Hacker News, now with downvotes

http://jacquesmattheij.com/HackerNews,+now+with+downvotes

by swombat • 16 years ago

60 45 16 years ago

Quoting:

  > The downside of this being an obscure feature is that
  > knowledge of it could be abused by the less scrupulous
  > to push undesired articles off the homepage using a
  > series of flags.
  >
  > Another way to abuse this is by downvoting everything
  > except for the articles that you upvote

PG has stated elsewhere that he has an "indiscriminant flagger" detector, and that when it gets triggered, subsequent flags from that person don't get counted.

DanielStraight• 16 years ago

This is somewhat frustrating to me. I understand why it's there, but I hate having to be in fear of being tossed out when I'm genuinely trying to improve the site. I really think people who trip a detector should be notified of it so they can understand why. Failing to notify seems like a DRM-type move: basing a decision on preventing abuse rather than empowering honest users.

duck• 16 years ago

Yeah, that reminds me of the recent story on how most crosswalk buttons don't actually do anything.

joe_bleau3• 16 years ago

I tend to aggressively flag stories from new accounts, especially if they're obviously spam or political. Did not realize that I was setting myself up to be ignored. I guess the safe move is to no longer flag stories.

aw3c2• 16 years ago

Some angry moderator once ghosted my account. It was very bad because I could not even get any help on the site itself. In the end I had to directly mail pg.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Greater transparency in the UI would be welcome, but what I think would be the best solution is a "temperature meter." Think barrel temperature in some action games -- fire a lot all at once and you'll overheat; fire efficiently and you'll be able to fire whenever you need to. It could be displayed as simply as a numerical percentage in the top right.

The same system could even be applied to other user actions such as voting, replying, and story submission, to help emphasize quality over quantity.

tnorthcutt• 16 years ago

I wonder if that's a permanent change? If someone indiscriminantly flags for a while, but then slows down, will their flags begin to be counted again?

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

Doing that opens the system to being gamed easily. If the penalty is temporary, then a large number of logins can be acquired and scripted to enable down-voting cabals. If the penalty is permanent, then new accounts with sufficient karma would need to be "farmed."

jcr• 16 years ago

I have accidentally tripped the "indiscriminant flagger" detector, so I can tell you about what happens.

I can't type well or much these days, so I rarely post and spend nearly all of my time reading. When PG was kind enough to reset the password on my account, I ended up with an ancient account but no karma due to simply not using the account much (never logging in).

Given my situation, I thought I would try to help out the quality of the site by both up-voting "good" stuff and flagging obvious spam. In trying to be useful and helpful, I obviously tripped the "indiscriminate flagging" detector on the first day of flagging spam. It only took a flagging a few (under five) articles, and the "flag" link disappeared. I can no longer flag anything.

I believe the detection code incorporates karma of the account due to the low threshold I've seen compared to the experiences stated by other high-karma people (jacquesm, yourself, ...).

It would be better if the abusive flagging detection code took into consideration whether or not the post/article was eventually deleted or marked dead, then reverse the "damage" to become a "benefit" to the person who flagged something (i.e. you actually helped in identifying something inappropriate).

wccrawford• 16 years ago

I flag any article that I think doesn't belong on here. (i.e. It doesn't fit the theme of the site.) I wonder how close I am to the 'indisciminant flagger' line? Or if I've crossed it?

IgorPartola2• 16 years ago

I use it only for spam articles. I don't believe I am able to judge what fits the "theme" of the site. As I see it, if you hang out here, you are a "hacker" by some definition. Stories are submitted, and if you find it interesting, you upvote them. If nobody upvotes a story, it is uninteresting to everyone and it dies out in about an hour (how long it takes to leave the first page of the New section). If it is uninteresting to me, I would be inclined to flag it since I don't think it fits my definition of the site, but I restrain myself since other upvotes mean that it is interesting to some (possibly quite large) subset of this community. I can't decide that ahead of time. All I can do is not deprive others of the opportunity to upvote a story before it gets killed.

robg2• 16 years ago

This is the Hacker News Ideal. Your urge perfectly describes the tension of "interesting to me". Now that I think about it, the upvote/flag seems like a simple, elegant social cognition hack. In order to flag you have to go to the comments page. Positivity is made slightly easier and negativity can always be undone even while it take an extra click.

What's the equivalent for comments?

nervechannel2• 16 years ago

For a community-driven site without a clear statement of intent, 'having a number of upvotes' == 'fits the theme of the site', surely?

Personally I think articles about how to make more money are nothing to do with the hacker mindset, but I wouldn't even consider flagging them if other people found them interesting enough to upvote.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

The site started out as 'start-up news'.

pmjordan• 16 years ago

The guidelines are pretty clear about this, really:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.

Startup-related stuff is therefore explicitly on topic. Making more money seems on topic re: startups.

robg2• 16 years ago

Can you define "hacker mindset" for me?

zbruhnke2• 16 years ago

HN does have downvotes actually. Once you hit 500 Karma you get access to downvoting

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

Articles, not comments.

arethuza• 16 years ago

That's downvoting on comments - not on articles.

zbruhnke2• 16 years ago

Ahh, you are correct. Sorry about the confusion there

Zak• 16 years ago

That's only for articles. The author, jacquesm has over 45,000 karma and would probably have mentioned here it if he had a down arrow for articles.

rorymarinich• 16 years ago

Unless he's hiding his powers so that we don't get jealous and overthrow him.

yosho• 16 years ago

anyone know why they raised the downvote option from 200 karma to 500?

I miss my down arrow :(

ollysb• 16 years ago

Now you're just showing off ;)

borism• 16 years ago

because they can

hugh33• 16 years ago

Inflation. More users means karma is easier to get. And there's enough folks out there with 500+ karma to ensure that any deserving comment can get downvoted to the floor.

da5e• 16 years ago

I had this delusion that if I flagged an article, someone would come read it and kill it if it was off topic. I like knowing that it is merely a downvote. PG's invisible hand is always working.

gojomo• 16 years ago

Because the word 'flag' has a strong connotation of 'calling to the attention of others/administrators', it was always my assumption/hope that flagging things meant some human-with-authority was likely to see it, and be able to take conscious action using their privileges.

So, I 'flag' articles that are perfectly on-topic, but have abusive against-the-guidelines headlines. (I may have even, at one point or another, upvoted and flagged an article at the same time.)

I have some concern that my strategy, if misinterpreted by the algorithms, could result in my flags being discarded as signal-free.

The rise of automated moderation is giving a different meaning to the word 'flag' -- indeed closer to 'downvote'.

dminor• 16 years ago

Wasn't this already known? I seem to remember a discussion months ago about why some highly upvoted articles disappear faster off the front page than others.

jdoliner• 16 years ago

I find this to be quite acceptable. Reddit is constantly facing the question of what exactly a downvote is. (There was even a very funny comic on the topic recently.) Everyone sees downvote as the opposite of upvote, which is understandable, but this gets problematic because people don't like being disagreed with so polarizing arguments tend to end up with net 0 upvotes. Just by changing the name from downvote to flag it makes it enforces a different user behavior.

Hacker News, now with downvotes

Related Stories