I'm back on HN now because I caught this LLM bug and am obsessed with building/open-sourcing stuff with them, and am having fun contributing to the big repos. I have questions for some and answers for others and ultimately I'm netting mountains of daily knowledge and inspiration from this site for which I'm grateful. A lot of the people here have a gift for wording things to make them understandable such that it makes HN like paid-quality content but for free. Yet there are others, who often have extremely high scores/karmas/whatever who are clearly only here to sh*t on people and seem personally smart - and they're apparently being rewarded for it with the point system here.
So the prompt is simple - why do you downvote?
What's worthy of it, beyond spam? What do you get out of it? Does HN benefit from downvotes in a way that flagging does not and cannot address? If you don't downvote, answer why you upvote - I'm really curious about the reward system here, what it means and is all about. Why people like and dislike certain kinds of content here.
When a comment is hostile in a way that discourages discussion, or there is a long argument chain consisting of low-content/ad hominem/childish back-and-forth.
When jokes are not funny. I upvote when they make me laugh, but HN is known to be humorless because of the downvoting of anyone making "unserious" comments.
When someone is repeating or spreading what seems to me to be propaganda or political talking points, especially when those haven't already been brought up previously and don't have special relevance to the discussion.
Downvoting can serve as a weak signal of popular consensus (weak because the comment ranking algorithm seems to take author's total karma, time since posting, and relative age of the comment into account as well).
They help me as an author of comments to recognize when I have been too harsh, impolite, uncharitable, poorly worded, etc, but it's not always clear why some comments get downvoted. Sometimes there seems to be brigading or botting, but I obviously don't have the ability to know or definitively say whether it actually happens or not.
As a user I don't feel downvoting benefits me much other than providing an invisible outlet for expressing dissatisfaction, especially when I wouldn't be able publicly express it in a polite manner. I find it very annoying to see greyed-out comments and having to highlight them to read, and I hate the sorting of comments by score rather than date.
Shills I downvote, and flag if they're blatant.
Zealots (people who are here to spread propaganda, rather than have a conversation) I often downvote. They may have a point (the first time they post), but they Just. Won't. Stop. They won't listen, either, or respond in good faith to peoples' arguments.
Bad faith replies I downvote, and flag if it's blatant.
And when I think about that list, it sounds a lot like the HN guidelines. I wasn't deliberately modeling my voting on the guidelines, but I think there's a basis in the guidelines for my approach.
I dont have the ability to downvote. I'm not sure I would if I did, who cares about imaginary points.
I wish I could at least edit my posts and improve upon my grammar and spelling or make my posts clearer. Though it does seem my comments get deleted sometimes.
I'm autistic, so I'm overly blunt or whatever and I tend to draw hate.
>I find places with moderators and/or downvote schemes (HN, Reddit, Discord) extremely difficult to understand and survive long-term.
Oh yes, you'll find there's significant brigading on HN worse then Reddit. You'll be + score for hours and then all of a sudden -10 in under a minute. You'll find people will go to your previous posts and downvote everything they can. Your karma score will drop suddenly.
I'm -4 on this post for example? Hardly worth downvoting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075630
Though yes, I seemed to have hit a bees nest on my TSMC comments and so people are downvoting everything of mine.
> It's in some ways worse than other forms of embarrassment because it's your very intelligence and ideas etched in stone as "bad take" forever to the public.
We have a problem online that is probably best described by echo chambers but it's a bit wider then that subject.
People are accustomed to never hearing any viewpoint but their own. Confirmation bias 100%, blocked! filtered! So when they see a comment that doesnt fully align with them... they don't stop at downvoting that one comment, they have to downvote all your recent comments.
>Does HN benefit from downvotes in a way that flagging does not and cannot address? If you don't downvote, answer why you upvote - I'm really curious about the reward system here, what it means and is all about. Why people like and dislike certain kinds of content here.
I also never upvote. Not sure how you do that, I assume I'm restricted from doing so? I was told long while back that since I get downvoted so much on so many of my comments that I'm tagged and soft shadow banned because of my low quality content.
Paraphrasing…
A writer should apologize for writing a long missive when they should have taken the time to write a shorter one.
With writing, the ultimate sophistication is simplicity that is nothing else can be edited away without changing the original meaning.
This usage is subtly different from the more common meaning of upvoting/downvoting elsewhere, which is "I like/dislike this," and the HN community goes to great lengths to try and remind people of that difference (with obviously less than perfect success - it's very ingrained!)
Personally I try to only downvote when I think a comment is of low conversational quality, not just because I disagree with it. That usually involves me believing that the poster is posting in bad faith, is being too emotional to convincingly convey a point (when relevant), is flat out factually incorrect, etc. I will also usually throw in a downvote on things I've flagged (spam) just to get the comment a little more out of the way before it gets completely killed by flags.
As to a deeper "why," I think the reason is the same as participating in any other form of communal conversation. We're all just trying to convey valuable information to each other, whether that's by authoring text or influencing rankings of existing texts. Whatever drives you to write and comment is also what should drive you to vote.
Posts that look like they have put some thought or effort into whatever their conclusions are or the discussion that they're making I will tend to either not vote or upvote regardless of whether I agree with the post overall or not. When someone is taking the time to make a salient point I believe that needs to be recognized for consideration.
The voting system has its pros and cons but if you have a reasonably mature audience it should ultimately balance out. Just because I find no value or I believe that is a poorly worded or thought out post others may disagree and so my one down vote means nothing.
I do get the general impression that some people up or down vote purely based upon their agreement or disagreement with the content of the message. Not only as it relates to some of the things that I posted but I have also seen other comments be downvoted to the point you can't hardly see them but the person seem to be making a genuine thought out argument in their post. It was unpopular argument but it appeared to me well thought out. Ultimately I don't think anyone person can answer why people like or dislike a certain types of content. I think when you take broad groups of people you can make some generalizations that certain groups of people based upon their backgrounds and educational levels dislike having their worldview challenged and react badly to it. Other people based on their backgrounds and education levels and so forth are more open-minded about having their worldview challenged even if it doesn't change their mind. They are open to the Socratic method of learning and defending what your beliefs and understandings are. I find most people on hacker News fall into that second category they seem to genuinely want to have a discussion around its merits even if they don't change their mind. They generally seem to respect that other people may have a different belief in certain areas and that's not necessarily wrong it's just different.