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

(blog.stackoverflow.com)
61 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 09 Mar 09 05:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.244s | source
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codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 06:03 UTC] No.507987[source]▶
First, I should apologize for my misunderstanding. I do feel like a doofus for not realizing that downvotes are possible on HN. But I swear I have never seen a single downvoted post any time I’ve visited! I am a very occasional HN user, mostly a lurker, and my karma is not even 2 digits. :)

In my defense:

1) There's definitely an element of "if the user can’t find it, the feature doesn't exist" with downvoting here.

2) In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they almost don’t exist.

Anyway, I'm encouraged that downvotes exist on HN, but the threshold could be considered so absurdly high that they're nerfed into oblivion.

replies(6): >>507993 #>>507994 #>>508015 #>>508159 #>>508173 #>>508534 #
1. patio11 ◴[09 Mar 09 06:26 UTC] No.508015[source]▶
One reason you see so few comments which get the nerfed-into-near-invisible-grey text treatment is that community norms discourage piling on. I mean that when I say it -- comments get down to -5 or so and then people will take time out of their day to post and say "I don't necessarily agree with that but it is a valid point of view" and then, this is the magic part, people mod them up to visible as a result of the social norming.

(Edit to add: I should mention I'm not talking about foul-mouthed racial slurs getting tolerated out of a total desire to let it all hang out. Its more that views which are quite possibly locally unpopular get tolerated, particularly when not obviously trolling. "Rails docs suxorz" would probably end up gray. "The quality of documentation in Rails is subpar, and has been for years. The platform changes so fast that significant features of the most recent releases are documented only on blog posts, if that. The wiki is an unusable mess, bordering on unreadable and filled with information which is out of date or merely wrong." would almost certainly not end up gray, despite the fact that Rails is very popular with the crowd who hangs out here.)

Another reason is that while the signal to noise ratio is not quite infinite the signal to "#$%!"# ratio is pretty close to it. I have omitted the word I wanted to use almost entirely out of my concern that it would be inappropriate for HN. That says something right there. To see it, click here:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

The following are taken directly from another popular news site, at random from the #1 story today.

[Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That was rich.]

[It'll be as big as that book of his, that totally revolutionized science! Oh, wait, nevermind.]

[The next Cuil!]

These three comments were heavily encouraged by the community on the other news site. They would not be encouraged here. This tends to prevent other people from seeing "Aha, sarcastic one-liners are what is valued, I should probably work on my sarcastic one-liners" and drowning most of the value-adding discussion.