The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong

Honest question, and I do not mean this as a flame, because generally I quite enjoy Hacker News.

How, exactly, is the current top-rated story on HN, "How to Stop the Drug Wars" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507509 ) related to.. news of hacking?

But I can't.

Editor control should be used to put a stop to that, IMO. Democracy is great, but it went too far with Reddit. HN would become much less useful to me if it went in that direction.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,

Isn't "How to stop the drug wars" about politics? I know it is exactly the kind of article I expect to find on Reddit. I was surprised to see it on the front page here. From the linked article:

> That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

This is not an article about politics?

source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396

Which is good for everybody who uses HN as something other than a place to get tips about programming, which I expect is the vast majority of the HN user population.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507890

I think I've flagged something....once. Yup. Most everything on the front page is interesting, the most interesting of which I upvote, and the few things that aren't I just don't read and let die. the front page changes enough to allow me to do that anyway.

That wasn't really his point so much as yours. ;)

> Political issues often result in uncivil discussion. There is also probably significant audience crossover with reddit that caused that post to rise up. Hackers may have an interest in libertarianism or economics, but does that mean that this site should become one about Ron Paul if people feel that way?

That is in fact a good question to ask, and I wasn't precluding it from being asked, but rather reiterating the stated goals for Hacker News. Such questions ought to be asked.

This is not an article about politics?

My comment was plainly not about the article but about a false description you made of this site. The article itself strikes me as a borderline case. It can't really be called "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon", but neither is it narrowly about politics. It's an intellectually respectable piece about a thorny social issue. For me, it passes the test because of the interesting historical content of the first paragraph, which I was curious and gratified to learn.

If I could make one thing go away from HN it isn't egregiously off-topic articles, which the flagging-and-editing protocol handles just fine, but rather the incessant "The sky is falling, it's just like Reddit" meta-noise.

Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.

But that's precisely what happens when you give people no other option to vote against something: they write comments complaining about it. It's a direct and very literal consequence of the design decision not to allow downvotes on article submissions.

Besides, I only brought that up because pg said:

> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles.

Which is generally true, but clearly not true today because the top rated article is, as you said, borderline. And from my perspective, it is not at all borderline, and I'd vote against it in a heartbeat.

Not so. The people who flag it also get to have a say. And if you observed the site more closely you would notice that their say is quite effective.

That's okay; the models are really different. Stack Overflow needs to scale more because to be useful, there need to be thousands of questions asked every day, and every question needs to be able to get a response. Hacker News can be useful to me even if it only gets a hundred new stories a day, and it's not really a problem if many stories get axed for a bad reason.

I understand how voting works, but how does the flagging mechanism work? Once it's flagged by (n) people, what happens? I checked http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and I couldn't find anything.

I think flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression; you can't counter an upvote in the case of controversial, marginally on-topic questions like the drug war one.

I totally agree that some of the powers like voting down and flagging have to be earned through participation, by the way. We do the same thing on Stack Overflow.

The problem is that the upvoters get a highly disproportionate say in the matter. Let's say

- 30% of the HN community finds that drug war article interesting. They all upvote it. - 20% don't care or have no opinion. They do nothing. - The other 50% think the article is only marginally on-topic. (I would say it is not at all on topic, but let's give the benefit of the doubt.)

For those HN users, the article isn't spam or evil or lame (it's the freakin' Economist!), so lumping it in with that sort of nastiness by flagging it seems extreme -- a bit like the nuclear option. I can't find any description of how the flagging works, so I don't know if flag counts are public or not.

What you end up with is a plurality of public upvoters balanced by a (I'm assuming) silent and mostly invisible minority of off-topic flaggers. These are very different axes of expression. They don't really balance each other in the case of a marginally on-topic submission.

What would help, particularly in these marginal cases, is a reciprocal downvote.

I think the silence is a feature not a bug. The meta-noise reached its peak just before flagging was introduced, and it got way better after that. It still flares up intermittently, like now. An interesting observation is that it's mostly new(ish) users who post complaining meta-comments. Perhaps after they've been around for a while they notice that those discussions are always the same, as are the "sky is falling" threads.

Edit: uh-oh, the right margin is fast approaching. And damn it, I had managed to go at least 6 months without getting sucked in to this meta business!

I think that's pretty healthy. It means that Paul Graham gets an article to the front page one day, and the next day a rebuttal to that article goes up right next to it. Doesn't matter if all the people who agree with one want to downvote the other - as long as it's good, we all get a chance to judge for ourselves.

And on top of that it is clearly politics, which isn't fun to discuss or engage in. Unless you enjoy other high-risk, low-reward activities like, say, juggling chainsaws..

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

So flagging in and of itself does not trigger any automatic removal of the article. There has to be a human action to remove the offending article.

I agree with you, stories about drugs aren't what I come to HN for.

What next, some really intelligent analysis of Ron Paul?

On the other hand, with a downvote, there's no opportunity for discussion, and the end result is that worthwhile stories about out-of-fashion concepts like Perl or .NET or software patents get suppressed.

It's worth mentioning how often the intent of voting is misconstrued; is it "I disagree with this" or "this adds no value"?

Or "Karma payback time, dude"

In practical terms, it means all of that. What it is "supposed" to mean, I guess, is stuff that PG likes to see (or not)

There have also been intelligent, interesting stories about Ron Paul on Hacker News. For example this one ;-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76469

This site is vastly related to programming and startups, but other topics that are of interest and thought provoking tend to rise up as an interest.

We don't have kittens on the front page, so I consider it a victory.

I've been friended by some people on digg - and they constantly shout battles at me: bury this, digg that. The bury brigades have gone to work on this, etc, etc.

You can't do that here, someone who hates a topic simply can not affect it. All you can do is say there are X number of people who are interested in something. It doesn't matter that some people hate the topic, or are opposed to it. They have no voice.

Example: If you have a very controversial topic that 50% of people agree with, and 50% of people disagree with. You will never see it if you have downvoting. But since there is only upvoting, you will. And I think that that is very very important, and it's one of the reasons this site is so much better than digg and reddit.

I've always thought that digg should frontpage also controversial stories, not just upvoted ones, but ones that have an almost even ratio of down/up votes.

And BTW you don't loose half of the information about votes for a topic - the algorithm here is that stories fall down over time, so time itself basically acts as a constant down vote. You have upvoting to counter that, and ignoring a topic to assist that.

Bill Gates once said something like: if I only read the stories that I am interested in, I'll never learn anything new - so I make a point of reading the entire newspaper. (I hope I remembered the quote correctly, it was from before the internet.)

This effect is probably muted on SO which is primarily technical.

I am a big fan of hacking social and economic problems. If a topic is not of interest I ignore it. A thread rarely stays on the front page more than a day or two.

I originally came to HN for Web 2.0 news. But things have evolved.

What we really need is a system that works most of the time. The cost of a false negative with down-voting (losing a genuinely insightful article as off-topic etc) is simply too high, IMO.

As regards the comparison with Stack Overflow: I find it rather pointless; the sites exist to serve different purposes altogether.

Perhaps you could rethink your initial thoughts given all the comments above and provide an even more interesting analysis of how user behavior is modified by the presence of certain features... :)

But you never give any reasoning for your own disproportionate weights beyond what you personally feel is fair or seems to work. Granted, HN gives no little rationale as well, but that makes it at least as valid, having survived longer. It may be that the ideal weight for downvotes is even lower than 1/5th, or it may be that merely having downvotes at all hurts a site more than not having them.

The message an upvote sends is "I like this and I want to see more of it". Conversely, you seem to think a downvote should say "I hate this and want to see less of it", but when the site adds them directly to upvotes, the downvote message becomes "I hate this and I think everyone who voted it up is an idiot." A site using this mechanism sends the message "We are willing to allow controversial material as long as an enthusiastic subset of users votes it up." I would expect this to encourage clique voting over time.

By contrast, the message the flag system sends is "I don't think this belongs on the site; what do you think?" It defers the decision of what belongs on the site to editors. This is more work than letting the market decide, and it probably doesn't scale as well. However, it also ensures that the market doesn't take your site in directions that you don't want to go.