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

> Not everyone agrees on what is interesting

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 have enough points to downvote comments, I come here all the time, and I've never felt the need to downvote a story. I just ignore it and wonder why everyone else thinks it's so interesting.

I totally respect the Economist, but are they really saying something about the pointlessness of the drug war that I haven't heard a thousand times over already? Furthermore does it belong on a site devoted primarily to programming topics?

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..

I have a lot of nerdy friends who love discussing politics. Some of them also code. I don't think it's fair to make the generalization that politics isn't fun to discuss.

I've created a number of social sites and I've come to the conclusion that down-voting should not generally be allowed/used. The reason is that 9 times out of 10 it's used as a way to say "I disagree with this" regardless of the quality or accuracy of the item in question. Usually based solely on political and religious world-views.

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

I understand the urge to make software perfect; but really a usable system need NOT be fair, democratic, open and with set rules that may be debated upon (e.g. www.xkcd.com: We don't ask for democratic control over what comics are "on-topic". Yes, I know it's a personal site; but consider: would you ask 37Signals to change their blog to your liking?)

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... :)

It is quite reasonable for upvoters to have a highly disproportionate say, because it's a highly disproportionate problem -- as you surely must realize, considering that you assign disproportionate effects to upvotes/downvotes on your own site.

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.