←back to thread

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

(blog.stackoverflow.com)
61 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 09 Mar 09 05:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
Show context
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.

replies(6): >>507993 #>>507994 #>>508015 #>>508159 #>>508173 #>>508534 #
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?
replies(1): >>508169 #
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.

replies(2): >>508215 #>>508347 #
1. michael_dorfman ◴[09 Mar 09 13:26 UTC] No.508347[source]▶
No, the comment downvotes are not "nerfed"-- things get downvoted all the time, and there are often comments with negative karma-- you just haven't been around enough to notice on your cursory glance at the system. (The fact that they are in grey makes them easy to miss, which is part of the point.)

There aren't article downvotes-- but there doesn't seem to be a need for them. The moderators kill stories that are plainly inappropriate, and the ranking algorithm makes it difficult for things to reach the front page without a decent number of upvotes in a short period of time.

My point is: this is an interesting and subtle topic, and it might be in your best interest to study it in some detail, rather than just glancing superficially at what others are doing and forming conclusions thereupon.