Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
HN Rant: Come and Go Voting
26 points by DanielBMarkham on March 6, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
So I log into HN and read the wonderful essay about healthcare and end-of-life costs. I was going to comment and vote on some of the comments, but I can't downvote.

Must have ticked somebody off, I guess.

I upvote a few of the better comments and move on.

Then I go and read about the new Chrome HN extensions. Nice job!

Now I can upvote and downvote.

I go back to the healthcare essay. Still no ability to downvote.

Does anybody here besides the coders of HN want to support the idea that the user can have abilities come and go on a whim and this is going to make for a enjoyable user experience? HN keeps getting more and more nuanced about who can do what when, and, quite frankly, all it seems to do is intermittently piss me off. If it's making things better I can't see it. And even if it is, you don't screw around with system behavior without notifying your user of what's going on.

I'm sure somebody will point me to some thread somewhere or another where pg explains that for condition X we're not allowing users to downvote. And also frankly, that's part of the problem. Understanding the system shouldn't require extreme devotion to every little thing said about it over a period of years on every thread related to HN. A system should be simple to use and understand. HN is still simple to use, but beats me if I can understand it any more.

So am I out here all alone in this feeling, or is it bothering other HNer's as well?




The entire source of news.arc is open - eg http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

Lines 1095-1098 control whether the downvote arrow is displayed or not.

So, to answer your question, yes, it bothers me that there's very rarely a clear enumeration or description of features.

On the other hand, it's been a wonderful opportunity to learn Arc.

(I'm only half joking - Arc was actually my first stab at functional programming and I probably wouldn't have tried it if pg had bothered to document HN's features)


downvoting is disabled for users comments after a while so people cant go and downvote all of a users old comments, as comment threads get deeper it takes longer for replies to be enabled to disuade arguments.

Since hacker news has managed to keep a relatively similiar experience despite a large increase in users, its pretty clear(subjectively) that some of these measures are working.

You should probably worry about it less.


This is the user. This is the user telling you the application pisses them off at random intervals and for unknown reasons.

Worry is not part of this conversation.


You're not the user, you're a user. You should first verify if other users are pissed of as well. (i'm not for instance)


if you stopped worrying about exactly how and why these features get enabled / disabled and accept that pg will and can experiment with features and isnt particularly worried about documenting them, then you will no longer be pissed off.

the way hn is developed is very open, and I dont imagine becoming the most easily understandable news site on the web is a particular goal for this place, so speaking in truisms like "dont modify users behaviour" doesnt mean much.


Once again, you're taking this conversation somewhere that I'm not going.

Nobody is saying pg can't experiment. Nobody is saying that the site isn't great, open, wonderful, etc.

Just pointing out that inconsistencies in experience -- even to people who like the app and enjoy the benefits -- piss off the users.

You can care about that or not. Fair game. You can "worry" about how the system works or not. Still ticks people off, and people are still going to point it out.

Telling the user that their feedback isn't as important as the overall purpose of the site may also be true, but that's also not the point.


No downvote arrows appear for me either, so it's not just you. They appear on other items, so it's not just me. The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature. It appears to be just that item.

As with other measures PG takes to try to prevent abuse of the system, and occasional abuse by people of people on the system, it may be that there is a mechanism by which he can disable downvoting on a given item.

In this instance it wouldn't surprise me. Completely guessing here, but healthcare is one of the topics that can provoke intense reactions, and people can get very heated, and downvoting can pile on, even when it's not really justified. Replies and comments can get unpleasant, so disabling downvoting may be a defence.

I'm not defending the way the system works, and I occasionally wish it were more open, but this site is still working reasonably well despite its popularity. I think that is mostly because of the occasional draconian and obscure measure.

I've given up worrying about wrinkles like this. They still annoy me on occasion, but I shrug and move on. The site continues to decline, but less quickly than others I've been on. I accept that I won't know everything about the way the site works, and part of the reason for that enables it to continue to do so.


"The item is only a day old, so it's not the "stale-out" feature."

I was pretty sure that downvoting is disabled as soon as a comment is one day old. Check out the "bestcomments" list and you'll see that you can only downvote the ones that are less than 24 hours old.

I can currently downvote several of the <1-day comments on the healthcare story. But maybe I'm seeing something different from you, or it has changed since this post was made.


It appears that you're right - good call. I thought it was 2 days, perhaps that's been reduced of late.


I was thinking along similar lines -- that somehow, somebody, somewhere had flagged the article because of the subject matter.

I'm a hacker. I like knowing how things work. If I have a little up and down arrow, I want to click it and watch the little number get bigger or smaller. It's not too much to ask, is it?

It's already impossible to determine how the system sorts -- but I think that bit of obscurity works for everybody. Having buttons appear or disappear randomly sounds like a way to annoy people.

There's also the issue of the buttons not actually changing the score -- another pain for some users.


Nothing has changed for a long time, either with HN or your account.


When can we downvote a comment? Remembering this feels like remembering perl syntax.


To finish the story, I was pissed for about ten minutes. Not a huge deal but perhaps not something people would want in an app either.

I thought it was important to write down what I was thinking at the time, not only in terms of HN but also for other people writing web apps.

Interesting that it got the attention that it did.


Relax. The central thing about HN is not the ability to up- and downvote, the central thing are the submissions and their comments. Be annoyed if HN randomly disables your ability to submit or comment, don’t be annoyed if you randomly can’t vote.

Voting helps to create a useful structure for the content but it's not why I’m here. It’s not what’s fun about HN.


I think the Wikipedia folks are generally right that voting/polling has a poisonous effect on conversation--people get too wrapped up in voting up/down and score. The most important part is the article content and the substantive conversations that they create.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Polls_are_evil


Voting is perhaps the most important thing, because it is voting that determines what people see. If voting is horribly flawed, then the right submissions won't get seen.


The recent thing about average voting score bothers me a bit. It seems to make commenting a risky business, and overall comments seem to not be welcome.

In fact, thinking about it just gave me an idea for a feature request: I might be better off if commenting was disabled for me for good. Overall I am mostly embarrassed that I wrote so many comments, and commenting wastes a lot more time than just voting.

I like to read people's comments on subjects, often there is useful additional information. Not sure what I actually gain from commenting myself, other than the "someone is wrong on the internet" effect.


I think your average karma is only visible to yourself. Or at least, I can only see mine.


Sorry to interrupt, but can you give me the link to the healthcare essay? I can't seem to find it.

Thanks in advance (and please don't shoot me -- I tried to find it, really).


Seems like it was on page 3 or 4.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1168065

or the direct link:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avRF...


Thank you!


I'm confused why downvoting for comments matters. Or upvoting. It doesn't bury comments. It doesn't really change the conversation that happened. It doesn't really do much but give a bigger useless number to people you agree with and a smaller useless number to people you disagree with.

News.ycomb could get rid of all comment moderation and it would probably be at least as good. Maybe better. Suddenly what "Karma" means would become clear. It isn't some mixture of popularity poll and story contributor, it's just a measure of how popular the stories you've contributed would be.

My karma is over 2000, and it's almost all from comments. Maybe 100 of this karma is from stories. I consider it to be very artificial and meaningless, because most comment voting is basically "I AGREE!" or "I DISAGREE!". I wish I had karma from contributing stories that people wanted to share.


There's a lot in what you say about comment voting. It used to be useful, or at least harmless. But now HN has grown so large it has become an injection of dumbness (and often ill will) into the conversation. I plan to try to some design changes to deal with this when I have time, maybe in April. I'll probably get rid of the display of point numbers on comments.


I find comment voting tremendously useful:

- It gives me direct feedback on whether other users found my comments insightful. I find it encouraging when I put some effort into explaining something and I get a bunch of points for it. I'd much rather get upvotes than a bunch of meaningless replies like "I agree", "good post", or "x2". (Getting substantive replies is even better, but not always warranted.)

- It gives me an easy way to find comments others have found insightful, even if they're nested deep in a thread where they don't get auto-sorted to the top. I was actually planning to ask for highlighting on highly-rated comments -- something unobtrusive like bolding the number.

- It gives me a way to reward/encourage those whose comments I found educational or insightful.

Downvoting can also provide an injection of dumbness or ill will into a conversation. But I would take the dumbness of downvotes over the dumbness of people saying "you're an idiot" any day.


And with voting, I don't have to say "I second this" to everything I strongly agree with or that I find very insightful.

But in case PG doesn't look at scores, I second this.


You don't have to say "I second this," even without voting.

If someone says something you like and agree with: congratulations, you have found a kindred soul, enjoy this moment of warmth in an otherwise dark and unforgiving universe. If someone says something you dislike or disagree with: if it's not worth posting a rationally and carefully written rebuttal to the post in question then it's probably not worth your time or effort, the internet is full of people who are wrong.

In general that tiny number next to posts is more an indication of things other than the quality of the ideas expressed in posts. In fact, I'd say they're not well coupled. Usually, it's more correlated with political alignments or writing quality.


Well, the idea of HN's scoring is to bring the most insightful comments to the top while burying the noise, correct? I think it generally does a decent job of this, though the scoring seems to be somewhat noisier than it used to be.


Well, the idea of HN's scoring is to bring the most insightful comments to the top while burying the noise, correct? I think it generally does a decent job of this, though the scoring seems to be somewhat noisier than it used to be.


How about separating the voting from the sorting?

People like voting. They like scoring systems. As much as folks might say "who cares?" study after study has shown that if you provide a numerical feedback/points system, it's going to motivate users. So I'd leave the points in.

There is a second question: what should be at the top of my display? This doesn't have to be tied so closely to the scoring. It's probably much more related to the type of material as well as the overall voting activity.

I think you've tightly linked these two concepts, voting and sorting -- lots of other boards do the same thing -- and the linkage is what is causing the mismatch.

With the app I'm currently writing, sorting happens based on a Bayesian system of matching up tags from what you've liked in the past. The tag-for-sort seems to work a lot better than the vote-for-sort.


Separate 'valuable/not-valuable' voting from 'agree/disagree'. It is the disagree-downvotes, which also carry with them a slight sting of censure because they share the same gesture, that inject the bad feelings.


I think that comment voting is nice, especially if people actually vote on quality, rather than agreement. However if its becoming a problem it may be better to only use comment votes for ranking comments and not have them count toward karma.


On a slightly different but related topic: I've never been able to downvote anything, neither posts nor comments. Why is that?


there are karma threshholds on doing somethings, like downvoting, flagging, and changing your top colour


For downvoting, I think it's 200.


If you want to "come and go at a whim", you are not a part of the HN community.......simply a surfer. In that case, why does upvote/downvote/karma matter? I believe HN functionality currently disables the "hit and run" attitude.


You misunderstood the OP. He isn't saying that he wants to come and go at a whim; he's saying that what he's allowed to do by the HN software comes and goes at a whim. (In this case, presumably Paul Graham's whim.)


If you click on the user's name and look at his profile you'll see that he's a long-standing and frequent contributor.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: