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.

I don't think Hacker News' system kills lame articles. I have seen obvious troll blog posts and such reach the top of HN repeatedly.

The reason this happens is because of the following. Let us say that an ordinary story that is completely relevant to Reddit and is worth reading is upvoted by 50 people and downvoted by 10. This gets the story +40. Now, let us take a very controversial story, say, a blog post on how much git sucks that is obviously fishing for links. This story gets upvoted by many more people, say, 100 people... and downvoted by 300. It doesn't get near the front page.

Now, take the same on HN. The first story gets +50, the second gets +100, despite the majority of people believing it should not be on the front page.

This is not to say that the Reddit system is better, but rather that the HN system is not perfect.

Well, we kill everything the editors think is excessively lame. Downarrows would produce better results iff the userbase at large were better at deciding what was lame, which is probably not the case. Downvoting is often done reflexively, whereas killing something is a fairly momentous choice one thinks about first.

I think that HN does not really need down-voting for articles at all, but on the other hand, it needs some automated killing functionality.

EDIT: [About the editors, it takes an hour and sometimes more for a link to be killed, at least when I flag a link and I see it for hours - happened today. So maybe automation will help in any editors shortage]

For example, someone few days ago submitted your article "Why TV Lost", although it was already submitted, and we already discussed it! But he was able to do it, obviously because the submission detection script does not think that "www.domain.com" is the same as "domain.com", and treats them as different links.

Also if a link is submitted previously and it was dead because it's spam, then if a user tries to resubmits it again it should be killed automatically. Like Google homepage, myspace and all of these bla bla bla.

There are zillion techniques for preventing spam, and you know it better than me for sure. But there is a vision that you have about spam on this website, that I don't really understand yet.

>the submission detection script does not think that "www.domain.com" is the same as "domain.com", and treats them as different links.

Those two are not the same. Just like mail.google.com isn't the same as google.com.

But google.com is the same as www.google.com? and ycombinator.com is the same as www.ycombinator.com? Got what I mean!

I am talking about the "www" which is the acronym of "world wide web", and it's automatically assigned to any domain name, so usually domain.com and www.domain.com points to the same host, unles if the sysadmin changes it which rarely happens.

I am talking about the "www." and NOT any other subdomain that the sysadmin/webmaster can add/change or remove.

I am sorry if you misunderstand what I am talking about.

The www. subdomain is not necessary and you can have a different cname value there. It can point to another domain for instance.