Ask HN: Do you get addicted to your HN votes like normal people do to Instagram?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24733859

by jonplackett • 6 years ago

26 35 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I just realised I totally do.

dinkleberg• 6 years ago

No, though it makes sense that people would. It’s validation of like minded folks. It feels good to make a point and have others agree with it. It’s human nature.

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

I think that's a pretty good explanation of it. It's a human nature that fb/snapchat etc have just turned up the volume on.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

I kind of do, and then I decide that that's ridiculous, and then I kind of don't... for a while.

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

Likewise. But I bet that’s exactly how Instagram-addicted teens think too!

xodice• 6 years ago

Not really. Too much emotional down-voting for me to care or find it of any useful information.

Obviously just my personal opinion.

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

Yes, but then I remind myself that (while me and other readers have overlap in tech interests), we have different socioeconomic backgrounds and that shapes how we view the world, and the implications that has for tech. But it also depends on the type of posts I'm participating in. The less emotional the subject, the better it tends to be here.

Someone1234• 6 years ago

The absolute votes? No. In fact most of my higher vote comments are lower in substance (because people won't read long/nuanced posts, they want short black & white answers).

But it does irk me slightly when someone will -1 a comment without an explanation/response. I don't mind an active counter-view (heck, I may learn I was wrong!), it is the silent dismissal I cannot stand (and often seems knee-jerky when you criticize a sacred cow company/product).

But like all complaints like this, I am a giant hypocrite and have downvoted comments without responding.

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

Not the absolute votes exactly. I guess I mean more of an addiction to checking to see if people have replied. To see if you got an up or down vote - I also hate unexplained downvotes! I just want to know what their alt opinion was!

pbronez2• 6 years ago

You have to check for replies aggressively or you can’t have a conversation, because the site doesn’t proactively notify you about responses.

Is there a service to get push notifications for HN responses?

Sebb767• 6 years ago

In fact most of my higher vote comments are lower in substance (because people won't read long/nuanced posts, they want short black & white answers).

Similarly to Reddit, hn karma seems to be a lot about timing. Getting in on a thread early and getting some quick votes yielded far more karma for me than anything else.

I wouldn't necessarily say that larger comments are overly ignored (especially in the hn community); the time it takes to formulate and research them, combined with the delayed upvotes due to reading time, probably scews the average karma enough already.

d-1• 6 years ago

I actually don't care about the status/karma aspect of votes. Negative votes would be more constructive if reasons were given for it (aka feedback). Positive votes, what is their use even? A "seal of quality" granted by HN users or simply a measure of how interesting a post appears to the HN crowd? It's probably the latter. Hard to make judgments about the general quality of the post by vote counts alone. At least HN is not like the YouTube trending section where a lot of clickbaity videos appear. You will encounter titles like:

"I ate nothing for 1 hour and this is what happened" "I bought $200,000 worth of bananas and now I'm broke (and sad, lost in an island full of monkeys barely scraping by)" "You won't believe this happened" "Do this one trick (and waste 10 min of your time)" "I almost got killed"

I'm sure you even encountered fancier ones, but these are what came off the top of my head.

How to get people hooked on our site long enough and make them watch ads? That's YouTube for you. HN is quite different and thank goodness it is.

valand2• 6 years ago

I can relate about the silent downvote, it enables irresponsible cancellation.

I wish HN introduced a new method to disagree. A counter-argument type comment, which when upvoted, will downvote the parent comments.

millzlane• 6 years ago

No. I'm not a serial poster. But I mainly come for the interesting posts about technology and the discussions that surround them.

afwe• 6 years ago

On HN I get addicted to my downvotes. And the flags... oh god, the flags.

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

What do you mean by the flags?

agustif• 6 years ago

When you get enough negatives on a comment / post. It gets unranked/greyed out, and / or disappears from most other user views.

You can check by going to your profile and clicking comments.

lapinot• 6 years ago

I do too, so i just zapped the vote counter using ublock so i can't glance at it. I'm also regularly hit by the "someone's wrong on the internet" syndrome, so i've decided to browse hn logged-out, unless i really want to answer. Logging-in is actually quick, but it makes me think about what i'm doing. That way i stop myself from intervening in any opinion rage.

ianmobbs• 6 years ago

What are "normal people" are addicted to on Instagram, likes? I only follow people I consider actual friends and I can't think of any people I follow that would be like that, but maybe that just has to do with who I hang out with?

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

I think it's just that pull to check back all the time that I'm talking about. It's something social media companies engineer for - the more times you check, the more ad you see. So it shouldn't be as strong on HN, but I still feel the pull to check if someone replied, or if anyone upvoted that comment or article I posted.

throwmeaway_pls• 6 years ago

It’s not worth optimizing for.

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

What do you mean by that exactly?

axaxs• 6 years ago

Not at all. This is a place I post my honest thoughts on things regardless of the points. Sometimes I'm downvoted, even ridiculed(perhaps fairly), and I take zero offense to any of it. Similarly, I get no 'high' off something that scores upvotes. I think HN does a pretty good job of helping this by not showing everyone's score, not notifying you someone replied to your post, not having reactions, etc.

WorldPeas• 6 years ago

Eh. I do like the upvotes, I get dopamine, but it's not the kind of dopamine that makes me want to spit out more posts and spend more time here, it's more like "oh nice, I helped that person"

qtrain• 6 years ago

Are the people that read Hacker News not normal? :thinking:

jonplackett7• 6 years ago

Not 100% ;)

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

Not significant. Used mostly to gauge folk's reactions, temper comments to not offend etc. Negative votes are just disagreement, not an attack, so I have no emotion investment.

Further, my comments that have gotten the largest uptick, are uniformely silly offhand comments of no merit. It's enough to teach me, they aren't meaningful.

hexbinencoded• 6 years ago

tldr: Give less f's, awesome will flow with fewer inhibitions, and stress will melt like an ice chip on a New York sidewalk during the summer solstice. Some things will fall flat because they seemed awesome only to you, but that's okay.

This isn't gram obviously, which I nuked because it wasn't serving a business or personal branding purpose for sometime, but I will slip back in for a vintage car restoration.

If someone cares about votes, they'll be a slave to them and:

- worry more what other people think of them that writing, doing, or creating

- they'll censor themselves about something they feel strongly about and regret it

- they'll do something incredibly stupid for attention and regret it, such as jumping on top of a moving freight train. Don't. Or get pulled over by 4 UFOs for doing a buck 40 (mph, that's 225 kph). Don't do that either. Or drop a cover over their motorcycle license plate and outrun the cops from a highway on city streets. Don't do that either. Or have insanely hot sex at work in the back stairwell just before the lunch rush. You get the idea. You don't need social media for the best things in life; some things are best not shared but lifecasting is cool too.

- Don't become a trained monkey performer unless it's a determined career path.

On HN, express yourself with reason and evidence, and let the chips fall where they may. On gram, it's different because it's about displaying moments, creations, and art publicly and let the critics do whatever the heck they're going to do; it's a museum or a show-and-tell where folks have probably had some champagne already and also cyberdisinhibitionism, so feedback needs some big ass grains of salt.

Meditate on being more like Peter in Office Space after hypnosis and be awesome. Votes are for other people. Take it only as feedback after the fact, not before. Risk being booed on-stage.

Peace, out

cottonseed• 6 years ago

You guys are getting upvotes?

kstenerud• 6 years ago

What I really want to know is:

1. Have I clearly gotten my ideas across? Am I reaching people?

2. Am I even right?

Fluctuations in votes helps answer #1, and responses help to answer #1 and #2

pbronez2• 6 years ago

This, plus:

3. Am I adding value to this community?

Which should show up as a decent overall score.

I don’t find HN karma addictive at all, just informative. I do get a bit Pavlovian refreshing looking for new stories, and when I notice I’m doing that I make a point of walking away and focusing on something else.

Fjolsvith• 6 years ago

I've grown to where I use the votes on my comments to gauge what people agree with. Sort of like an informal poll. It burns karma, though.

peruvian• 6 years ago

Don't care about the score but I often find myself opening HN even when I just closed it. I often block it via hosts, apps, or the built-in settings.

valand2• 6 years ago

What I feel is usually, "oh nice/no, what did get upvoted/downvoted though?"

The emotional reaction is stronger when the points upvoted/downvoted are close to my personal values are well taken.

Like when I comment about being critical and unbiased about anything, about constant improvements, and people upvotes, it is really satisfying. Vice versa, especially silent downvotes where you "cant see the enemy".

But when I talk about the trivial things, votes don't mean much.

Ask HN: Do you get addicted to your HN votes like normal people do to Instagram?

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