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Hacker News Guidelines

(news.ycombinator.com)
446 points tonmoy | 7 comments | 24 Aug 23 16:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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yjftsjthsd-h ◴[24 Aug 23 17:09 UTC] No.37251581[source]▶
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)

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jedberg ◴[24 Aug 23 17:14 UTC] No.37251672[source]▶
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.
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arfafaerhgaq5[dead post] ◴[24 Aug 23 17:23 UTC] No.37251821[source]▶
[flagged]
TX81Z ◴[24 Aug 23 17:28 UTC] No.37251883[source]▶
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.

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1. carlosjobim ◴[24 Aug 23 17:42 UTC] No.37252126{3}[source]▶
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.
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2. sanderjd ◴[24 Aug 23 17:52 UTC] No.37252284[source]▶
> 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?

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3. kergonath ◴[24 Aug 23 18:13 UTC] No.37252559[source]▶
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.

4. krapp ◴[24 Aug 23 18:14 UTC] No.37252562[source]▶
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.

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5. sanderjd ◴[24 Aug 23 18:19 UTC] No.37252627{3}[source]▶
> 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.

6. carlosjobim ◴[24 Aug 23 20:51 UTC] No.37254385[source]▶
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?

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7. sanderjd ◴[24 Aug 23 23:58 UTC] No.37256092{3}[source]▶
This sounds like tilting at windmills to me.