I agree with you 100%, I love HN and have been here for years but the downvoting feature disgusts me. Either allow a post or don’t, but this weird “fading” of someone’s post just because some people don’t agree with what someone has to say strikes me as petty and cheap. HN should be bigger than that.
It gets faded to signal to other people "this has been downvoted" because you can't see the karma score next to the comment anymore like you could in the early days. One of the things this signal does is it provides the opportunity for corrective upvotes by people who feel "That didn't deserve to be downvoted" which is one of the cultural traditions here.
I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a very big problem to never allow any kind of signal of disagreement or whatever and the system here is intended to keep singal-to-noise ratio high.
It's a big forum and anyone can join. There is no fee to join. You don't need an invitation to join.
You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." to try to keep Eternal September down to a dull roar so HN can do what HN does better than any other forum I have ever seen, which is why I hang here so much even though it's never been an easy thing for me to be here.
> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here."
Can we use flags for this purpose?
Problem is even though a comment does not violate any rule, it gets down-voted as hell if you say something that majority of people would not like. e.g there are posts about hyped programming languages, go check out down-voted comments, most of them does not deserve to be down voted.
There some topics, these topics have “fan-boys”, so even a comment is constructive, it gets down-voted.
You already show disagreement with comments. If a comment violates a rule, we can flag it. If a comment does not get up-votes, it moves to bottom of the page. So, I think down-votes don’t add any value to HN.
As someone who gets downvoted probably more than average, I don't agree with you. Downvotes are the least problematic way for people to tell me they have some problem with my comment and minimizes the fallout from me having to try to navigate gender politics as part of the mix.
It would be vastly worse for men to only be able to express sexist garbage by openly attacking me and trying to find some plausible excuse for hostility that is sometimes rooted in "She won't date me!" basically.
I'm a very controversial figure in part because I am getting healthier when that is not supposed to be possible and the world generally has a big issue with me because of that reality. HN has handled my "disruptive' presence better than any other forum I've been on. I've been banned from several forums and I've had mods elsewhere tell me that the abusive treatment heaped on me by others that was a clear violation of the stated rules was not the problem, the problem was somehow my behavior.
Since I'm not making any of that up, I'm kind of painted into a corner here socially and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to not end up essentially murdered over it, like Semmelweis was.
I do everything in my power to behave in accordance with the rules and blah blah blah, but I'm a woman and HN was as much as 98 percent male when I joined and I'm getting healthier when that isn't supposed to be possible and so forth. And HN is the only forum that is able to cope with that constructively and help me talk to people who are knowledgeable about areas of science that are pertinent to my needs as someone trying to survive in the face of an incurable genetic disorder.
I say all kinds of things that are not "popular" or even socially acceptable and as long as I am not violating the rules of civility, the mods here don't have a problem with me being here and that's extremely unusual. Most mods are all too happy to just get rid of me as the easy answer to their problem while not caring that this is de facto a polite way to quietly commit murder against someone whose crime boils down to "I am a scientist who is doing cutting edge work and my credentials include I'm a former homemaker and spent years homeless."
It sucks to be me. It sucks majorly for a long list of reasons.
And most forums find me intolerable and HN is willing to let me stay and that's literally life saving for me.
So I feel strongly that I am the ultimate test case for how well their rules work. The entire forum can literally think you are nuts and you can say things here that people literally believe is you being a deluded fruitcake making shit up, and if you behave you can stay.
So I think they are doing something amazingly well that's incredibly hard to do and I'm a huge fan in part because it has helped to save my life.
I'm sure there is room for improvement. I'm also equally sure no one else on the planet does it better.
Even though I find myself in disagreement with some of your posts on here, I still value and enjoy your presence here. The internet shouldn’t be an echo chamber. HN has meant a lot to me too, so I can relate with you on that. Have an upvote, and an amazing evening!
> I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a very big problem to never allow any kind of signal of disagreement or whatever and the system here is intended to keep singal-to-noise ratio high.
It certainly is not, one can verbally signal one's disagreement with a reply. I very much do not believe that it has anything to do with “signal” and “noise” which of itself are rather vague terms and I find that very often people will consider something “signal” simply because they already agreed with it before they read it.
I see no reason for comments to be “rated”, and I certainly see no reason to pœnalize users for lowly rated comments as I see plenty of them that otherwise provide an interesting perspective.
> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." to try to keep Eternal September down to a dull roar so HN can do what HN does better than any other forum I have ever seen, which is why I hang here so much even though it's never been an easy thing for me to be here.
“This is not welcome.” means “Ðo not disagree with what the nonrepræsentative portion of H.N. that votes thinks says.” and I stress that it is not repræsentative. — it yields more power to those that are willing to downvote something for mere disagreement and gives lesser to those that would not do so, in my opinion very much the type of person whom one should not yield such power to to decide what is and isn't welcome.
Visually, the low contrast from downvoting is tiring to the eyes if it's longer than a short sentence or so. As the reader, I do not see why my eyesight should be punished for this purpose. There are some really good decisions in HN, but the visual representation is not one of them.
I get eye strain from looking a bright white pages, so I use a Firefox add-on called "Dark Background and Light Text", which lets me override the foreground and background colors of pages with my choice of colors. As an added bonus, it prevents the annoying graying of comments on HN. (Use the "Simple CSS" option with HN, otherwise the up/down arrows will not display.)
I can't speak for the person you are talking to but this site has much less tolerance for deviation from cultural norms - which is both a good and bad thing.
Compared to even niche subreddits there is much less room for "freewheeling" (can't think of a better term for it) comments. It has costs but what for what you pay, you gain in a more serious and sober environment.
Wow, I think my experience has been different. Redditors seem to pile on a 'wrong' opinion and downvote to oblivion, whereas HN seems more evenhanded to me. I'm sure it depends on the subreddit though.
Its not serious at all, its a news aggregator that by very silly means filters stuff to the top that is worth reading. Serious is when you have skilled professionals pick the topics and an interesting debate is when preferably everyone disagrees.
I initially downvoted this. I've reversed that and decided to reply.
HN is bigger than it used to be which has helped introduce an Eternal September effect, but HN is the funnel for YC. You need an HN handle to apply to YC.
For people interested in starting a business and applying to YC, there is potentially millions of dollars at stake. Especially in the beginning when it was smaller, your comments here were used to help them evaluate your application to their seed funding and business mentorship program.
Lots of latecomers seem oblivious to that function and think it's just a silly discussion forum. But there are people who still know better and the people who understand that what you say here can make the difference between becoming the next Reddit (a YC company) or Dropbox (another YC company) or never getting anywhere with your business dreams help skew conversation here in a more serious and respectful direction than you are going to find on most forums that really are just discussion forums and that's it.
That's not what HN is. HN is the foyer you have to get through to have any hope of joining a large and powerful "old boys club" that has created many millionaires in a relatively short period of time.
Being an ass here is a good way to be politely turned away without ever knowing why: "Sorry, not YC material." Because they pick which applications to approve and fund primarily based on the people, not the idea.
That's not a secret. They talk about it incessantly. Anyone who doesn't know just hasn't paid attention to the huge volumes of info they put out about their application process.
> your comments here were used to help them evaluate your application [...] Lots of latecomers seem oblivious to that function and think it's just a silly discussion forum.
I see, it [apparently] may still have serious implications. I still consider a serious discussion to be one where you can be right and I can be wrong - politely. It is then up to you to enlighten. Next round you get to be wrong and ill be there to point it out.
> I initially downvoted this. I've reversed that and decided to reply.
The exception not the rule. Normally I don't reply if I disagree and you downvote.
Now that I think about it the downvotes should make an interesting data-set to judge the founders by.
I still consider a serious discussion to be one where you can be right and I can be wrong - politely. It is then up to you to enlighten. Next round you get to be wrong and ill be there to point it out.
That still goes on here. It just is a smaller percentage of the discussion than it was when I originally joined in 2009. It's less obvious, but still possible to find that here.
There are more people here who don't participate that way, so you need to be a bit more careful about whom you try to engage that way to avoid having it go pointlessly sideways.
It's harder to stick your neck out about such things than it used to be and I don't know how to remedy that. It used to be much more possible to have a vigorous debate and have both sides remain civil in a way I have never seen anywhere else.
I see what you mean, but I think the “fading” is meant to systematically steer downvotes away from meaning plain disagreement. Whether it succeeds is another issue.
The fading indicates that what an HN downvote means is “I think people shouldn’t see this/this shouldn’t be part of the thread”. Whether it’s bc the post is off topic, flame bait, trolling, just plain boneheaded, etc., is kind of beside the point, although ideally it isn’t simply disagreement.
But that means replying to a post you downvote makes no sense. Why further a conversation you’re trying to bury?
Also, if an opinion is so unpopular it gets downvoted into oblivion, maybe a forum based on votes just isn’t the right venue for it. Start a blog.
It's more about the opinion relative to the overall context of the thread. As an example, if you try to defend or contextualise Facebook (the company's) actions in a thread about how much they suck, you'll get downvoted.
The same opinion in a different thread will probably just be ignored, because people self-select into threads based on what they care about, and the FB dislikers won't be so concentrated.
Nastiness and "can't you just" statements tend to get downvoted regardless of context though.
I have come to see this "fading" as highlighting. Here as well as in the world at large. To be fair, most of the time the downvoted comment here is trash in one way or another, but sometimes it's gold. Often times it's neither and should be left alone.
I've long held that you should have to reply to the comment when downvoting. Even if it's just a "no", that's better than the ability to hide a comment you don't agree with
The problem is that extremely low-quality comments (e.g. anything from "agree" and off-topic memes to irrelevant political sledging to the kind of thing that will get the user banned when a moderator sees it) are the majority of downvoted comments. Requiring a reply would give them long chains of unnecessary comments until they hit the threshold to be hidden.
That's the horse of twenty-somethings, and their "older" cohort, who think being a jerk is funny. I've definitely done that way too much here at times, oops.
Still, it falls on the creators and maintainers of HN to do something about it.
I'd be interested to read any discussion in suport of down votes from the crew who run the site.
