
Ask HN: Anyone think downvoting is starting to get out of control? - jryan49
I&#x27;m not really talking about my comments as much as other people&#x27;s comments I see that are just dissenting being down voted because people don&#x27;t agree with them. It feel like it&#x27;s being getting worse and worse over the last year, and I feel like it used to not be this way? I was curious if anyone else felt the same way?<p>edit: in regards to this being flagged, even though the rules say not to talk about down votes in actual discussion i don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s bad for the community to at least discuss this in its own thread... I thought the rule was more about not having actual conversations devolve into arguments about downvoting
======
nathanaldensr
Yes, I do. Posts that are well-thought-out, some with references and great
detail, are turning gray simply because some militant readers don't agree. The
posts themselves rarely, it seems, violate site guidelines.

This site is becoming more and more like Reddit every day, and it's super sad
to me. I don't come here for repeated political arguments and discussion. This
is Hacker News, not r/politics.

In fact, I've started searching out gray-text posts because often those seem
to be of higher quality than normal black posts. That's a bad sign.

~~~
repolfx
I have started reading HN via this page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active)

because it shows flagged posts. It's not just comments. More or less any story
that might attract comments of a conservative bent are immediately flagged,
like the recent story about how Twitter is shadowbanning prominent
conservatives.

I might go looking for an extension or CSS change to disable the greying out
of downvoted comments too. The greying achieves nothing. There's virtually no
real spam or abuse on this site, so a grey comment almost invariably means
someone made a good point that someone else couldn't refute and didn't want
to. They're often excellent posts.

Don't expect it to change. The moderators here like to claim they're unbiased
but I've seen very frequent cases where they tick off someone and warn them
they'll be banned simply for not agreeing with whatever extremist ideas are
coming into vogue in California - but the posts were written politely and made
good/logical points. Meanwhile people supporting the opposite position with
comments that throw around terms like "nazi", "racist", "trash fire" or
whatever are left alone. And of course the blatant flagging of posts or
comments simply for their viewpoint is left unaddressed.

~~~
dang
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

------
davrosthedalek
Yes. I actually started upvoting comments which are downvoted because they are
dissenting, even if I don't agree with them. I think a downvote should be
accompanied with an explanation if the reason is not very obvious. EDIT: the
last point might actually be a new feature: If you downvote, you can leave a
note why, and the poster (or everybody) can see that.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You've always been able to reply to a comment you downvoted. Replying doesn't
cancel the downvote, either - I tested it on a willing subject.

~~~
davrosthedalek
Yes, but I thought it would be nice to have a separate, not always displayed,
list of reasons. Having five comments saying "rude" displayed all the time is
not making the reading experience for everybody else any better. The poster
seeing 5 notes "rude" associated to his post might help them adjust the tone.

~~~
repolfx
Slashdot got it right - give a set of reasons you can pick when moderating.
This not only makes sure every moderation gives a justification, but also sets
expectations about what sort of comments are wanted or not wanted.

Unfortunately Slashdot also undid themselves a bit by introducing "Overrated"
and "Underrated" which adjusted the score without needing to provide a
justification. I always wondered why they did that.

------
AnimalMuppet
Disclaimer: This is my perspective only.

I started on HN four and a half years ago. My impression was that, in those
days, HN had higher quality discussion. More of it was technical, but even the
nontechnical discussion (political, say) was discussed differently. There was
more fact- and evidence-based discussion, and less dogmatic assertion of
positions. There was more real thought and less reflexive spewing of pre-
canned viewpoints.

HN has become a lesser place - more filled with dogmatists (of various
flavors), and less with people who can actually change their minds if given
real evidence. As a result, the discussion has become less about evidence and
data, and more full of strident statements of dogmatic positions, made by
people who will happily talk but won't listen.

In that environment, of course you're going to get downvotes from the
dogmatists when you question (or worse, contradict) someone's dogma. But is
the strident stating of dogma by someone who won't listen itself worthy of
downvoting? I'm not sure the answer is no - that's not the kind of
"discussion" we want here. On the other hand, it may be reinforcing bad
behavior on the part of others, and some of those "others" may be
salvageable...

~~~
drenvuk
I feel the same way as you. It seems to be the nature of all good forums or
anything that has a concentration of folks that create good conversation. The
good people move on to other things and/or the newer people come in, typically
lacking the technical or ideological slant that would have brought them into
the fold earlier in the forum aging process. PG seemed to know it was
coming[1] but I'm wondering whether the dilution is ever able to be mitigated.
It's not like anyone has come up with an easy solution to filtering people in
slowly without destroying the quality of discussion.

One thing that should always be considered is that maybe the discussion was
always bad but you were new at that point too.

1\.
[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

------
tptacek
Downvotes to express disagreement are part of the ethos of this site; it's a
norm Paul Graham established almost a decade ago. But comments discussing
downvotes are not; the guidelines specifically ask us not to waste time
litigating them, which is what this thread basically asks everyone to do.

~~~
jryan49
I interpreted the rules to mean that it's bad to discuss down voting in
threads because it makes boring reading and distracts from the original topic.
This topic however is about down voting, so I felt it was okay.

~~~
krapp
No, what you're supposed to do is either realize what you did to get downvoted
and adjust your behavior to better conform to Hacker News culture, or else
stop caring and continue to be downvoted. Complaining about it is a waste of
time.

~~~
jryan49
I'm complaining because in my experience, it has destroyed a lot of
interesting discussions for me. It's less about my experience making comments
but more about reading other comment threads that get killed or discussions
becoming intense circlejerks.

~~~
krapp
Hacker News has never been about free and open discussion, unfortunately.

I use the userscript I have linked in my profile to disable the fade for
downvoted comments but there's only so much you can do.

And to be fair... there are some subjects for which Hacker News has proven
less than capable of maintaining civil discourse, and some subjects like
mainstream news and politics which are legitimately off topic. But it would be
nice if people learned to just ignore sentiments they both disagreed with and
were neither willing or capable of a reply to, and just hid threads they
didn't want to participate in.

~~~
jryan49
Thanks for the userscript! I'm going to try it out.

edit: fun note, we joined HN basically at the same time

------
bargl
I think a lot of people use downvote on things they disagree with. I
personally try to downvote things that I see that are detrimental to good
conversation not things I disagree with. If I disagree with you but it's good
conversation you get an upvote. I like differing opinions. I like productive
conversation.

I probably use downvoting similar to flagging. Swearing, cursing, being rude,
etc get downvoted.

I once did an experiment. Where I took one of the bottom comments and copied
his post word for word minus the part that could be considered rude (with his
permission) to see how much one sentence could throw off a comment. It is one
of my higher rated comments. I'll have to go back and look it up.

My copy:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395162)

Original:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395046)

------
anothergoogler
The problem is that one downvote grays a comment, which makes it appear
"fishy" and influences readers/voters. Your own comments are never grayed, so
I hide the point indicators with UBlock (as well as the total in the header)
and have no idea when somebody downvotes my thoughts. Also, I upvote any non-
trollish gray comment, out of principle.

~~~
nathanaldensr
I also find myself upvoting gray comments nearly instinctively now. I believe
enough in the Hacker News experience that I feel like I can't let the
irrational downvotes stand; I will irrationally upvote to at least cancel out
one of them.

------
criddell
It's a UI problem.

People will upvote comments they agree with and nobody seems to have a problem
with that. The opposite action - downvoting to express disagreement - feels
pretty natural.

Slashdot found a reasonable solution to this problem a decade ago and it
surprises me that more tech-oriented sites haven't borrowed some of their
innovations.

~~~
newscracker
Could you edit/expand on what Slashdot did? I was an occasional visitor of
that site when it was popular, and didn't notice much except for the positive
and negative points and some thresholds.

~~~
repolfx
Slashdot's moderation system is unsurpassed, in my view. I used to be a
moderator there and here's how it worked.

Most users cannot vote on posts.

Posts can reach a maximum of +5 or a minimum of -2.

Users who have reached a certain karma threshold themselves, start being
allocated mod points at random. You get given a small allocation of points
that replenishes from time to time.

Each mod point you are given can be used exactly once. If you moderate a
discussion and then post to it, your moderations are undone but you don't get
the points back. This ensures people only moderate discussions they don't want
to take part in, i.e. that they don't feel strongly about.

In particular this means that voting on Slashdot is not a way for readers to
express agreement.

New users receiving mod points for the first time are sent to a page that
explains how moderators are expected to behave and act. It's treated as a
responsibility that's earned, not something just anyone can do.

To moderate a comment you must pick a reason from the dropdown: insightful,
informative, interesting, funny, troll, flamebait iirc. Each post showed its
score and the last justification given. There were also "overrated" and
"underrated" which I felt was a flaw in the mod system, as they altered the
score but not the last justification (and the two words themselves are too
vague to represent a justification). This meant you could get comments scored
as +5 Troll, for example, which was pretty funny but ultimately a quirk of the
design, not intended.

Moderations are themselves meta-moderated. Many more users are allowed to
meta-moderate than moderate. In meta-moderation, the judgements of the
moderators themselves are scored. Users are presented with a set of posts and
the justification the moderator selected and asked if they agree with it.
Moderators that frequently get bad scores from meta-moderation stop being
allocated mod points or are given less, and as such are dropped from the pool.
If meta-mods agree with your moderations, you can get given more.

You can mark users as "friend" or "enemy" which applies an adjustment to their
scores. In this way users who frequently get modded down but you like their
posts can be up-scored just for you.

Scores control thread collapse not just ordering. High scored replies to low
scored comments are still visible by default.

Anonymous users have post scores that start at 0. Logged in users start at 1.
Users with high karma start at 2. In this way users who repeatedly make good
comments get rewarded with default higher visibility.

This scheme has many advantages over the typical upvote/downvote mechanism
most sites use:

• Moderation is not a simple aol me-too voting system, but genuinely intended
to highlight good posts.

• Moderation is not done by the site owners. It's done exclusively by the
readers. This acts against groupthink as the site's readers are pretty
diverse.

• The system encourages certain kinds of posts, in particular funny posts.
Reading Slashdot is/was frankly more enjoyable than reading HN: the commenters
were just as smart, and that smartness was often deployed towards being
entertaining.

• Abusive moderators that just downvote things they disagree with were flushed
out of the system.

A modernised version of Slashcode would be a good thing to have. Its approach
to discussion moderation is deeply unappreciated.

------
bjourne
Yes! I've been here since 2012 and it has gotten _way worse_. Especially when
it comes to drug related articles. If you post a comment that is not 100 %
positive to legalizing drugs expect to be heavily down voted.

But since people are dumb as shit and hoping that they will change is futile,
why can't we have a setting that keeps down voted comments black? Since I'm
reading HN on my phone, solving that problem with a user style doesn't work.
If there was a karma opt-out setting entirely disabling the karma system for
comments and all its effects I definitely would turn it on. I'd rather suffer
some spammy comments now and then than partaking in Hacker News' dumb karma
chasing game.

------
Yetanfou
Yes, it is. The downvoting button is used more and more to silence those who
voice dissenting opinions, something for which I can only assume it was not
intended and for which it is ill suited. Either move to a moderation system in
the lines of that used by the Slashdot of old - where posts could be tagged as
interesting, insightful, flame bait and other categories - and give the reader
the choice how to act on the negative labels (grey out, hide below a certain
threshold, etc) or get rid of the thing and just keep the 'upvote' button. Add
a 'report' button to weed out obvious spam posts but don't just grey out or
hide marked posts as this will end up causing the same problems as the
downvote button does.

META: An alternative to this might be to add a meta-moderation system but that
has its own share of problems which could be fixed by adding a meta-meta-
moderation system; GOTO META

Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that downvoting supposedly was
meant to be used to indicate dissent while discussing downvotes is explicitly
frowned upon. While I agree with the latter I assume the former is incorrect.
If the downvote button actually was meant to indicate dissent it might as well
be relabelled as the 'Nomenklatura button' as it has the same stifling effect
on the community: voicing a dissenting opinion can get you silenced without a
chance to discuss.

------
DanBC
Posts that are gray are both i) downvoted and ii) not upvoted.

I can't do much about i), but everyone can do something about ii) by upvoting
gray comments if those comments are making a contribution to the conversation.

A few people have got the ability to downvote, but many more people have got
the ability to upvote. Those people should start using their upvotes.

What you're noticing isn't new. There have been complaints about downvotes for
many years on HN.

------
newscracker
I don't think this post should be flagged or removed. Though HN is a
proprietary platform owned by a commercial entity, discussions like these
could help improve things (as long as we don't spend every other day
discussing it). A separate "Meta HN" discussion board could help keep these
discussions isolated.

I don't think downvoting is getting out of control, but my memory makes it
seem like the the ratio of

 _downvoting for disagreement_ : _downvoting for quality of discussion_

has increased over time.

When I crossed the karma threshold for being able to downvote, I mostly
adhered to downvoting as an indicator of off topic, irrelevant and trolling
content, because I thought that's what HN was about. Then I read Paul Graham's
old comment that it's ok and acceptable on HN to downvote as a sign of
disagreement, and so I changed my behavior to use it for that purpose too.

I try to lift what look like unnecessarily downvoted comments by upvoting
them. I try not to downvote as a knee jerk reaction on things I disagree with,
but I don't follow it all the time.

One must also realize that these actions at an individual level don't matter
much since karma points on HN are as unpredictable as airline ticket prices
(actually, we're getting better at predicting the latter). One downvote is not
always -1 karma, just like one upvote is not always +1 karma. My guess is that
the graying of downvoted comments (which I dislike for UX reasons) depends on
some kind of calculation based on number of downvotes, who downvoted the
comment, the recency of the downvotes, and other factors. So one single person
should not be able to game the system (even with multiple accounts) — that's
the theory. It doesn't look like it works well in practice.

------
leesalminen
Maybe the staff should increase the karma required to downvote? IIRC, it’s
500. Perhaps double that?

~~~
yasp
What about downvoting incurring a (small) karma penality on the downvoter? I'd
like to see such a penalty extended to flags as well, potentially.

~~~
mkempe
Make it a high karma cost. E.g. you must have been upvoted 10 times to be able
to downvote once. That cost can climb up for people who generally don't
significantly upvote more than they downvote.

[added] I've noticed that sometimes in a deep conversation between only two
commenters -- _where they cannot downvote each other_ \-- one of them gets
their comments downvoted within a minute of posting or so, suggesting that
there are parallel accounts used to downvote as a method of intimidation or
retaliation.

~~~
yasp
Saw you getting wrecked by ideological downvotes in a thread I made recently.
Good job not letting it keep you from speaking.

------
lainga
Evidently so, someone just came by and cheekily downvoted every reply.

------
gremlinsinc
I'm kind of lazy, I rarely downvote, and only if It's really garbage, I don't
upvote much either unless it's a golden comment or post. I should probably
upvote more.

------
z3t4
You can help out by scrolling to the bottom and up-vote those you think got
unfairly down-voted. I do this, but most of the time they where down-voted for
a good reason, so I think the system still works. When I get down-voted for no
apparent reason I think "at least someone read my post". :)

------
ddingus
I see more of it than I feel is warranted.

Personally, I do not ever downvote, preferring to reply instead, or just
ignore.

~~~
anothergoogler
The irony of your utterly benign comment being downvoted within minutes... a
good demonstration of the problem.

~~~
ddingus
Yup.

------
RickJWagner
Yes!

IMHO, it seems like there are some political activists on HN. It's really
discouraging to see smart comments downvoted (into grey) because they offer a
political opinion that doesn't sit well with the activists.

HN can be so much better.

------
lizardskull
For real. I am afraid I was guilty of this until just a few weeks ago and
vowed to only upvote from now on.

------
qop
Yeah, talking about partisan politics, while not fun, it is necessary
occasionally, is impossible on HN.

Talking about certain people and their decisions in tech is not possible also.

I don't think downvotes are useful inputs, personally. It's far too easy to
farm votes and use the accounts for essentially manipulation, it doesn't
actually contribute to the dialogue, even when they're down voting something
like an overly obvious question or dumb comment, a down vote doesn't really
change anything.

I think accounts under 5000 karma shouldn't have dowvoting capability at all.
Additionally, once a down vote has been cast on a comment, that post's score
should be hidden to discourage multiple downvotes.

Unless someone is spamming or posting something actually harmful or illegal,
ie not just an opinion, there's no benefit in discouraging that person from
contributing in the site.

These are my thoughts. I've seen HN go from a bastion of intelligent hackers
and scholars mature enough to discuss nearly anything to a collection of
mostly childish people bickering about nothing. Over the years and different
accounts and seeing the wrong people rewarded and the wrong people blasted out
for minor errors. It's crazy.

Downvotes are just one angle, but I agree that it needs attention.

Edit: this post now serves to prove the point I'm making.

------
jstewartmobile
HN is a _property_ , so I suspect the politics of downvoting are beside the
point.

I've had one or two vigorously up-voted comments _manually_ pushed beneath
grayed-out ones. I have heard others suspect/complain that the points awarded
to their posts/comments have not always been one-to-one. Manual moderation is
a powerful (and not always transparent) force here.

And as long as everyone knows what the game is, I have no complaints about
that. It's YC's board. They can do what they want with it.

~~~
dang
We do that mostly in an effort to prevent discussions from bogging down in
predictability. We read HN more than (almost) anyone else does, so we've got
the patterns of boredom in our bones.

