My biggest complaint about Hacker News is that the upmodding and downmodding of comments is used to express agreement/disagreement rather than as a method of distinguishing the quality of the post itself. I regularly upmod intelligent, yet unpopular, comments if they've fallen below 1.
from the keyboard of pg, expressing a differing point of view.
After edit: the low-rated comments that most disappoint me are the comments asking follow-up questions, to verify information asserted in the parent comment. I'd like to see a lot more upvotes for comments along the lines of "Could you cite some references on that?" or "What is an example of that?" or "What are some of the best online sources on that issue?" Most of us like to learn here, and the guidelines say that "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on topic, so anyone who asks a question to pursue curiosity ought to see that comment upvoted, it seems to me.
In response to pg's argument: assuming there is a flaw in the system, that is, assuming agreement does not correlate with quality, then downvotng would simply amplify the effect of opinion based voting, and thus marginalize quality based voting (because peopl's opinions are a stronger force).
So ideally a lot haters would vote down, and a lot of agree-ers would vote up. And it would balance it out. But this only works if we assume the right amount of people are backing a good idea.
What happens if it's an unpopular but good comment? Then allowing people to downvote would quickly suppress it without enough counteracting "I Agree" upvotes.
So upvotes can be used for more than quality indicator, but a downvote simply makes the system more volatile. If there were just an upvote and no downvote, then the novote will simply be the new downvote. Except the novote will be less volatile.
My problem with downvoting-for-disagreement is that it is not symmetrical to upvoting-for-agreement.
If someone makes a quality comment, but it happens to be an unpopular view, and they get voted negative, they are less likely to express their view in the future... and we are the poorer for it. No one wants a monoculture.
If that same person makes the same comment, and people merely upvote the opposing viewpoint, then neither person is being 'discouraged' from contributing. One is just being encouraged more than the other.
I realize it's all just a number and shouldn't matter, but we are human beings and it does... seeing someone else get told "good job" isn't near as bad as someone telling you "bad job"... especially when you thought that you had done something good by contributing a useful viewpoint.
(Obviously none of this applies to trolls/spam and things that are outright false... people shouldn't say things they can't provide evidence for.)
To make a rather tenuous analogy: If you don't like a product, you don't get to take money away from the company that makes that product. The best you can do is give money to their competitor. And to extend that, you can only take money (fines) from some company if they do something illegal. Here doing something 'illegal' is trolling/spamming.
I see a lot of people saying this, but judging by peoples' actions I'm not sure it's true. If I had to guess I'd say that maybe 1/4 (of hackers, a far smaller slice of the general public) of folks really do value a truly vigorous open exchange of ideas and welcome reasoned and thoughtful criticism, with the remaining 3/4 of folks implicitly willing to live within the cozy confines of an ideological fishbowl.
One example of a comment that I hoped would get an answer (I didn't care particularly whether or not it got an upvote, but it is an answer to your question) is my comment
asking in full, "What online sources would each of you recommend as better articles on the meme concept and the strengths and weaknesses of that concept?" Alas, that comment received no answers, even though some other comments in the same thread had implied that some participants had read better sources than the submitted article that opened that thread.
I think having 3 options would help with this problem: agree, disagree, and downmod. Top agreed posts would float to the top as they do now. Even posts with a healthy bit of disagreement (evenly matched agrees/disagrees) could be very high. Disagreed posts aren't penalized. Downmod would only be used for irrelevant or low quality content. You wouldn't need an upmod -- simply agreeing or disagreeing would count as an upmod.
If "downmod" has a more potent effect than "disagree" people will use that instead. The reason people downmod things they disagree with is because they want to censor an opinion that goes against their world view. Unfortunately, few will click disagree if the result is to make the disagreeable opinion even more visible.
The problem is that then downvote is for spam/junk. Why would I want to suffer a penalty to make the site better for others (I've already seen the spam).
I disagree (though I am not expressing that with a downvote). Comments should be upvoted for insight, thoughtfulness, or interestingness - not simply for expressing a popular opinion.
The idea of up/down voting expressing agreement/disagreement seems standard. At least, that is what I have seen. If we try to impose a new standard (downvote -> moderation), then users will (probably) ignore that standard or not follow it.
Therefore, why don't we try to do something different. Instead of having upvote/downvote arrows which implies the standard, we can use a plus sign (or an arrow up) for agreement, and a null sign or an 'X' for disagreement. That way, down voting might not imply disagreement, because an 'X' does not mean disagreement; it means 'not allowed'.
I like the idea of orthogonal marking of comments, and wonder how many previous comments advocating that have been posted to the feature requests thread
I do that also but I upmod and downmod higher modded posts according to my opinions. It seems like a popular approach. I think that's why my favorite comments usually stay at 2.
The way to get a high modded post seems to be state a completely obvious refutation of a parent post. Saddly, I don't actually find such posts terribly interesting.
Fortunately, I don't think everyone posts for points here.
FWIW, last time I complained about this, I got downmodded to oblivion, and pg followed up saying that getting downmodded because people disagree with you is just dandy :-)
So now I downmod all the time, just if I disagree with a comment as it seems to be semi-official policy.
now I downmod all the time, just if I disagree with a comment as it seems to be semi-official policy.
Here's a friendly suggestion for a slightly different policy. (I didn't vote up or down on your comment.) I upvote, first of all, whenever I see something I learn from or think that other people will learn from. I especially upvote new submissions that I think will help the hacker majority here learn about facts about the real world that aren't usually discussed in the hacker monoculture. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I especially like to upvote comments that ask follow-up questions looking for more information, especially those that take advantage of the hypertext nature of the World Wide Web to ask for links to more information to back up someone's statement about one issue or another.
My downvotes indicating lack of adherence to the guidelines or bad impact on the community expand to include downvotes indicating disagreement when
a) the comment to which I'm responding doesn't leave a good opportunity to be replied to by a comment,
and
b) the comment itself is repetitive, a mere declaration entirely unsupported by evidence, or flat-out in disregard to a more thoughtful comment that has already been posted to the thread for a while.
My goal is to upvote a lot more than I downvote. (But since I don't have statistics on my own behavior as a reader of HN, I don't know if I am achieving this goal.) I see a lot of statements that I disagree with that I just let pass. Statements that I disagree with have to be actively annoying, by the criteria above, for me to downvote. And people can disagree with me factually, even proving me wrong by specific evidence, and I will upvote that if I have learned something from the comment.
P.S. I wonder why there are so many more complaints about too many downvotes than about too few upvotes? I rather think that not upvoting the really good stuff here is the main problem.
I rather think that not upvoting the really good stuff here is the main problem.
I agree. Actually, I'd prefer there to be no downvotes and only upvotes. It works for the front page and doesn't lead to bad feelings or people trolling to get downvoted.
Well, there's several ways to disagree with someone. I would certainly say that I am more likely to disagree with something if it's biased, facile, rude, superficial, lazy, or uninformed. All of these qualities—generally speaking, a lack of rigor or engagement—I think are quite worthy of downvoting. To be honest it's very few comments that I see buried at -4 that I really think deserve to be in the black. Periodic concerns aside, I think the system is in good shape.
If they truly think they're right they might just downmod using both methods. I assume a lot of people who think a comment is wrong, might also think it is stupid.
That's a great point, but the nice thing is that you can actually detect that programatically. If a user always votes both up or down, the software can remind them of how they are supposed to vote.
Or the software can just ignore people that vote both up or both down. The more interesting and 'telling' votes are those who agree but vote down, or disagree but vote up. Of course, it would behoove pg not to tell the secret, otherwise people would simply game the voting.
The best way to disagree is already possible: reply to a comment by stating your opinion. Off course that can have negative effects on signal/noise ratio (or not?).
That is a frequent request for sites that have votes. It would be an interesting experiment to try it out on hn or some similar system to see how it handles.
If you would upmod them anyway, why do you distinguish by " I regularly upmod intelligent, yet unpopular, comments if they've fallen below 1." ?
Wouldn't you just upmod these anyway?
I think HN does an above average Job with its comment moderation. I think this is a testament to the quality of the HN community.
What bothers me even more, is that very often voting is based on personal preference. For example, being down-voted by Google fans, when one criticized Google.
I actually don't have a problem with this. I've long since trained myself to check the date in all circumstances when I'm looking at something online. My main complaint is when something on the web doesn't have a date (or it just has month and day but no year), how do we push guidelines out to all web publishers?
I don't know if this is still the case but when I created this account there was a welcome link up where you find
[Y]Hacker News welcome | new | comments | ...
linking to this.
Edit: To be more clear I think the welcome link disappeared after a certain amount of karma was acquired like other little features on HN ( flag,downvote,topcolor ).
I added this feature within the last year, so none of the established users know it exists, but I think it has helped stave off decline as HN has grown.
Yeah, you're right. The original intention was to make the beige almost invisible, so that it just added a subtle impression of a box bounding the text, but it isn't really working that way.
It works better on pages with images that are flush with the beige on both sides. If you indent the text, what do you do with the images? Indent them too? Maybe.
The 'welcome' link is hard to find. It does little to explain things like flagging, the karma limit to down or up voting and in general, anything at all. In fact, it doesn't even tell you the format rules the HN comment box accepts. There is conceivably some deluded notion that 'real' hackers will sort all of this out. Or they'll just call terrible UI as they see it.
What are the thresholds for voting down a comment? I looked in News News and it says karma of 100, but there must be something else because I have over 100 now and I don't see any down arrows.
I haven't read these in quite a while, and had hearty chuckle at:
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"
Was that in the original guidelines, or a recent addition? It seems almost too perfect in response to the comment that iamelgringo was responding to. (As malte pointed out elsewhere in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978170)
I'm assuming this is a different Erlang Day than the one I was here for, as I'm still a noob. (And on that note, how many have there been? And can we pick another language for subsequent days plz?)
the first happened when pg said the site was having some trouble coping with an influx of new users due to some high-profile mentions on other sites. he suggested posting articles about erlang to make the site look boring. i guess people complied a little more than he was expecting, so then he asked people to stop.
the second time was when the site was overrun with articles about _why, right after his disappearance. some people thought it was a little too much, which once again triggered an influx of erlang articles. it looked to me like pg and the editors started killing erlang articles after that, and possibly the _why articles as well.
It's a good idea to point to the HN guidelines from time to time. I just wonder if there was a specific incident that made you submit them. Just curious.
Edit: oh, just answering to which incident. In the comments, iamelgringo talked about submission guidelines, so I'm guessing that's why he resubmitted them here, so yeah, I meant the discussion.
Kinda confused. The user who submitted that Ask HN is an older member, so they technically should know the rules. Or perhaps you meant the discussion taking place?
Can I add a suggest adding something about comment moderation to the Guidelines? Perhaps:
"Don't downmod comments just because you disagree with them. Similarly, don't upmod a comment just because it takes your side. Instead, vote up for comments that further the discussion, and down for comments that do not."
where he wrote, "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."
On some threads, I can find occasion (as I do here) to post a reply indicating substantive, polite disagreement with a previous comment, to which I reply with my disagreement. On some other threads, I see comments to which it would not be good use of time to post a disagreeing reply, and sometimes in those cases (not all the time), I find it most appropriate to downvote to indicate disagreement. I can tell that I am not alone in that practice.
What I especially like to do is to upvote any comment that is good, where "good" is defined as helps me learn something I didn't know or makes me think from a new point of view. People can disagree with positions I hold and still get upvotes from me, especially if they post verifiable information indicating why they hold the positions they hold.
I've seen Paul's comment before, and have now voted it up. Still, I don't think encouraging voting based on agreement is a good thing. Yes, given limited channels of communication, sometimes voting up a comment you like is the best way to show solidarity. If in the long run this produces a better forum for discussion, then great!
I'm fairly happy with where the quality of discussion is now, and I'd like to see it continue at the same or better level. I think a guideline that encourages conscious and non-reflexive voting based on quality rather than agreement would help, even if the other only difference is that people think more about why they are voting as they currently do.
OK, feel free to reword it to "upvote the comments you want to see discussed more". My main thrust is that an explicit guideline should be given for comment moderation, not what the exact content should be.
Usually it's comments I disagree with that I want to see discussed more. It's where someone else disagrees with you that you are most likely to identify mistakes in your own reasoning. Reading things you agree with can make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but you won't learn much from them.
What is the opinion on silly comments in submissions that will soon be killed? I've seen people get in one word comments in some of these submissions and not get downvoted.
I have had some fun myself. My latest: "Opening studiobriefing.net was like watching time lapse photography of some butt-ugly flower blooming."
These are the only times that I knowingly type something that I know has a good chance of getting downvoted. But I will stop if you guys tell me it is a bigger deal than I think it is. I just don't see the harm in commenting something silly into a submission that will likely get killed.
Please correct me if this is at all detrimental to the community.
Consider that it adds to the noise, even if in a small way. People learn etiquette through observation; if someone sees both a bad submission and a bad comment, they're more likely to think that's okay around here.
As for my downvote. I had an idea of how my question would be received.
But, it was an honest question since -- and you have to agree -- the values of humor and sarcasm here are usually left at the front door. For some of us, it is hard to let go of since it is held in high regard in the real world and other internet communities.
So, I thought it was a valid question that deserved a response for those of us who are so new, that we're on the border of whether or not to completely abandon humor and snark. The appropriateness of this aspect of the HN community has been really hard to gauge, and is frankly a culture shock.
scott_s's comment was the final verification that I needed that, yes, when submitting silliness, to please be more careful.
I did a correction upvote since it was an honest question.
As far as humor goes, I'm going to restate something I've said frequently around here: you're not as funny as you think you are. When a few dozen people who think they're funny try to be funny, you have a lot of noise.
I've found that humor is always acceptable in any community, but the standards and flavor can vary wildly. Unless you feel that you really have a good handle on what the community thinks is funny, it's best to avoid trying. I'm convinced that discouraging attempts at humor that are not funny is for the best in any online community. Humor should be used sparingly and skillfully.
This is just plain hard for me to gauge, but thanks for your reply as well.
I know what you mean by saying that attempts at humor are not welcome here. I'll see a comment that I think is pretty witty, but it has maybe 0, or less, points. I click the user, and it turns out they're respectable.
I've gotten a couple pretty well received comments in, and a few failures. So the whole point of my original comment was to eliminate an easy platform for humor.
I mean, it is pretty easy to make fun of a bad submission and I've seen a few respectable users do it. So I did it myself a couple times and had fun. But I wasn't sure if that was okay -- in the grander scheme of the community, detrimental -- which is why I asked here if it was a big deal.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."
I certainly don't say things on HN that I wouldn't say in a face to face conversation, but that's because I'm honest offline as well as on (read: not civil). It can get me into trouble, but I sure as hell am not going to stop saying what I think because of downvotes (on HN) or in the name of good manners (IRL).
Popular belief among those lacking social grace. It is quite easy to disagree with people without being impolite about it. All it requires is a bit social intelligence and basic good manners. Being an asshole and trying to excuse it with "I'm just being honest" just makes you a far bigger asshole.
Hmm, good example I saw today - this was at Pike's Place Market in Seattle if anyone's interested. Very narrow street with slanted parking spaces. Guy was stopped waiting for someone to back out of a space (presumably so he can take the space). Guy behind completely oblivious, thinks guy ahead is just stopped, and starts honking like a madman.
Passerby goes up, bangs violently on the window, and proceeds the tell the guy to STFU, and generally being angry at the (admittedly clueless) driver. Shouting match ensues and almost gets physical.
One has to wonder why the passerby couldn't have knocked on the window and just calmly informed the driver that there was an obstruction ahead - this seems like it would've solved everyone's problems without any trouble.
Sure, the passerby was correct in that the driver was clueless, inconsiderate, and lacking in manners himself, but his approach was lacking in tact, and created more problems than it solved.
The mind knows how, but the soul is unwilling. I know how to tiptoe around people, but I greatly prefer being combative.
Which explains why my adviser is currently holding the contents of my bookshelf locked in her office until I comply with her demands. Score by her, but I tend to win these battles by not giving a shit.
Good graces will take you far in life. from the utilitarian perspective, the emotional valence of the message ("sugar coating") does not impact the veracity of the semantic content. While this is true, humans are not rational fact-processing machines. We are primarily emotional and irrational creatures with a fleeting capacity for logic and reason. For many technologists, this is something we lament. However, our emotions are not that complicated... they are just governed more by expectations than by facts. If you learn to guide someone gently from one expectation to another, then you will learn to avoid triggering their defense mechanisms and have a much easier time being effective at communication and achieving your goals. Especially if this is difficult for you, I suggest that you take some time to study meat computers.
> Especially if this is difficult for you, I suggest that you take some time to study meat computers.
I do, and I have. I just wanted to say that it's one of the most challenging things I've ever worked on in my life. I still occasionally slip up, but in the main I've killed the impulse to argue combatively.
When I mean honest, I mean honest both literally and emotionally. If I see bullshit, then I actually call it bullshit, instead of calling it "innaccurate." While the two terms may be similar in meaning, they are not equivalent.
At the end of the day it is about what you want to get out of the situation. Do you simply want to vent your frustrations and make yourself feel better, or do you actually want to try to do something constructive to improve the situation? While the former may be more satisfying in short run, working with people and being constructive is often better for everyone in the long run.
I'm not saying you should never simply call bullshit, but before you do you should analyse the situation and the people involved and try to work out what your best course of action is given the result you want to achieve. Going with your first instinct is often satisfying, but rarely optimal.
I am not agreeable to following the "be civil" guideline.
The times when I have been uncivil, I've generally been downvoted, which I think is perfectly fair. However, there are some times when I've been rather rude, and the comments ended up positive; but they were negative initially by quite a few points.
I really do think that "being civil" has its place, but to be civil all the time requires a certain dishonesty; perhaps not in literal meaning, but certainly in emotional meaning.
Well, then I'll politely express my disagreement (as others have in other replies) to say that I think civility is ALWAYS a good idea in online discussion, and there can never be too much of it. I think it is possible, as I hope is happening here, to be civil while being very firm in one's factual position.
Civility does not require dishonesty. You can make firm, bold, blunt, and even emotionally powerful statements while remaining perfectly civil. Civility is not a weakness. It is a strength.
Being civil is always more effective for persuading people to your side. The only thing you can accomplish by being uncivil is rallying people who already agree with you (free upvotes), widening the divide between us and them.
Would some research in the field help ? I am reading http://presnick.people.si.umich.edu//#publications for a term paper, seems very relevant. If anyone has read his work before, can you tell us what is applicable to HN case? I'll post back something when done reading!
By the way, the fact that there is a continued and unresolved discussion about voting based on agreement suggests that the voting feature is broken. There is a design defect in this web software, pg; please consider redesigning it! I would consider it fixed when a significant majority of users find voting intuitive and useful.
An ongoing dispute isn't always (or perhaps even often) a sign that something is broken. E.g. evolution. If I could think of a better approach I'd implement it, of course, but I doubt there is one.
Actually I would like the ranking algorithm to distinguish between a comment with no votes and a comment with 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes. I think the latter usually shows the comment is controversial and probably deserves to be displayed as it's likely to be interesting. This makes it so that people can still use votes as agree/disagree without negatively impacting the quality of the debate.
I suppose it depends on whether or not you want to promote controversial discussion, which you may not. It would be harder to enforce etiquette through downvotes and might bring on eternal september sooner.
That said, if you wanted to experiment, one simple way to do this is simply to make the number of points an upvote grants different than the number of points a downvote produces. Not for purposes of karma, I think HN probably does that right now, but simply for purposes of comment ranking.
The downside is jokes that aren't that funny would likely be ranked higher than they should be under this algorithm. (The only instance I can think of where downvotes that came along with upvotes served as suitable chastisement under the current algorithm but might not under the approach I just outlined.)
Could you try one of our suggested solutions, and as long as it doesn't mess the whole site up, keep it? And if it doesn't solve our original issue, try another one of the suggested solutions, and as long as it doesn't screw things up keep it?
I mean iterate, so that HN can evolve right?
I agree that public sentiment should not always be factored in, as we will naturally oppose change. So if you test a radically new system you'll get opposition. But as long as the actual results aren't negative, I think it's at least progress.
It's not broken, it just could be better. The same could be said for any voting system that exists today on the web. The reason why no one has quite solved it yet is because the solution is not obvious. It may very well be that the current system is an adequate approximation of a perfect voting system because a perfect voting system is too complex to implement well.
Last I checked, identical URLs are automatically prevented. But the duplication becomes a problem when people decide to submit blog posts, etc. instead of original articles. There is (usually) only one "best" URL for a story.
It looks like I've been breaking the "use asterisks for emphasis" rule for years without realizing it.
I've always used _foo_ for code-specific articles, or FOO for a more general audience, and reserved foo for parenthetical physical actions such as shrug or bows.
First I'll start with submissions: all to often Hacker News looks like any run of the mill news site. No longer is it the spot I rely on to go and see what the hackers are up to. Because too often now it's the same junk on Digg.
Comments: the quality of comments on here is pitiful. They're used to be good discussions and relatively long, well thought and written comments. Again, like Digg it's getting where people are just doing a 1 line/sentence post where seems like they're just trying to hit on something that other people will vote up for more karma points.
Fair enough. Yet I have to wonder about how you criticized one line posts after making that one line post yourself: "They used to be taken seriously."
One line posts can sometimes be better than rambling on and one. If you get straight to the point a pithy statement can be more rewarding. However, there is definitely a problem with snarky one line put downs as the guidelines suggest.
If you expect a comment of yours to be downvoted, perhaps you should consider whether or not the comment in question is actually contributing to the discussion. I imagine that your original comment was downvoted because it expressed your feeling that this was not worthy of submission without including any reasons supporting your opinion. You seem to be surprised, in general, when people disagree with you. Try convincing them, or considering things from their points of view.
-4 is the current system-imposed limit. When a comment reaches -4, it's a reasonable inference that there may be many more than five participants willing to downvote it.
I wonder what would happen if a similar system was set up for upvotes? I guess that would make it harder to tell the relative worth of valuable comments. Nevermind.... scrap that idea.
