If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments.
But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?
My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.
> downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment
I hope downvoting has nothing to do with agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated).
I want to see many more comments that are valuable and challenge the community (and challenge my thinking too). The groupthink is already well known and if not, will certainly be posted by someone.
In practice, I do see downvoting used on comments that are valuable but challenging. It's disappointing.
pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.)
I generally don't unless the disagreement has another value-subtracting component (lack of substance, poor reasoning/phrasing, factual errors, unnecessary incivility.) For disagreeable but worthwhile comments, I prefer responding instead. But I recognize the value in having differences of opinion over the use of downvotes -- comments of marginal quality (which some people disagree with, and others don't find valuable enough to upvote even if they agree) will end up dropping down the page.
> pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement (particularly since it's OK to upvote due to agreement.)
What value does this provide to the reader? Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth, IMHO, and provides little marginal value, because I already know what it is and it's easy to find. In fact, I wouldn't read HN if all I found was the groupthink -- I gain far more from new or challenging ideas.
EDIT: When Amy up/downvotes, it is for the benefit of Bob and other readers. Amy receives little benefit besides maybe a little emotional satisfaction. If the vote mainly was for Amy's benefit, HN wouldn't need her vote to impact anyone else's threads -- we all could have personalized, independent scores for each comment. What benefit do I, Bob, receive if Amy is just voting on what she agrees/disagrees with?
Downvoting because you disagree provides the exact same benefit to the reader that upvoting because you agree provides. "Downvotes aren't for disagreeing" is an absurd redditism.
> "Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth"
In strongly technical discussions, which are common on HN and which HN should be optimized for, "groupthink" and "correct" tend to correlate quite nicely. Whenever there is a concrete notion of "correct", it works well. It is only when "correct" becomes subjective (such as in political discussions) that shit gets messy.
> Community groupthink is not strongly related to truth, IMHO, and provides little marginal value, because I already know what it is and it's easy to find.
In other words, downvote and upvote according to what you think those actions mean.
> pg has said many times that it's OK to downvote out of disagreement
That doesn't mean it's a good idea. I would urge everyone (including PG) to reconsider the acceptability of this practice -- it strikes me as being harmful.
To put it a different way: PG & friends have put together a quality discussion forum. One of the reasons it remains relatively high quality is necessarily that many users of the site do not use downvotes to express disagreement.
>> One of the reasons it remains relatively high quality is necessarily that many users of the site do not use downvotes to express disagreement.
I think the reason it's high quality is because it started as a place for the kind of people interested in startups. To me that means (statistically) well educated, ambitious, interested in STEM topics, etc...
Just like in the old days of internet news before AOL made it available to the masses. For example, sci.math had awesome discussions among leading mathematicians, and then the masses came looking for help with their homework and those guys left.
Like all good forums, if it does really well to the point that the general public takes interest, it will likely become crap.
Like all good forums, if it does really well to the point that the general public takes interest, it will likely become crap.
That isn't an inevitability, it's a consequence of poor forum design. At one time, if water started leaking into your boat, it sank. Then someone had the bright idea of pumping the water out and sinking was no longer inevitable.
One mechanism that might prevent the dilution you describe is to hide low-scoring comments from low-karma users, but show them to high-ranking users. Then the high-karma users can exert influence on the low-karma users by upvoting quality comments and downvoting poor ones. It becomes a self-organizing system with a bias towards quality, rather than the open loop 'majority rules' system currently in place.
Compared to Reddit, HN has a way, way smaller number of instances of "downvote to disagree". You can't prevent it entirely because sometimes it is the right behaviour (such as someone spouting crap on vaccines causing autism, for example...), and sometimes there's an opinion people feel too strongly not to downvote but not strongly enough to reply instead.
But the amount of times I've seen controversial opinions rise to the top just because they're thorough and elaborate has been really fantastic, and I make sure to upvote things I disagree on myself. On reddit, the top comment tends to be a one-liner pun -- and again, it feels wrong to me to upvote things I disagree with on Reddit, so I don't do it and it just makes the whole situation worse.
I think HN should make voting more structured. I'm not sure why my karma should suffer if I don't have a popular opinion. Such example is low-carb diets. I always get downvoted, because most people are hooked up on carbs. Why should my karma reflect that? A niche like hackers penalizing niches is not very karmic!
> I hope downvoting has nothing to do with a agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated).
That's a weak distinction when there is a factual disagreement, since most people probably believe that factually incorrect statements are not valuable to the conversation.
Downvoting for mere disagreement has been blessed by the top level; it's an HN 'thing'. It would be less of a problem if it didn't also fade your comment.
I rarely see well considered dissenting opinions down-voted into the gray. That is something that I typically only see when somebody is being uncivil, committing logical fallacies, mis-characterizing the arguments of others, or is factually incorrect yet self-sure.
>"I hope downvoting has nothing to do with a agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren't valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated)."
I agree.
Thing is, the "when to downvote" debate is ancient at this point and no closer to consensus.
These days, I'm given to thinking that any voting system should assume the behavior of least resistance, that it's thoughtless, reflexive and therefore only potentially valuable after being sanitized / aggregated / weighted.
Reddit/HN create one interaction with the comment(upvote/downvote) and then expect that they must use this button to make the post more prominent or less prominent, even though the most strong emotional reaction is agreeing/disagreeing.
Its like you invite people to a debate, where you say "please only boo when someone is saying something obscene and nasty or breaking the rules of the debate, not when they are saying something you disagree with".
"If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments."
In theory, no, downvoting is not supposed to be used to disagree. It's supposed to be used to move "stupid" comments (inarticulate, illogical, poorly argued, etc.) down towards the bottom of the screen. Flagging, on the other hand, is meant to call out wildly inappropriate, offensive, or completely off-topic comments.
A few hypotheticals:
1) I see a comment that is well articulated and generally inoffensive, but I disagree completely with its premise or its arguments --> I do nothing.
2) I see a comment that is irrational, illogical, poorly constructed, whiny, or off topic --> I downvote.
3) I see a comment that is extremely offensive, completely unrelated to the topic at hand, spammy/astroturfy, or clearly intended to instigate a flame war --> I flag.
That said, many people seem to use downvotes to disagree with a comment, and I'm concerned that lowering the downvote threshold will lead to even more of that behavior.
Maybe the problem is that downvoting and flagging share too close of a hypothetical use case. Downvoting is clearly easier to do, and it's doable in the main thread view. So that could be why people routinely use it to disagree with comments. I have flagged maybe a grand total of one comment in all my time on HN, and I generally regard flagging as an option of last resort. (It could also be that I arrive at various threads after the worst stuff has been flagged and removed, providing me an artificially sunny view of the threads).
That's a reasonable take on what downvoting is for, but the HN take is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement.
Interesting. At first I thought, wait a minute, isn't "don't downvote to disagree" in the HN Guidelines? Then I checked, and no, it isn't. The guidelines talk about downvoting ("downmodding") very briefly, and only to say that one shouldn't complain when it happens to him or her. There are no guidelines on how or why to downvote.
Maybe this is a problem, in and of itself? Seems different people have different takes on the use case for downvoting.
Gotcha. I'll take your word for it, because I regard you as about as much a lay authority on HN posting as HN has. And if pg has weighed in on this topic, well, he's quite the authority, too. :)
That being said, I still feel weird about downvoting to disagree. The way I see it, disagreement-downvoting creates noise in its own way. Less noise than unproductive or bad replies, certainly, but more noise than doing nothing.
"The simple way to metabolize this system is just not to get unhappy when you get down voted."
True, and this is also an official guideline. (A good one, too, IMO).
> is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement
No, quite the opposite. (See I wrote a comment explaining that I disagree, I didn't just click the arrow. Much more valuable to you and the reader.)
And that's why you are wrong, by saying why you disagree you might (rarely) change the posters mind, or more likely change a 3rd readers mind about the topic.
This isn't my argument, but you're missing its point. Think of disagreement downvotes as a pressure release valve for the downvoter. The idea is to prevent you from expressing your disagreement in an unproductive comment.
There is no particular purpose for HN downvotes other than to express dislike. It's not needed to move 'stupid' comments down, because only 'non-stupid' comments rise up. The comments which are never voted on have no intrinsic value, so they might as well be stupid anyway.
I wasn't even aware of flagging on comments until someone mentioned it, and to be honest it's so inconvenient i'd probably never do it. Downvote is an easy enough way for me to say "I don't like this" and it helps reinforce the group dynamic, which is what they want (this whole post is about manipulating group dynamics).
The only way to fix downvoting is to put an express purpose behind it, like a button that says "I disagree" next to a button that says "I dislike" next to a button that says "Inappropriate comment". But for some reason forum admins always prefer generic feedback which give rise to unexpected behavior. Heh, it probably keeps people upset, which reinforces user engagement.
Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I don't approach voting from an agree/disagree axis. I approach it from a productive/unproductive axis. I upvote comments I find helpful, articulate, or informative. I downvote comments I find unhelpful, inarticulate, or uninformative. I leave alone comments that I find "meh," or that someone has already said better, or that neither add to, nor subtract from, the conversation. Basically: something either adds to the conversation (upvote), subtracts from the conversation (downvote), completely derails the conversation (flag), or is neutral.
Case in point: I didn't necessarily agree with your comment, but I found it articulate and interesting. It presented a perspective I hadn't considered. It made me think. I upvoted it.
Now, one could argue that agree/disagree and productive/unproductive are basically the same thing in practice. They both represent a desire to move the conversation in one direction or the other. (To your point about the group dynamics). But I don't know if I totally buy into that. I have no idea if this is true, but I'd hypothesize that voting patterns would be different under one explicit guideline or the other. I'd also think that downvoting-to-disagree runs the risk of fostering an echo chamber, which discourages dissenting or different viewpoints, particularly on hot-button topics.
>There is no particular purpose for HN downvotes other than to express dislike. It's not needed to move 'stupid' comments down, because only 'non-stupid' comments rise up.
The problem is that smart-but-unpopular comments may fail to rise up. We want to prevent groupthink by ensuring that the top comments don't exclude ones that are well written and productive while expressing a contrary viewpoint.
Well first of all, I disagree with your assertion that top comments with contrary viewpoints might prevent groupthink. Sometimes being contrary is inherent to groupthink. And being well-written and productive doesn't mean the comment is insightful, intelligent, or informative, which one assumes would be a preferred top comment. (personally I think promoting comments that are well-written, productive and contrary just gets you a class of people who can bicker in a very civilized manner, like two English gentlemen having a polite row)
Why do we vote in directions? It would appear that according to social media, we only have one orientation in voting (vertically) and can thus only go in two directions (up and down). But this makes no sense. For one thing, the 'direction' of a comment/conversation may go many different ways... conversations do not go in a straight line. And the idea of 'elevation' in a conversation is also confusing: if anything, a conversation would be more three-dimensional than two, moving around a changing landscape.
In addition, 'up' and 'down' gives an immediate subconscious reaction where 'up' is associated with goodness (and therefore correctness) and 'down' with badness (and therefore incorrectness). I say this moral implication is the default because it makes no sense for only one direction to be correct, unless you needed to know where you were supposed to go, and your default assumption was that you should never go down. (That would be a bad presumption for airplanes, for example, as they would never land until they ran out of fuel)
So what does it mean when HNers 'vote down'? Are they agreeing with something, or disagreeing? Are we assuming they're trying to impose a nuanced influence on a particular part of a person's commentary? If it was a generic part of their comment, was it their moral or ethical stance, or their writing style, or the correctness of their comment? We have no idea; all we know is they wanted that comment to go 'down'.
A simple vote down, regardless of its supposed intent, doesn't provide any specific benefit if it comes without context. The lack of a down vote would do the opposite, however: it would force people to only be able to provide positive feedback, or no feedback at all. How does this effect group dynamics? It actually works on individual behavioral conditioning: provide positive feedback, and you get positive behavioral conditioning, and negative behavior gets weeded out automatically (because the individual wants to be rewarded, which it knows it only gets for positive behavior). This is what practically all dog-trainers and child psychologists suggest as the best method to promote positive behavior. This would have two similar effects: people would be nicer, and they would provide 'better quality' comments.
So I think 'downvoting' is a loaded and useless way to regulate comments. I think that valid alternatives would be votes for specific feedback, or if you wanted to provide a way to simply "move thread position", a button that said so specifically. These would create specific, immediate changes in the group dynamics and the interactions of the users, unlike a generic downvote button. If you're trying to prevent groupthink, give the users tools to allow them to express themselves better.
>Sometimes being contrary is inherent to groupthink.
And lack of being contrary, is more conducive to groupthink.
>And being well-written and productive doesn't mean the comment is insightful, intelligent, or informative, which one assumes would be a preferred top comment.
Only if you're using a non-standard definition of productive. Could you spell out what you mean here? In common use, a productive discussion is one in which at least one side emerged with a better understanding of the issue. (If you can do that without being insightful, more power to you!)
This contrasts with a discussion in which arguers blur important distinctions, talk past each other, and so on.
It may be helpful (productive?) to give an example of (what I consider) a comment that is insightful, informative, and correct, but unproductive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840204
In this case, it's because the poster simply reiterated the logic behind the point his critics already accepted, thereby doing nothing to convey understanding of why they should take his position.
So, I don't think you actually disagree that "productive = good" here, but have non-standard criteria for what counts as productive.
What's the difference between a super stupid comment and a comment which gets no votes at all? I'll bet you the answer to that is "I really didn't like it", which mostly means emotional value. So the purpose of the downvote there is to basically have an emotional reaction button. Take away the downvote and you take away the emotion from the voting. Then all you have is upvoting, which is based purely on merit. It sounds like people don't like the idea of forum meritocracy, though.
> "What's the difference between a super stupid comment and a comment which gets no votes at all?"
Feedback for the comment writer. Shows the difference between "nobody thought much of my comment either way" and "some people really disliked my comment".
I think it's been very effective at weeding out the completely pointless comments (memes, jokes, "this", "I agree", etc.) and is also somewhat effective at weeding out subtle incivilities (I've changed my behavior in response to downvotes before.)
Some comments degrade the quality of the conversation. We might disagree about which ones, but surely we can agree about that, right? The obvious candidates are purely asshole comments, trolling comments, intentionally racist comments, etc., and there are less obvious ones too. (Almost any joke where the author feels a need to reply, "guess no one around here has a sense of humor" after being downvoted probably fits.)
The discussion is better if those comments are lower on the page and, ideally, discouraged from being made at all. Downvoting does both.
> Then all you have is upvoting, which is based purely on merit. It sounds like people don't like the idea of forum meritocracy, though.
I don't understand what this means or what a "meritocracy" is in this setting. (The moderators are in charge; the highest ranked users will never form a ruling class or be in power. Most forums are not "meritocracies", "socialist exeriments", "democracies", "plutocracies", "oligarchies", "monopolies", or anything that implies something other than a loosely managed commenting system.)
HN has many readers that know an absolute shitload about different subjects, and I'd like them to share interesting information and anecdotes about interesting articles. I don't want to read stupid jokes and memes on HN, because there are other places that are better for that. So I like that there are ways to explicitly encourage certain comments and explicitly discourage others.
> Some comments degrade the quality of the conversation. We might disagree about which ones, but surely we can agree about that, right?
Yes.
> I don't understand what this means or what a "meritocracy" is in this setting.
Basically, thread sorting would be based (mostly) on merit.
> the highest ranked users will never form a ruling class or be in power
The highest ranking users have high social power. Their power is simply a tendency to steer the group without telling anyone what to do. Usually it's unintentional, and sometimes they have no idea they're doing.
Most forums are actually discrete social communities made up of ingroups, with their own cultural standards and hierarchies, and often a few custom heuristics. Some of them are really incredible from a behavioral standpoint, like an internet chat galapagos island. HN is not so special, but it does have a clearly defined social structure.
I agree with you that the stupid jokes, memes etc should stay off HN. That's why I think some kind of meta-voting is necessary: because a simple downvote is used for a lot of things right now, and not just "this-comment-is-out-of-bounds" like you're talking about. Barring meta-voting, removing the downvote keeps the troll talk but it still filters down to the bottom with the other useless comments.
As far as I can tell, there are no guidelines or FAQs about what downvoting should be "used for" on HN.
On Reddit, the Reddiquette [1] standard is that you should only downvote if a comment doesn't contribute to the conversation. I think is is an excellent standard. It's been suggested in the past that a similar standard should be present on HN. [2]
Considering that flagging is a privilege that can be lost if someone decides that you're abusing it, ideally it should be reserved for the egregious cases that are unquestionably bad. Downvoting on HN should be for comments that truly don't contribute to the conversation, though the comments in question may not rise to the level of flagging.
As an example: Say you have a comment expressing an opinion with no support, no references, and factual errors. Is it "inappropriate"? Arguable. Does it contribute to the conversation? Not in any positive way. I would suggest downvoting that comment would be the right answer, even if you agree with the sentiment, because it doesn't positively contribute to the conversation. But flagging wouldn't be appropriate considering the comment is on topic and not spam (which are given as criteria in the HN Guidelines).
If you encourage downvoting because you disagree with an opinion, then minority opinions get buried. And sometimes it's useful to see that an opinion isn't unanimous, and that there's another side to an argument, even if you disagree.
Moving comments down completely can break the threading - e.g. you could have a highly upvoted parent comment with a single child comment that was heavily downvoted. You can't move the child any further down the tree.
You CAN indicative that the comment has been downvoted - the fading accomplishes that objective.
That sounds like an incorrect fix. Since the comments are separated by trees, they should be positioned and compared to comments relative to that tree, not relative to the master tree. Being at the bottom of a sub-tree marks the comment automatically as the most downvoted in that tree.
Applying fading to all the comments just because a downvoted comment has a parent that happens to be at the top, seems wrong.
Agreed. If they're this adamant about keeping the fading functionality tied to downvoting, they should just do away with downvoting all together, because fading just seems to worsen the discussion.
I've lost count of how many times I've seen perfectly good insightful comments around here that get ignored because some people decided to downvote them for some arbitrary reason. In fact, it's so bad, that I'd say I've barely seen any good instances of fading for the past year; they just seems to encourage group-think almost every time.
I'm ok with the idea of downvoting meaning disagreement, since that's how voting systems always end up being used anyway (not to mention pg approves of that interpretation as well), but penalizing comments to become practically non-existent based on a few downvotes (last time I noticed, a score of -1 started the fading) is just not conducive to interesting discussion.
Comments that most deserve to be downvoted (trolling, incivility, lies, etc) are inevitably going to garner a lot of downvotes anyway. It's only the ones which oscillate between one or two downvotes and upvotes in what may be controversial threads which most fall prey to what I consider to be the more petty examples of downvoting. The first couple of downvotes are the least meaningful, I think.
So perhaps a margin of, say, five or six downvotes should be necessary before any visual effect takes place. Not only would this no longer bias readers against a comment before having read it, but it would guarantee that the faded comments more accurately reflect the standards of the community as a whole.
Downvoting and threaded view is hard to combine. What you describe is the trivial way. It has the downside that if a comment has few subcomments, downvoting them don't accomplish very much.
Using a downvote to express disagreement with somebody here is going to come off as highly inflammatory towards them because downvotes actually cause their comment to fade out, as you mentioned. In fact, there have been instances where I've upvoted comments that I didn't agree with because they were so well articulated.
I believe that pg himself disagrees with me on this, but I honestly don't think the site is designed correctly with his view of voting in mind. The punishment for downvoting shouldn't be so harsh (both moving the comment down and fading it out) if it's just to express disagreement. That just encourages extreme group-think.
By far the best way to express disagreement IMHO is to neither vote nor flag, but to post a response.
> By far the best way to express disagreement IMHO is to neither vote nor flag, but to post a response.
I sometimes wish downvoting comments that have no response was impossible period, but I have no idea how to deal with the edge cases. Still, it's frustrating to see responses (actual ones, not just a bunch of insults etc.) made in obviously good faith greyed out without anyone pointing out what is wrong with them. When I do know, I try to reply, but usually I don't feel quite qualified. But the person who downvoted should know, right? If they can't put it in words, can it really be that good a reason? Among people who mostly type very fast, mostly idly browsing this site instead of being in a hurry, the time it takes is not an excuse, either.
To me it says someone has enough time to care about something someone said being somehow wrong, but not enough time to tell them what it is; that somehow the fact that they said something wrong makes them unworthy of being told what was wrong about it. Oh, and that nobody else who doesn't "get it" doesn't deserve to learn, either.
I think you don't understand the rules correctly. Or rather, I know a different version. Maybe that is because that question does seem to not really be answered in the rules, at least I found nothing.
I was under the impression that downvoting is for comments that you do more than just disagree with. If you disagree, but it is a valid interesting argument, I try to vote a comment up, in any case not to vote it down.
Flagging is for inappropriate comment, stuff that is harder than just a bad comment, like racial insults or spam.
I think disagreeing with a comment is not enough to merit a downvote. I'd rather see downvoting as a signal to the author about the quality of their post - while flagging is a signal to the system itself in cases where the post is unacceptable and should be removed from the site.
When I disagree with a comment, I'd rather write a dissenting one or a reply stating my counter points. Another method of dealing with disagreements is to simply upvote other comments you agree with.
> If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment ....
Certainly not.
Up & downvotes determine what is shown on the site, and what is prominently featured. Is your goal for this site for it to be full of things you agree with? I hope not. That's not my goal.
Now, there are varying opinions on the issue of downvoting for disagreement. Regardless, it is certainly never officially stated that this is the purpose of downvotes.
But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?
My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.