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

(blog.stackoverflow.com)
61 points Anon84 | 7 comments | 09 Mar 09 05:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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pg ◴[09 Mar 09 05:37 UTC] No.507970[source]▶
The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.

We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners.

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codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 05:59 UTC] No.507981[source]▶
> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles.

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?

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wfarr ◴[09 Mar 09 06:06 UTC] No.507989[source]▶
Hacker News isn't so much just about programming, but things that are interesting to programmers. It's entirely possible that the programmers that visit HN are interested in that topic.
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codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 06:09 UTC] No.507995[source]▶
Regardless, I think it's a terrible story for a site about programming topics, and I would absolutely vote it down.

But I can't.

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johns ◴[09 Mar 09 06:18 UTC] No.508002{3}[source]▶
Flag it if you believe it to be off-topic.
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1. codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 06:28 UTC] No.508017{4}[source]▶
Where's the UI to flag a story as off-topic? I don't see anything on the article page itself, and the FAQ ( http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ) doesn't mention anything about flagging?
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2. johns ◴[09 Mar 09 06:31 UTC] No.508025[source]▶
On the article page, this is what I see: http://screencast.com/t/Wqa1zmMJ I don't know if there is a rep threshold for flagging, but I wouldn't be surprised.
3. kylec ◴[09 Mar 09 06:34 UTC] No.508031[source]▶
You apparently need at least 51 karma to flag a post. (The number may not be exact, it's not an official source. Also, it says "comments" not "posts", so there may be a different threshold for that)

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

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4. kajecounterhack ◴[09 Mar 09 06:46 UTC] No.508047[source]▶
Yeah, I think it's karma. oh well, just get some karma and then talk a little more about it, eh?

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.

5. codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 06:53 UTC] No.508055[source]▶
Shouldn't these rep limits, and the information about them, be codified into the FAQ?
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6. allenbrunson ◴[09 Mar 09 07:09 UTC] No.508074{3}[source]▶
karma limits change all the time, due to "inflation." it used to be pretty difficult to get to 100 points. these days you could get there in a day or two, if you're determined.
7. lacker ◴[09 Mar 09 07:20 UTC] No.508085{3}[source]▶
No. Hacker News doesn't have to work the same way as Stack Overflow. Not only are these limits fluctuating and not really public, HN relies on human editors a lot.

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.