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

Slight hijack, but I last time I used it I thought Stack Overflow missed the value of simplicity.

On Stack Overflow, at its core, you have posts, and people reply to that post. That's fine. You can do that whether you're logged in or not (although you need an OpenID provider to sign up, which is a pain when it /could/ partner with a provider to seamlessly give you one on registering).

You can mod up and down the posts. And mod up and down the comments. But only if you have a certain amount of karma for each. But the selected answer by the author of the question is at the top, ignoring the karma completely.

You can have favourites. But only if you're logged in, despite the fact you can submit posts whether you are or aren't.

And then you have comments on each post. But you have to click to view the comments. And you can only add comments if you have a certain amount of karma. This kills a lot of conversation needlessly.

And you can edit other people's posts - if you have a certain amount of karma.

And you can flag posts, but only if you're logged in.

And then too often you view posts that make no sense until you see the context which is buried amongst the tags, rather than the site being naturally split into natural obvious 'sections' which will interest people who know about certain technologies.

It's all very confusing, and completely needless. Hide things or at least make it obvious what I can't use before clicking. Reduce the arbitrary karma limits to add more distinct classes so that the majority have equal abilities.

> It's all very confusing, and completely needless

Well, the funny thing is that the complexity is there for the some of the same reasons that HN explicitly doesn't document its behavior -- it's a small barrier. But these are much lower barriers than HN, as I'll describe below.

> Hide things or at least make it obvious what I can't use before clicking

Ah, but this is a problem -- we tell you what you need to earn to do something when you click on it. So a) you have an idea that the feature exists, and b) you can do it at some point in the future.

> Reduce the arbitrary karma limits

Our limits are quite low, far lower than HN. We require the equivalent of 2 karma on HN to upvote, and 10 to downvote. More here, just divide by 10 to get the HN equivalents -- http://stackoverflow.com/faq

Imagine you visit a website, where both links and non-links are shown by underlined black text. You quickly get confused by what you can and can't click on until you rollover them. I think we can both agree this is a bad thing, and that the correct fix for this is to make the links a different colour so it's obvious.

Imagine you're a new user visiting Stack Overflow, when things you both can and cannot use are shown in exactly the same way as a full user until you click on it and then it tells you that you need X karma to do something. I think this is a bad thing and that the correct fix is to either hide the things you can't do (because features I can't use don't really matter to me) or to make those things look different. This is where we differ, because you think it's not a bug, it's a feature, because it's a "small barrier" by confusing new users as to what they can do out of the box. I personally think that's /insane/, much like someone who decides to make all their links black as a "small barrier to new users".

I think you also misunderstood what I meant by "reduce the arbitrary karma limits". I don't necessarily mean "make them easier to attain" (although I'd argue reducing barriers to entry unless you have a good reason as it generally encourages new users), but rather "reduce how many of them there are". There are 10 different 'levels' of karma where features are unlocked to /users/. Why does a user need 15 to upvote but 100 to downvote? Why do you need 500 karma to retag questions but 750 to edit community Wiki posts? Most sites have a maximum of 3 levels of hierarchy (Admin, Moderator and User), your site has /at least/ 11. I guess with the badges system I should be happy that it doesn't use the same ridiculous system as Team Fortress 2.

And no, I wouldn't regard HN as good at usability either. Functional rather than ideal, even if it is trying to make creating a new poll difficult.