zlacker

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.

>>coding+(OP)
Actually, I've noticed several downvoted posts in my short time here. Caveat: I think this is more a result of trollish posting in many of the cases, but of course that is another problem on its own.

See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507278

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507604 (the downvoting on this does seem questionable, although it is an extreme position)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507301

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505452

>>coding+(OP)
You can downvote comments, but you can't downvote posts themselves. You can only flag them.

>>coding+(OP)
One reason you see so few comments which get the nerfed-into-near-invisible-grey text treatment is that community norms discourage piling on. I mean that when I say it -- comments get down to -5 or so and then people will take time out of their day to post and say "I don't necessarily agree with that but it is a valid point of view" and then, this is the magic part, people mod them up to visible as a result of the social norming.

(Edit to add: I should mention I'm not talking about foul-mouthed racial slurs getting tolerated out of a total desire to let it all hang out. Its more that views which are quite possibly locally unpopular get tolerated, particularly when not obviously trolling. "Rails docs suxorz" would probably end up gray. "The quality of documentation in Rails is subpar, and has been for years. The platform changes so fast that significant features of the most recent releases are documented only on blog posts, if that. The wiki is an unusable mess, bordering on unreadable and filled with information which is out of date or merely wrong." would almost certainly not end up gray, despite the fact that Rails is very popular with the crowd who hangs out here.)

Another reason is that while the signal to noise ratio is not quite infinite the signal to "#$%!"# ratio is pretty close to it. I have omitted the word I wanted to use almost entirely out of my concern that it would be inappropriate for HN. That says something right there. To see it, click here:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

The following are taken directly from another popular news site, at random from the #1 story today.

[Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That was rich.]

[It'll be as big as that book of his, that totally revolutionized science! Oh, wait, nevermind.]

[The next Cuil!]

These three comments were heavily encouraged by the community on the other news site. They would not be encouraged here. This tends to prevent other people from seeing "Aha, sarcastic one-liners are what is valued, I should probably work on my sarcastic one-liners" and drowning most of the value-adding discussion.

>>whughe+6
Those are comments, not posts. Posts themselves cannot be downvoted.

>>kajeco+21
Ack, I'm getting my terminology confused. I meant posts in the usenet/forum sense.

>>coding+(OP)
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?

>>michae+M2
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.

>>coding+(OP)
1) As soon as users get over the karma threshold, downarrows appear right under the uparrows.

2) That's largely because few users make comments lame enough to be downvoted. But when they do, they get downvoted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507604

>>coding+W2
they are not "effectively useless", they just useless by you, a non participant / browser of the site.

>>daleha+G3
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? :)

>>coding+Z3
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)

>>coding+W2
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.

>>coding+Z3
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.)

>>coding+Z3
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'.

>>Xichek+D6
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.

>>coding+(OP)
"In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they almost don’t exist."

It's not because you don't see them directly a lot that they don't have an impact. A comment that ends at +3 with 7 upvotes and 3 downvotes would have ended at +7 (or more because of the "momentum effect") if there weren't downvotes.