Hacker News Guidelines

The one thing I wish was added - either in the guidelines or as a change to the actual web UI - was replying to a comment that you're downvoting; it's frustrating both to have one's own comments downvoted without explanation, and to come across a comment that's grey without obvious reason (Was it factually incorrect? Endorsing an unpopular idea? It's not always obvious).

(I'm not saying HN should do exactly the same thing, but one example is Slashdot's system where a comment can get downvoted in a way that tags it specifically as trolling/offtopic/whatever - https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml seems to describe it alright)

It's an interesting idea, but you'd end up with a situation where the worse the comment, the more discussion it generates due to the forced replies, which is sort of the opposite of what you want.

Comments to explain downvotes are nice, and should perhaps be encouraged, but they certainly shouldn't be mandatory.

I do not downvote for comments I disagree with.

I downvote for off topic, or for comments which detract from the conversation. I believe most others with the ability to downvote do the same.

Replying to off topic posts would be counter to the purpose of downvoting.

Perhaps a system where a comment can only be downvoted if it has at least one reply? So someone has to explain, but only once

I probably agree that if downvotes were only for off-topic/trolling/unhelpful comments the situation would be better, but I don't think we're there; I am fairly confident that downvoting for disagreement is common and officially okay.

In the market of ideas you’re failing, and that’s the signal you’re getting.

It sounds like you don’t care to adjust to “the crowd”, which is fine, but then you have to deal with the consequences.

> What is the downside of "more discussion"?

The only limited thing is time. I have never consciously thought of downvotes like that, but their only truely meaningful use would be to push down items I do not only not want to spend time discussing, but not even spend time reading, under the precondition of the assumption that most others likely feel the same.

A perhaps viable idea. You should email it in and see what they say.

I remember when there were no upvotes and downvotes on forums, and each comment stood on it's own merits. We have to remember that for every user down voting, there are a hundred lurkers just reading. There are also a bunch of activists here on HN as on other forums, who will categorically downvote every comment by certain posters because they maybe wrote something they disagreed with several years ago.

Similarly, are up-votes expressing agreement or do they indicate something worth reading (opposite of thd topic/trolling/unhelpful)?

Some comments can go yo-yo, but I don't think it is possible to see the two counts separately.

No, because that allows one person to double down on negativity - it can turn something grey and detract from the comment, both of which then bias future readers to read it negatively.

I'd go the other way - disallow downvoting if you comment, and disallow comments if you downvoted. You get one choice of how to indicate that you don't feel the comment is correct.

Admittedly, teaching people not to downvote just for disagreement would be better. Personally, I downvote a ton, but never for disagreement - I downvote for exactly the reasons I see in the guidelines: non-substantive comments. Or, admittedly, I also downvote people who are just being a jerk.

> Data storage is cheaper than ever.

But because it's true that data storage is cheaper than ever, human attention is more expensive than ever.

Noise is bad. It is a good thing that HN attempts to optimize for signal.

> There are also a bunch of activists here on HN as on other forums, who will categorically downvote every comment by certain posters because they maybe wrote something they disagreed with several years ago.

Interesting. How do you know?

I think some sites have a feature, that when you downvote, you have to add some words/tags to why you downvote. I like that idea, it gives the commenter some concrete feedback, but also the downvoter a moment for reflection (is this really a bad comment, or do I just have a bite reflex because its language sounds like a (ideological) side I hate?)

I know that I have stupidly taken some downvotes personally, but later realized, those comments were maybe not bad by itself, but in that context attracting flamewar OT debates. With some extra words, I would have realized sooner.

And downvoting for merely not liking someones opinion is something I really don't like, but is explicitely allowed here.

How do you then tell the commenter why you downvoted them? How are they supposed to improve without feedback?

I asked this exact same thing a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673613

So yes downvotes for mere disagreements are okay here.

> it's frustrating both to have one's own comments downvoted without explanation, and to come across a comment that's grey without obvious reason (Was it factually incorrect? Endorsing an unpopular idea? It's not always obvious).

Personally, I don't downvote anything unless it's either complete and utter bullshit (e.g. someone acting like PHP is bad based on arguments barely valid in the end of the PHP5 era), or it is plain and simple far-right/conspiratorial in nature. It used to be the case that this was how most people used the downvote feature.

Nowadays? Seems like the tide has shifted, and even completely legitimate viewpoints (not just on politics threads) get downvotes for unexplainable reasons. It saddens me a bit.

> I'm not saying HN should do exactly the same thing, but one example is Slashdot's system where a comment can get downvoted in a way that tags it specifically as trolling/offtopic/whatever

Such a thing exists. You have to open the comment's dedicated page by clicking on the timestamp; if you're over 500-1k karma you can then flag it. Enough flags auto-kill comments and they only appear for those who have "showdead" enabled.

This is not only a "market of ideas", but a virtual world. And in the sense that it is a virtual world, you're also telling him "you can't exist here".

Which is a pretty shitty thing to say regardless, but when the real world withers away from us a little more every year, it starts to become monstrous.

> Admittedly, teaching people not to downvote just for disagreement would be better.

That would be awesome were it possible. Got any special insight into how to do that? I don't have a problem doing so, 16 yrs on reddit, if I ever downvoted even 30 times total, I'd be shocked. Others I've talked to make it seem like that's a daily or at best weekly total for them...

I think the trouble is that people fear others seeing the comment. Downvoting is used as a technique to prevent that contamination. It betrays some sort of mistrust in others' intellects.

on a technical level, being able to see downvotes and upvotes separately would actually be interesting, as it does carry a signal, but it probably doesn't happen often enough to be worth the effort to implement.

Confirmation bias. It’s the same in most forums I follow; there is always someone complaining about an imaginary person downvoting everything. Which is always bullshit because even if a couple of posts had one single downvote by the time the comment was written (though there is nothing to say whether this was from a single account), it is never the case if you wait a bit.

I guess part of us really want to be against other people and the shady systematic downvoter fills that role. It is always stupid, though. Luckily we don’t get much of that here.

Sometimes you'll make a controversial comment and you'll notice the score on every recent comment you made go down by one.

Also I vaguely remember a couple of people here bragging that they had networks of sockpuppets specifically for mass-downvoting, but IDK.

This place can certainly be petty enough for that.

Where does "you can't exist here" come from? I don't think it's common for people who just get downvotes frequently (not flags, but just downvotes) to get kicked off the site (or out of the "virtual world", if you prefer).

> Sometimes you'll make a controversial comment and you'll notice the score on every recent comment you made go down by one.

Sure, but that's a different phenomenon. If you make a comment that gets a lot of attention, sometimes people will go read a bunch of your other comments. I have also had the opposite of this happen, where I suddenly get upvotes on old comments.

> Nowadays? Seems like the tide has shifted, and even completely legitimate viewpoints (not just on politics threads) get downvotes for unexplainable reasons. It saddens me a bit.

Dead posts are far from the majority here, and the vast majority are dead for a very good reason.

Grey posts just mean that some people disagree, but it does not really say much about the post itself. It might be that the tone was wrong, or the poster was being an arse. It does not prevent people reading it, and it does not prevent discussions about it. Grey posts are not a sign of persecution or a cabal against you, it’s just that it rubbed some people the wrong way.

You are interacting with a whole lot of people here. Some of them will have had a bad day or just be irrational. You don’t need many of these to get a net negative vote count. It does not really matter.

Yep, there is no doubting what the policy is. But it is reasonable to question whether it is the right policy.

That would be redundant.

If I make a factually inaccurate comment, I can expect at least three replies correcting me. We like to joke that they all start with "actually..." Maybe I've also been downvoted, but it's clear I was incorrect about something.

If I'm downvoted without replies, was I being a jerk? This requires some self-reflection, but there's rarely any mystery. Maybe I made a joke that fell flat, wasn't appreciated, or was deemed unsubstantial. Flop on this one badly enough and the mod will let you know by word or act.

Which brings us to the last possibility. If I haven't been incorrect, a jerk, telling dad jokes, or being generally pointless and my comment is still being downvoted, then it means I've said something that some people wish wasn't true. It might not even be a majority, just whoever happened to be passing by. Be proud and don't sweat the fake internet points.

Many Reddit subreddits use AutoModerator to automatically remove comments by users with substantial negative karma, e.g. -49 or lower. There are definitely false positives, but this policy removes a lot of drive-by troll comments.

This is the second time recently that I have been participating in a thread about moderation on HN and people have responded with comments talking about moderation on reddit...

I don't get it. We're not talking about reddit here, we're talking about HN.

People who don’t follow a social situation’s rules and norms don’t get invited back. It’s true of parties, shopping centers, and Hacker News. I don’t think that’s a problem.

It has the exact same problem as the original idea - its motivation and purpose is really reducing the personal sting of getting downvoted, not 'producing an interesting set of comments ordered by some approximation of interestingness'. Notice how nobody ever suggests or advocates for 'receipts for upvotes'.

It's a totally sane motivation it just doesn't obviously make a messageboard better.

They are explicitly discouraged in the guidelines this thread is about.

That is a great question, but I feel that making the commenter go through the exercise of reflecting on what they said and trying to understand the possible reasons is just as much a driver to become a better community member as handing them an answer would be.

It depends on the commenter. Some truly want to learn and get better, and in those cases it will make the board better.

These things aren't mutually exclusive and the commenters who want to get better (and/or develop more resilience to mild online criticism) do so just fine without the noise cost. There are lots of other ways one could try to dampen the unpleasantness that don't involve the extraordinary burden of receipts for downvotes.

I guess that's probably the best way to summarize this argument - the extraordinary burden demands extraordinary benefit and not even the people who are really into this idea often argue the benefit would be commensurate with the burden.

That sounds like a useful way

Commenting about downvotes themselves is discouraged. Commenting on the reasons why somebody was downvoted is a separate matter

> Comments to explain downvotes are nice

Downvotes are for material that does not support productive discussion, if it is productive to discuss a comment (even on a meta level like “why it is a bad comment”?), then downvoting is inappropriate.

No it's not. It's the whole meta-discussion about voting in general. And, it doesn't say it explicitly, but almost all meta-discussion itself. You can find both of these explained in the moderator commentary over the years.

Comments sections do hold attention for a finite amount of time per person, and having a low-effort, negative, or trollish comment suck the air out of the virtual room is bad.

"don't feed the trolls", "downvote and move on" are valid pieces of advice.

> Grey posts just mean that some people disagree, but it does not really say much about the post itself. It might be that the tone was wrong, or the poster was being an arse. It does not prevent people reading it, and it does not prevent discussions about it. Grey posts are not a sign of persecution or a cabal against you, it’s just that it rubbed some people the wrong way.

Which is a good point, but nevertheless I think that if one disagrees with a post (excluding the post breaking site guidelines), it is good culture to explain to the poster why one has done so.

Actually, Slashdot doesn't allow you to use mod points on threads you're a part of. It enforces the opposite of what you propose.

One explanation I’m thinking of is that different people have different views of what an upvote/downvote represents, especially if there aren’t very clear guidelines on it. Or if they are coming from a different social network where a downvote might instead mean “I disagree”.

This reminds of the 1-5 star rating system issues, and how people interpret it however they want without reading what it means. Let’s take Uber for example. I leave a 5/5 rating for a purely average trip where everything went as expected. Afaik, this is how Uber’s rating scale works (apparently drivers start getting warnings if they drop below ~4.5), so it surprised me when I once saw a friend give a 4/5 since the trip was “just normal/average”.

Conversely, let’s take Goodreads, where I feel that many people don’t read the definition of the rating scale and give star ratings not matching the definitions.

Goodreads definition is: 1 star="did not like it", 2 star="it was ok", 3 star="liked it", 4 star="really liked it", 5 star="it was amazing".

With that, if you simply found a book “ok”, you are to give 2/5. If you simply “didn’t like it”, then that’s a 1/5. It shouldn’t be unexpected to see many 2/5 and 1/5. And a 5/5 should be a rarity. Yet you if look at the actual reviews, feels like many people don’t follow the rating scale definitions and give it their own meaning.

Moderation is moderation. Don't pretend that it is significantly different from place to place.

I mean, I guess we can just talk about HN if you want. Yay, circumstances were such that HN moderation isn't as shitty as reddit, and may even remain that way for the lifespan of the site. How long is that anyway? Will HN be around 30 years from now? 5? It's so much smaller, that how many unlucky heart attacks or misfortunately early deaths would derail it? Is that a higher-than-single-digit number?

So, any discussion of purely HN moderation (besides those asking for input on policy adjustments) aren't talking about anything long term and pointlessly self-congratulatory.

Only the admins would have any certain proof of users voting behaviour, but you can deduct things using your own logic. Most of my comments here will get a few upvotes in the beginning after posted and then after a day or two they are downvoted. Completely normal on-topic comments. And if you are familiar with other similar forums with a voting system like Reddit, you know there is no limit to how petty and obsessed people can be online.

I never down vote here on HN, because why should I waste my time when I can just move on?

Well, when you put it that way...

Of course, if we alter your metaphor only ever so slightly, then you don't need an invitation to the public square, the town council meeting, or the bus stop bench.

And internet forums have certainly been happy to take the place of those things when it suits them, but without the inclusivity they require. They want the benefits of being those things, without the tradeoffs. We see no effort being made for them to not be those things.

I suspect a strong correlation between those who see no reason to be concerned by that, and HOA members who sneak out at 5:45am to measure your front lawn's grass with rulers.

I do often see people asking why they've been downvoted (and seem genuinely confused), but I don't think it's the right move to require at least one explanation reply.

I'm reminded of the xdcd "someone is wrong on the internet!" comment. I'm starting to get to the point where I don't feel like arguing or even explaining things; I just want to downvote, move on, and hope my moderation contribution has made the shape of the thread more useful to people.

If I had to explain my downvotes every time, I'd hardly ever bother, and I suspect that's true for most people. A forum where no one wants to take the time to moderate is not going to be a healthy place.

I've been hearing people complain that "downvoting was so much better back in the day!" for as long as I can remember, on pretty much any site with downvotes. For example you can find comments from more than 10 years ago in [1]; e.g. from 2011: "Glad to see the downvote-disagree is becoming ever more prevalent!"[2]

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403589

That's interesting: I don't think I've ever been unsure of why people downvoted anything I've said.

I don't think we should make it any more complicated. You might benefit (on the margin) from some feedback, but that makes the conversation more noisy for everyone.

I can say that personally, if I downvote something without also replying to it, it's either because I don't have time to write a helpful response, or because I know my own contribution would make things worse.

Yup, the incentive should always be to direct people toward high-value conversations.

> you're also telling him "you can't exist here".

No, we are saying his behavior is unacceptable, and that if he wishes to participate in this community he will need to conform to those standards.

It is not a mercy to allow bad behavior in order to be more "welcoming".

What if this were an in-person community, and the above commenter had a problem with personal space and non-consenual touching? Not only are you driving everyone else away, but you are also risking legal consequences (or worse).

The way to help such people is have firm boundaries and clear rules. If the above commenter had any question about what constituted an acceptable comment, he could refer to the HN guidelines which the subject of this very thread.

> Moderation is moderation.

No, moderation varies wildly from place to place. As do the rules and guidelines that the moderation is driven by. Each community has to figure this out for itself.

It is, really and truly, ridiculous, to bring up how moderation works on reddit, when discussing moderation on HN. It's an entirely different group of human beings working from an entirely different set of guidelines using an entirely different set of tools. It's just a total non sequitur.

> I mean, I guess we can just talk about HN if you want.

This whole discussion is about HN! We're discussing a link to the HN guidelines! Like, what made you think we're in any way talking about something else?

What in the world are you even talking about with the rest of this? It just seems entirely unrelated to the topic.

This sounds like tilting at windmills to me.

So many replies to this, but to clarify. I think OP has a right to express their opinion, my point is nobody seems to be interested in it which may or may not be a bad thing.

I think of votes as a sort of social currency that makes this a fairly observable marketplace of sorts.

Perhaps in ten years all of OP comments will seem prescient - who knows? Not my intent to say they are doing anything wrong. If nothing else, shows dedication.

Reddit does this as “controversial” and it is a good feature.