
The Quality, Popularity, and Negativity of 5.6M Hacker News Comments - BeautifulData
http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/
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dalke
> Therefore, starting in 2014, both quantity and quality are on a downward
> trend.

Or people have gotten bored with upvoting, or it's lost its novelty, or those
most interested in boosterism and show support by upvoting, have moved
elsewhere, or people tend to upvote accounts/people they know but the HN user
base has gotten too large for the halo effect to be significant.

> What’s surprising is how few comments have 0 or fewer points: this shows
> that HN users do not like downvoting.

It shows that HN uses do not like downvoting _below 1_. There may those who
downvote if and only if the comment is not already "an aesthetically-
displeasing gray" and a larger percentage who upvote mild 0s to turn them to
1s.

