Off topic, but I would love the opposite of this. The ability to block certain HN users, just hide their comments entirely. Certain people have shown again and again they are not willing to have good faith arguments, and I simply don't care to be subjected to their nonsense.
The downside to allowing blocking is that the site works best when you downvote that kind of content, because then everyone else doesn't have to be subjected to it. It's why we resisted a block feature on reddit for a long time. Because the site only works if bad stuff is downvoted.
While I understand that argument, I imagine most regular readers do not have the down vote privilege and may not for a long time, if ever. (I'm not sure in fact what the threshhold is, but it seems to be high.) To post enough and get upvoted enough to achieve it probably takes years on average.
That's a very interesting question. I always assumed most daily users do, by a wide margin, but I never actually had any data to base that off of. I even thought this before I had the 501 karma needed.
By absolute user count I'd definitely expect most to not have it but only because most accounts aren't regularly used (many even abandoned).
A little example: I’ve used the site for a little over 4 years but don’t usually post or comment. If I do comment, it’s something really specific or to try and help clear a misunderstanding so usually low karma amounts. I regularly participate through flagging and upvotes but only have ~50 karma so I still can’t downvote and will likely never be able to.
Not saying it shouldn’t be this way, but downvotes are heavily biased toward people who regularly post or comment.
It's only 500 karma, a handful of successful posts will get you there. If you want to farm points, just go to /new, look for threads with 1-2 other comments and post something that is likely to be upvoted. Don't forget to upvote the post.
Exactly, I just absorb whatever I read and comment in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, there's many times where people have said what I wanted.
So why not incorporate blocks as a signal for the ranking algorithm? The simple version is every person that blocks $USER causes a -n modifier on all of $USER's content; more complex versions could scale the modifier with the number of people (or the combined "reputation" of the people) blocking $USER or shadowban them once x% of posters block them.
Open to abuse? Potentially, but so are a lot of community voting features, and reliably muting serial trolls would be a useful feature for a lot of social sites.
One problem I immediately see with this is that it's difficult to define what a serial troll (excluding bot accounts) is vs someone a community doesn't like for whatever reason, using a downvoting system at least provides some leeway in discussion that is on the boundary of what is and isn't commonly accepted for a given comment at a given time within a conversation.
The main issue is that if a comment gets downvoted when newly created, it looses almost all visibility (gets shown further down), and it mostly dies, just from one downvote
This just creates and echo chamber where only the most accepted/mainstream opinions bubble up
It would be nice if we could “sort by controversial” or “sort by new”, so that we got more variety of opinions
Right, it would make more sense to have a plugin that makes your account automatically downvote any of those users' comments as you encounter them. Or even better, periodically pull up their latest comments and downvote them.
Not advocating that, of course, and it feels contrary to what the benevolent mod team would prefer. And I assume that the site has some countermeasure for that, like it does against upvoting a submission that you accessed via direct link instead from from the main site?
One of the problems for subreddits is people coming from the front page or from other subreddits, who are not part of the community of that subreddit, and begin to downvote things etc.
HN is lucky in this regard; there is just one HN, not uncountable “sub-HNs”.
Of course people can still come from other places to HN. But to earn downvote privileges here you first need some amount of karma. So hopefully this makes it so that downvote privileges on HN are mostly handed to people who are at least somewhat aligned with the broader community here.
Blocking downvoting hides gamed/promoted comments, so it's a situation that moderators would generally prefer. It's definitely the reason Youtube did it; because it was ditching individual creators without professional production values and trying to promote corporate traditional broadcast content.
50 inauthentic upvotes for something no one likes, while hundreds of frustrated potential downvoters fume. Then someone puts up a reply designed to be upvoted as a proxy for the lack of ability to downvote the inauthentically boosted comment, and that reply is quickly deleted as trolling or a personal attack.
Showing the total number of views like Twitter does now is a positively-vibed kludge for people who hate the whiff of negativity, although all of Twitter's stats seem wonky as hell under new leadership. Still, a low upvote/view ratio can also represent indifference or people not believing they're qualified to comment on something, rather than being a great signal for disapproval.
So you can still game that pretty well by Gish Galloping with a ton of broad references (entire papers or books rather than passages from them or reasonable summaries), and lots of people will disqualify themselves from downvoting because they aren't going to click through to the papers, while others will upvote just because it looks like the commenter is making an effort.
Is that actually possible now? I remember a few years ago, some moderators removed downvoting for people who aren't subscribed to their sub using custom css, but of course it was easy to circumvent and didn't affect mobile users.
A minor point, but the vernacular has shifted to this being called "muting" whereas blocking is the much more toxic, "and they can't see what you post either".
Platforms that implement blocking almost always see it weaponized by hate groups, not to mention how antithetical it is to allowing a user to control their feed, and the argument of "targeted harassment if people can see my content" doesn't hold water given how trivially easy it is to circumvent (if targeted harassment is the goal).
Such a system would fail at HN, if offered by the site itself. Many users have accounts registered for the sole purpose of bypassing “identity over time” recognition, whether by karma and flagging or simply by username recognition. Anyone who perceives themselves to be blocked would just keep registering new accounts to exempt themselves from it, or maintain a collection of accounts to circumvent it. The absence of blocks removes a key benefit of doing so, which helps keep the sockpuppet population down.
(Note that if you see users that are frequently breaking the guidelines, please consider emailing the site mods using the footer contact link, so that they can consider whether further review and/or action is necessary.)
I haven't particularly noticed this. I mean, sure there are times when I've felt a lack of good faith in the other party, but that tends to be individual discussions rather than seeing repeat offenders; its often been noted the quality of discussion here is higher than most other places - but perhaps I don't spend enough time on here to have noticed the really annoying types.
