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Two HN Announcements

(blog.ycombinator.com)
698 points tilt | 1 comments | 29 Sep 15 18:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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unabst ◴[29 Sep 15 23:33 UTC] No.10300619[source]▶
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.

--

(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)

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InclinedPlane ◴[30 Sep 15 00:03 UTC] No.10300778[source]▶
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.
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dmichulke ◴[30 Sep 15 08:41 UTC] No.10302560[source]▶
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.

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InclinedPlane ◴[30 Sep 15 08:49 UTC] No.10302592[source]▶
Personally I like the stackexchange model where downvotes have a cost.
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1. dmichulke ◴[30 Sep 15 18:50 UTC] No.10306191[source]▶
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).