
which, among other things, asks about an undo function. I can't seem to find
anything on search about PG saying anything though.

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mahouse
Yes, but the timeout should be _very_ short.

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r-w
Aw, crap! I didn't mean to upvote this.

~~~
ilurk
Immutable votes.

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tzs
Or just move the freaking down vote button. Change the row layout from

    
    
       up/down user time
    

to

    
    
       up user time down
    

That will make it a lot harder to hit the wrong button.

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dm2
This could be done without changing anything on the site. Just create a new
page that can be accessed via options which lists the last 10 votes and a
delete button.

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DigitalSea
Accidents happen. For every person that makes a mistake, I am sure there are
many who will correct it. I don't think being able to change a vote is an
important piece of functionality.

