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

(blog.stackoverflow.com)
61 points Anon84 | 6 comments | 09 Mar 09 05:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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.

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michael_dorfman ◴[09 Mar 09 09:03 UTC] No.508159[source]▶
I don't want to start a dogpile, since you already admittedly feel like a doofus, but what's up with writing an article about "what's wrong with Hacker News" when you clearly don't have enough experience with Hacker News to have a clue about what's right with it and what's wrong?
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codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 09:15 UTC] No.508169[source]▶
See my response to the first PG comment, along with related comments below. Downvotes do exist (mea culpa), but are so nerfed as to be effectively useless -- that's part of the reason I never saw them.

And they don't exist for article submissions, which is problematic for all the same reasons I listed in the blog entry.

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1. daleharvey ◴[09 Mar 09 10:35 UTC] No.508215[source]▶
they are not "effectively useless", they just useless by you, a non participant / browser of the site.
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2. codinghorror ◴[09 Mar 09 11:08 UTC] No.508234[source]▶
Considering I hadn't seen a single negative voted comment in a few dozen visits to HN, I'd say they're at the very least underutilized. Although I did notice that a few people went out of their way to vote down stuff in this thread. Ironic? :)
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3. daleharvey ◴[09 Mar 09 11:43 UTC] No.508263[source]▶
there is also significantly less witty one liners / sarcastic replies / downright attacks, at least compared to most communities I have seen.

that suggests they are overutilized elsewhere and work pretty well here, I am not adverse to opposing viewpoints, I just dont want to see plainly dumb comments, if you overuse it, then it loses meaning.

(taking this thread as a test data, while I dont agree with a lot of what people have said, I wouldnt have downvoted any)

4. scott_s ◴[09 Mar 09 13:55 UTC] No.508382[source]▶
No, it's not ironic. It's business as usual at HN. Posts get downvoted all the time. In fact, a more recent problem has been people overusing downvotes.

It sounds like you didn't actually understand the dynamics of the HN community. You sound silly insisting your initial impression is even partially right, when the whole community is telling you the opposite. (This applies only to posts, of course. Downvotes still don't exist for stories themselves, outside of flagging.)

5. Xichekolas ◴[09 Mar 09 14:08 UTC] No.508398[source]▶
I don't have any hard data, but I'd estimate (as a heavy user) that at least half the stories with comments have at least one that has been downvoted below 1... but piling on someone is rare, just because it's rare that someone says something that needs to be piled on.

As for your assertion that not disclosing the karma threshold for downvoting is 'bizarre', I'd argue it's useful not to provide an exact number. Enough video games have 'achievements' listed out for people to obtain... I'd rather have people participate honestly than just to gain more 'abilities'.

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6. electromagnetic ◴[09 Mar 09 15:04 UTC] No.508473{3}[source]▶
Usually racism, bigotry and basically any purely ignorant BS gets piled on. An unpopular comment usually only gets downvoted to between -1 and -5, however recently there has been a problem with (I'm assuming) new users downvoting anything they don't like, which thankfully seems to be going away.