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Hacker News Guidelines

(news.ycombinator.com)
446 points tonmoy | 1 comments | 24 Aug 23 16:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Pannoniae ◴[24 Aug 23 17:30 UTC] No.37251926[source]▶
There's really one thing missing from the guidelines IMO - "don't downvote for disagreement, downvote for offtopic/flamebait/inappropriate comment".

Well, this should be obvious, but it sadly isn't...

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wvenable ◴[24 Aug 23 18:24 UTC] No.37252692[source]▶
A simple up/down vote isn't enough to convey on all the options. Most people take to be an agree/disagree button rather than good quality/bad quality button -- and I think that's a valid interpretation given the limited options.
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CM30 ◴[24 Aug 23 19:12 UTC] No.37253271[source]▶
Wonder if a good fix would be to explicitly separate the options?

So for a post you'd have 4 buttons:

- Good (which says 'this is a high quality post that adds to the conversation' when you hover over it) - Bad (which says 'this is a low quality post that detracts from the conversation' upon hover) - Agree (with the title being 'I agree with this post' on hover) - Disagree (with the title being 'I disagree with this post' on hover)

You'd then have only the 'Good' and 'Bad' options give or take away karma points (without the score being visible), and the number of people who 'Agree' and 'Disagree' would be displayed near the post separately in some way.

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steveklabnik ◴[24 Aug 23 21:28 UTC] No.37254770{3}[source]▶
Slashdot worked/works similar to this; with an additional "+1 Funny" that does not grant karma to the user.
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1. snapetom ◴[25 Aug 23 05:19 UTC] No.37258360{4}[source]▶
Slashdot also did a few things that allowed this to work. They limited how many votes you had. It made you think of whether something was Insightful, flamebait, or funny, etc. If you give people unlimited votes, 1) Would the bother to categorize something as funny? 2) Would it still get boosted to the top, drowning other comments, and like reddit, eventually make the site useless?