Two HN Announcements

The biggest lost opportunity I find here on HN are not with the comments moderated poorly or that were banned, but with the comments never posted and the discussions that never happened because of harsh anonymous downvoting.

Donwvotes on HN are anonymous and silent. This equates to being slapped in the face by someone with a mask on while you're in the middle of a conversation, without knowing why, and not being able to do anything about it. In a real conversation, disagreeing with someone involves actually opening your mouth and talking to that person, and even then is not rewarded with an immediate punishment to the person you're disagreeing with. This is what leads to a discussion, or better yet, a debate. Instead, the only recourse on HN is to change how you talk or to keep quiet.

But at this point I must assume this is an intentional design decision, and I adjust my tone and substance accordingly. But I wouldn't be writing this if I weren't okay with HN's rules.

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(edit/addendum: this isn't to say there are no discussions or debates on HN... but I hope other's agree there is something uniquely HN about most of them)

I'd say that this has gotten worse over time. I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.

Its because in real conversations, you talk to 1-2 other people and not a million. If a lot of people are discussing something (as they do in parliaments) people have a way of upvoting (by banging tables) or downvoting (booing) others.

Agreed - the only thing I dislike about HN at all is the tendency of some users to downvote anything they disagree with. It seems to have gotten worse over time (I've been lurking several years longer than my current account). Now I occasionally come by threads with a large proportion of not-terrible comments greyed out, and it does make me avoid commenting anything that might be perceived unfavorably by someone. It also seems to encourage lots of throwaway accounts for single comments of unpopular opinions. I wish something could be done about this more than anything else, but I'm not sure what that would be.

> I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.

There are a few topics I happen to know quite a lot about (e.g. health economics), and I generally enjoy discussing them with people in real life.

I've long since given up on being able to discuss them on HN, however, because it's really demoralizing to write a 1000-word comment with five footnote citations explaining the nuances of the health insurance billing system and labor supply market, only to get downvoted within 30 seconds by people who (presumably) don't like that my comments don't perfectly support their opinions. Rinse and repeat throughout an entire discussion thread.

So instead, on these topics where I know I'll inevitably get downvoted, I just write a single comment, much shorter, and oftentimes without citations. If people respond, I often don't bother to reply. It's not that I dislike debating, or that I dislike debating this topic. But it's a waste of my time to keep writing comments only to get (virtually) slapped in the face every time I hit "submit".

There are other users I've noticed who have followed similar patterns. Which is a shame, because I've learned a lot from them in the past.

At some point I came to the conclusion that the best reaction I could have to being downvoted was to take it as editorial criticism on my writing. This means just assuming that I didn't make my point clearly or that I was mistaken or didn't use the right approach to the reader. When I am downvoted, I tend to edit my comments. Sometimes this means changing the words around.

And sometimes it means deleting the comment. Not because I'm afraid of being banned, but because it's not very good. I've found that deleting not very good comments is good practice. That just saying the stupid thing that I feel compelled to say is enough. I don't need someone to actually read it. I'd rather have people read my occasional good comment.

On the flip side. Sometimes I downvote a comment in lieu of arguing. Actually, it's probably a lot more often than sometimes. Those downvotes are in lieu of mostly unproductive xkcd386 "someone is wrong on the internet" comments I might write if downvoting and moving on wasn't an option.

There are things about which it is reasonable to disagree. For example I believe that discussion is more productive than debate and that conversation is far more productive than either because it doesn't require opposing viewpoints as a starting point and doesn't entail the idea of winning or scoring points.

There are plenty of other places I could do that.

When I post I may be putting it out there, but if anyone replies, I'd like to think we are having a conversation. Or like now, I'd like to think this reply is to you, and not to a million people. More people may be reading, but we're not really talking until they join the conversation.

In real life, I would never throw a tomato at someone I overheard saying something I disagree with to someone else -- but that is HN. By design, I assume, but still.

Perhaps you've stopped writing them, but I still associate your username with high quality comments. Try not to care too much about the random downvotes, and please keep writing extensive well-footnoted comments about the issues you care about. It's probably a small audience, but we are appreciative.

Disclaimer: I don't know how the downvoting privileges are actually assigned.

The necessary karma threshold for downvoting is already prohibitively high, but submission karma and comment karma seem to be shared.

That means if you get one lucky submission, such as the announcement of the next major release of a popular project, you likely get shot over the threshold relatively fast. If the gain from there isn't modulated (or doesn't require a separate, sufficently high amount of comment karma), that may give people downvoting privileges too early, before they've familiarized themselves enough with HN.

It would be nice to know who downvotes how often in relation to others (publicly or at the very least for the person herself)

People could then compare their behavior against the others and one could define a "too often" in terms of std-dev from the mean or a quantile, both within a specific time window (say last 365 days).

In this way one has at least a candidate set of abusers (for the "HN Mods") and everyone could compare his downvoting behavior and adjust.

Additionally, since it's a simple statistic, it should be easy to implement.

Personally I like the stackexchange model where downvotes have a cost.

The problem with that is that you can't not care about them if you care about meaningful debate and conversation.

The effect of downvotes is to push comments down and fade them away into the background. That should be the effect of filtering low-quality comments, but why should that be the effect of disagreement?

More to the point, is it not to your benefit to encounter and engage with quality points of view that differ from your own?

Certainly, and one can still benefit if the comment is slightly grayed out and lower on the page. I'm suggesting that allowing the asocial behavior of small number of random strangers to ruin your day is likely to result in lots of ruined days.

Better, if you can mentally arrange it, is to treat some small number of downvotes as the price of admission rather than a personal attack, and to continue the conversation with those who are listening. The hard part is figuring out which downvotes are actually useful feedback, and which should be treated as random noise.

This wasn't my point above, though. My point was that I like chimeracoder's long detailed comments, and would like him to keep writing them, regardless of the behavior he observes in others.

The anonymity of votes is something that acts against the worst aspects of groupthink and knee-jerk opinions in the HN crowd. I don't trying to literally penalize disagreement with the median voter here would help at all.

The idea would be not to penalize local quantity (votes or downvotes on a topic) but aggregated quantities. Chances are that if I downvote 10 times per day (with say an avg number of down votes of 2 per day) that I am doing something wrong or I five times as much as the average user. In both cases it's food for thought.

Ratios of vote/downvote per user would probably also mean something.

Finally, I'd prefer to have these statistics private for each user, so there is no way groupthink could get a hold.

That's also possible, maybe with increasing costs, but the problem is that it introduces state (so it's not as easy as a statistic to calculate). Constant costs could discourage downvoting and AFAIR, PG wanted to have his numbers being integers (so no rational costs either).