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

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

This isn't "a site about programming topics". Read the guidelines. Or even just the comment you were replying to.

Are you and I reading the same guidelines?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,

Isn't "How to stop the drug wars" about politics? I know it is exactly the kind of article I expect to find on Reddit. I was surprised to see it on the front page here. From the linked article:

> That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

This is not an article about politics?

Yeah, those guidelines: the ones that say "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on topic and go out of their way to make explicit that this is "more than hacking and startups". Also, the ones that say "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site", which I wish you would respect.

This is not an article about politics?

My comment was plainly not about the article but about a false description you made of this site. The article itself strikes me as a borderline case. It can't really be called "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon", but neither is it narrowly about politics. It's an intellectually respectable piece about a thorny social issue. For me, it passes the test because of the interesting historical content of the first paragraph, which I was curious and gratified to learn.

If I could make one thing go away from HN it isn't egregiously off-topic articles, which the flagging-and-editing protocol handles just fine, but rather the incessant "The sky is falling, it's just like Reddit" meta-noise.

> Also, the ones that say "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site", which I wish you would respect.

But that's precisely what happens when you give people no other option to vote against something: they write comments complaining about it. It's a direct and very literal consequence of the design decision not to allow downvotes on article submissions.

Besides, I only brought that up because pg said:

> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles.

Which is generally true, but clearly not true today because the top rated article is, as you said, borderline. And from my perspective, it is not at all borderline, and I'd vote against it in a heartbeat.