
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong - Anon84
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/
======
pg
The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame
articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is
lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the
frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.

We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at
least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on
nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners.

~~~
DarkShikari
I don't think Hacker News' system kills lame articles. I have seen obvious
troll blog posts and such reach the top of HN repeatedly.

The reason this happens is because of the following. Let us say that an
ordinary story that is completely relevant to Reddit and is worth reading is
upvoted by 50 people and downvoted by 10. This gets the story +40. Now, let us
take a very controversial story, say, a blog post on how much git sucks that
is obviously fishing for links. This story gets upvoted by many more people,
say, 100 people... and downvoted by 300. It doesn't get near the front page.

Now, take the same on HN. The first story gets +50, the second gets +100,
despite the majority of people believing it should not be on the front page.

This is not to say that the Reddit system is better, but rather that the HN
system is not perfect.

~~~
pg
Well, we kill everything the editors think is excessively lame. Downarrows
would produce better results iff the userbase at large were better at deciding
what was lame, which is probably not the case. Downvoting is often done
reflexively, whereas killing something is a fairly momentous choice one thinks
about first.

~~~
thepanister
I think that HN does not really need down-voting for articles at all, but on
the other hand, it needs some automated killing functionality.

EDIT: [About the editors, it takes an hour and sometimes more for a link to be
killed, at least when I flag a link and I see it for hours - happened today.
So maybe automation will help in any editors shortage]

For example, someone few days ago submitted your article "Why TV Lost",
although it was already submitted, and we already discussed it! But he was
able to do it, obviously because the submission detection script does not
think that "www.domain.com" is the same as "domain.com", and treats them as
different links.

Also if a link is submitted previously and it was dead because it's spam, then
if a user tries to resubmits it again it should be killed automatically. Like
Google homepage, myspace and all of these bla bla bla.

There are zillion techniques for preventing spam, and you know it better than
me for sure. But there is a vision that you have about spam on this website,
that I don't really understand yet.

~~~
anewaccountname
>the submission detection script does not think that "www.domain.com" is the
same as "domain.com", and treats them as different links.

Those two are not the same. Just like mail.google.com isn't the same as
google.com.

~~~
thepanister
But google.com is the same as www.google.com? and ycombinator.com is the same
as www.ycombinator.com? Got what I mean!

I am talking about the "www" which is the acronym of "world wide web", and
it's automatically assigned to any domain name, so usually domain.com and
www.domain.com points to the same host, unles if the sysadmin changes it which
rarely happens.

I am talking about the "www." and NOT any other subdomain that the
sysadmin/webmaster can add/change or remove.

I am sorry if you misunderstand what I am talking about.

~~~
rksprst
The www. subdomain is not necessary and you can have a different cname value
there. It can point to another domain for instance.

~~~
thepanister
Oh really? I am sorry because I did not know it before. Thanks for informing
me, I really appreciate it. I am so glad that I am learning something new here
everyday.

Thank you so much for your explanation, I really appreciate it.

------
halo
Slight hijack, but I last time I used it I thought Stack Overflow missed the
value of simplicity.

On Stack Overflow, at its core, you have posts, and people reply to that post.
That's fine. You can do that whether you're logged in or not (although you
need an OpenID provider to sign up, which is a pain when it /could/ partner
with a provider to seamlessly give you one on registering).

You can mod up and down the posts. And mod up and down the comments. But only
if you have a certain amount of karma for each. But the selected answer by the
author of the question is at the top, ignoring the karma completely.

You can have favourites. But only if you're logged in, despite the fact you
can submit posts whether you are or aren't.

And then you have comments on each post. But you have to click to view the
comments. And you can only add comments if you have a certain amount of karma.
This kills a lot of conversation needlessly.

And you can edit other people's posts - if you have a certain amount of karma.

And you can flag posts, but only if you're logged in.

And then too often you view posts that make no sense until you see the context
which is buried amongst the tags, rather than the site being naturally split
into natural obvious 'sections' which will interest people who know about
certain technologies.

It's all very confusing, and completely needless. Hide things or at least make
it obvious what I can't use before clicking. Reduce the arbitrary karma limits
to add more distinct classes so that the majority have equal abilities.

~~~
codinghorror
> It's all very confusing, and completely needless

Well, the funny thing is that the complexity is there for the some of the same
reasons that HN explicitly doesn't document its behavior -- it's a small
barrier. But these are much lower barriers than HN, as I'll describe below.

> Hide things or at least make it obvious what I can't use before clicking

Ah, but this is a problem -- we _tell_ you what you need to earn to do
something when you click on it. So a) you have an idea that the feature
exists, and b) you can do it at some point in the future.

> Reduce the arbitrary karma limits

Our limits are quite low, _far_ lower than HN. We require the equivalent of 2
karma on HN to upvote, and 10 to downvote. More here, just divide by 10 to get
the HN equivalents -- <http://stackoverflow.com/faq>

~~~
halo
Imagine you visit a website, where both links and non-links are shown by
underlined black text. You quickly get confused by what you can and can't
click on until you rollover them. I think we can both agree this is a bad
thing, and that the correct fix for this is to make the links a different
colour so it's obvious.

Imagine you're a new user visiting Stack Overflow, when things you both can
and cannot use are shown in exactly the same way as a full user until you
click on it and then it tells you that you need X karma to do something. I
think this is a bad thing and that the correct fix is to either hide the
things you can't do (because features I can't use don't really matter to me)
or to make those things look different. This is where we differ, because you
think it's not a bug, it's a feature, because it's a "small barrier" by
confusing new users as to what they can do out of the box. I personally think
that's /insane/, much like someone who decides to make all their links black
as a "small barrier to new users".

I think you also misunderstood what I meant by "reduce the arbitrary karma
limits". I don't necessarily mean "make them easier to attain" (although I'd
argue reducing barriers to entry unless you have a good reason as it generally
encourages new users), but rather "reduce how many of them there are". There
are 10 different 'levels' of karma where features are unlocked to /users/. Why
does a user need 15 to upvote but 100 to downvote? Why do you need 500 karma
to retag questions but 750 to edit community Wiki posts? Most sites have a
maximum of 3 levels of hierarchy (Admin, Moderator and User), your site has
/at least/ 11. I guess with the badges system I should be happy that it
doesn't use the same ridiculous system as Team Fortress 2.

And no, I wouldn't regard HN as good at usability either. Functional rather
than ideal, even if it is trying to make creating a new poll difficult.

------
rglullis
The irony of it all is that is the first post that I really wish I could
downvote.

C'mon! The guy doesn't know what he's talking about, yet he is quick to say
that HN "gets it wrong". Others show him he doesn't know the rules and he
replies that the rules should be more explicit, when the fact is this very
idiosyncrasy is what helps HN not to grow too much: it takes someone who is
really interested in participating in the community to stick around and learn
how things work around here.

I'm flagging the link. I never liked Jeff's "from-the-hip" style of blogging,
but now more and more of his articles is plain linkbait and a way to get
attention to Stackoverflow.

(Btw, Jeff, the whole spiel of writing even when there's nothing to say is
annoying and makes more noise than signal. Quantity does not always trump
quality. Practice makes it perfect, yes, but all I can say is that you're
getting really good at producing crap.)

To have a post on HN with such an inflammatory title and factually wrong
claims is _downright offensive_. It's no different than me going to his office
and screaming how stupid he is.

In fact, I'll cancel my rarely-used StackOverflow account.

~~~
codinghorror
1) submitted links cannot be voted down. This is, in fact, correct.

2) comments can be voted down, but it's uncommon, and the UI is invisible
(literally) to the point that a casual user wouldn't even see it happening on
most posts (very few posts go negative). This is a good thing, but it's not at
all clear to a new or unsophisticated user that the _possibility_ of being
downvoted is on the table at all. Particularly given the front page which does
not allow downvotes on submissions.

3) isn't your post the very sort of inflammatory stuff that you're claiming I
write?

~~~
rglullis
1) You've written a critique about the whole HN voting system while being
factually correct about only one subsystem - the design decision about
submissions.

This is as silly (or arrogant, or plain stupid) as writing a critique of
quantum physics just because you know how and when to use Schrödinger's
equation.

2) It's not uncommon to downvote comments at all. Again, you are passing your
perception as absolute truth. What you may see is few comments that have a
negative score. _Few downvotes and few negative-score comments are two
completely different beasts_ , and you're inferring wrong things with the
information you have available.

3) <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflammatory> : tending to
excite anger, disorder, or tumult.

My comment was a response to your post. It comes off as angry, but it is a
reaction to the sort of thing that _you_ write. The post has more than 100
comments, few of them actually accomplishing anything except discussing with
you and pointing out why _you_ are wrong.

So, the answer to your question is _no_ ; it's your articles that provoke
reactions in others and excite disorder. It's your article that is
inflammatory, not my comment.

    
    
      - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
    

As a side note about what you write... I get it, Jeff. You're the textbook
example of an extroverted person: you need to externalize things to process
information. To you, doing supports thinking. For introverts like me (and most
of HN, by the way) it's thinking that supports doing.

There is no "right way" here, no "better side" to belong to. The problem lies
in taking these opposites to radical extremes, and this is what is happening
to you. While hardcore introverts end up suffering from analysis paralysis and
never get anything done, you end up doing things carelessly and using "social
brute-force": you say whatever comes to mind and expect people to throw you
"warning messages" and point you to a better solution.

Your blogging style is the equivalent of the guy that trolls in IRC channels
(<http://bash.org/?152037>) to see if he gets responses from the gurus. This
is seriously irritating: not everyone wants to be your "idea compiler", and
you consume much of other people's time and energy that could be better used
elsewhere.

You may even think that you are being successful with your approach: each post
you write will probably make your readership increase more than decrease. But
if you believe that, you'd be again relying on the idea that Quantity always
trumps Quality, and again you'll be wrong by missing the point about the
purpose of something like Hacker News.

Quantity trumps Quality on SO - you are more interested in having hordes of
beginner and intermediate techies to drive traffic than lots of experts that
don't need to seek technical help as often - but HN is about _insightful_ news
and comments, and for that you need the participation of above-average and
like-minded people; it's all about quality, not quantity.

~~~
codinghorror
(in response the section below the line)

This is really a criticism of me, personally.

You don't like me. I don't have a problem with that at all.

The idea that everyone has to like everyone else is unrealistic and dishonest.
If everyone likes you, you probably aren't doing anything very interesting.

------
raganwald
What would "it" be that HN is getting wrong? The point is to (a) have quality
posts on the front page, and (b) encourage a community of people to congregate
and share valuable advice/wisdom/information.

Design decisions are simply tools to accomplish these goals. Jeff says
disallowing downvotes is "harmful to the community" and explains why he
theorizes is the case, but why guess? We have HN, we can examine it and decide
for ourselves if HN has been "harmed."

I am all for him beating his chest and extolling the virtues of his
complicated system. But I do not see the merit of his comparison to HN: It
strikes me as fairly run-of-the-mill Coding Horror-style link-baiting.

~~~
codinghorror
> We have HN, we can examine it and decide for ourselves if HN has been
> "harmed."

When a clearly political post about the drug war stays on the front page for
two days, that's harm in my book. I expect you will see more and more of this
over time as the community grows.

Sorry you feel that way about the post, reg. Just meant to be a discussion,
and I went out of my way to say positive thingsa about HN. It feels almost
like a personal attack the way you stated it here.

------
hcho
Downvoting loses more information than "no downvoting". Think about a
submission with 110 upvotes and 100 downvotes, it is overall rating is 10. A
submission with only 15 upvotes has a rating of 15. Surely a submission which
attracts 210 user votes must be more valuable than the other one.

~~~
JeremyChase
Downvotes and upvotes should both be shown for this reason as it calls to
attention the divide in opinion.

~~~
hcho
But how about ordering? At the end of the day, these votes determine which
submission makes it to the front page. Allowing down voting but sorting by
upvotes might be one solution.

~~~
codinghorror
This is a good idea and conceptually similar to showing how many times
something has been flagged as off topic.

Although I still maintain that upvote and "off-topic" are not symmetric
actions.. but choosing between public visibility of data vs "cabal of secret
editors" is a no-brainer IMO.

------
jhickner
Downvotes are problematic, because even the best people can't always be
trusted to use them correctly. A downvote should be reserved for something
offtopic, evil, mean, etc., but too often a downvote simply means "I
disagree".

~~~
codinghorror
And yet we trust these very same people with upvotes?

I agree the potential for damage is much higher with downvotes, but there's an
asymmetry there.

The trick is to make downvotes cost a little bit of karma, IMO. And while I'm
on the topic, upvotes shouldn't be as free as they are, either.

~~~
tptacek
What's the asymmetry? You're begging the question. Bad upvotes mean too many
people see something. Bad downvotes mean not enough people see it. The latter
is worse than the former. So only one of the features is supported. This is a
simpler approach than turning karma into a currency to spend on suppressing
things people disagree with.

Having said that, the 2-1 downvote scheme you proposed does put some of us
within spitting distance of taking nickb down to zero, so I support it
wholeheartedly.

~~~
codinghorror
> This is a simpler approach

Having a secret cabal of editors, whose behavior and rules are not documented,
is simpler than spending karma to vote against things? Really?

~~~
tptacek
Yes. A lot.

~~~
codinghorror
can you elaborate?

~~~
tptacek
What's there to say? Submitters veer off topic. You hit the "flag" button. The
story gets marked "dead". How is my life improved by the prospect of having
more work to do to groom the site?

It's like people used to say about micropayments; all these little knobs exact
a mental cost; I have to spend 5 cycles deciding what to do --- mod up? mod
down? what are other people doing? do I need to care?

Seems to me like Hacker News is doing the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly
work. A good thing.

~~~
codinghorror
The simplest thing is finding and blessing 30 people with the right to kill
flagged entries? And trusting those 30 people to do the right thing?

Wouldn't it be simpler to automate the whole thing, and let the algorithm do
the work?

------
codinghorror
First, I should apologize for my misunderstanding. I do feel like a doofus for
not realizing that downvotes are possible on HN. But I swear I have never seen
a single downvoted post any time I’ve visited! I am a very occasional HN user,
mostly a lurker, and my karma is not even 2 digits. :)

In my defense:

1) There's definitely an element of "if the user can’t find it, the feature
doesn't exist" with downvoting here.

2) In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they
almost don’t exist.

Anyway, I'm encouraged that downvotes exist on HN, but the threshold could be
considered so absurdly high that they're nerfed into oblivion.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I don't want to start a dogpile, since you already admittedly feel like a
doofus, but what's up with writing an article about "what's wrong with Hacker
News" when you clearly don't have enough experience with Hacker News to have a
clue about what's right with it and what's wrong?

~~~
codinghorror
See my response to the first PG comment, along with related comments below.
Downvotes do exist (mea culpa), but are so nerfed as to be effectively useless
-- that's part of the reason I never saw them.

And they _don't_ exist for article submissions, which is problematic for all
the same reasons I listed in the blog entry.

~~~
daleharvey
they are not "effectively useless", they just useless by you, a non
participant / browser of the site.

~~~
codinghorror
Considering I hadn't seen a single negative voted comment in a few dozen
visits to HN, I'd say they're at the very least underutilized. Although I did
notice that a few people went out of their way to vote down stuff in this
thread. Ironic? :)

~~~
Xichekolas
I don't have any hard data, but I'd estimate (as a heavy user) that at least
half the stories with comments have at least one that has been downvoted below
1... but piling on someone is rare, just because it's rare that someone says
something that needs to be piled on.

As for your assertion that not disclosing the karma threshold for downvoting
is 'bizarre', I'd argue it's useful not to provide an exact number. Enough
video games have 'achievements' listed out for people to obtain... I'd rather
have people participate honestly than just to gain more 'abilities'.

~~~
electromagnetic
Usually racism, bigotry and basically any purely ignorant BS gets piled on. An
unpopular comment usually only gets downvoted to between -1 and -5, however
recently there has been a problem with (I'm assuming) new users downvoting
anything they don't like, which thankfully seems to be going away.

------
nav
Do you need down voting when you have a team of 30 pre-screening? Their is a
higher likelihood of foul play when one has the opportunity to down vote one's
post relative to one's own or peer's posts. A simple bubble-up philosophy can
work. It would also be interesting to see a separate section similar to the
top post thread but only contains posts that have been recently down-voted,
can potential have some interesting take-aways.

------
ralph
What really annoys me is that pg took away the ability to downvote a comment
after a day or two. Given I use RSS to visit news.yc every few days, that
means I can't fully participate; I can upvote people's comments, but not
downvote them.

And all because someone went around downvoting all the comments for a
particular user they fell out with. It's a sledgehammer, pg! Come up with
something better.

~~~
tptacek
Comment votes are a tool for grooming the discussion. Discussion on most
threads ends after a day or two. What's the value in downvoting a 3-day-old
comment? Very few people are going to respond differently to the thread as a
result.

If you want to participate, you should write comments, or, better yet,
submissions of your own.

~~~
ralph
By your reasoning, you think it shouldn't be possible to upvote comments after
a couple of days either then?

~~~
tptacek
I don't think it should, no. There's a big halo effect to karma, and disabling
upvotes for stale comments might mitigate it.

But it's not a big problem.

------
caustic
I don't care about downvotes. HN is just a great web site with great contents
so that I hardly ever feel the need to downvote something.

------
theBobMcCormick
If Hacker News has got it wrong... I don't want to be right. IMHO HN is the
most consistently readable, polite, and thought provoking news site on the
net.

The only other site I can think of that's close to as consistently a high
level of quality in the posts and comments is MetaFilter. And unfortunately
there are very few technology discussions over there. :-(

------
JulianMorrison
Up voting measures enthusiasm (and refuses any veto to the disapproving
majority). Up/down voting measures peer acceptance.

------
known
Why not just IGNORE instead of DOWNVOTE ?

