Tell HN: Voting on HN Fails Silently

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30316645

by axiosgunnar • 4 years ago

112 51 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you upvote or downvote a post on Hackernews, and it failed (e.g. because you have hit the 1-request-per-second limit), there is no error, and the vote silently fails.

Only if you refresh the page will you see that your vote actually didn't go through.

fsflover• 4 years ago

I can confirm. For this reason I'm constantly refreshing the page if I think my vote is important.

samwillis• 4 years ago

On mobile so can’t check but from memory there is very simplistic JavaScript on the pages and the vote buttons are just links (maybe form Post buttons) that return a http 204 (no content) response that effectively stops the browser from doing anything. The vote counts is just a preemptive ui update with no error checking.

It’s always been this way.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/204

colejohnson662• 4 years ago

Yep. They're simply <a> tags. The code inside `onclick` is very primitive:

    if (u.pathname == '/vote') {
      vote(p.get('id'), p.get('how'), p.get('auth'), p.get('goto'));
    }

`vote` just sees if it's an up or a down, set's the unvote link's `innerHTML`, then, curiously, uses an `Image` object to make the request:

    new Image().src = vurl(id, how, auth, _goto);

The code is only 152 lines and is very easy to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js

zarzavat2• 4 years ago

The Image makes sense as a way to make HTTP requests before XMLHttpRequest was widely supported.

version_five5• 4 years ago

Related, my account is shadow-blocked from up/down voting posts, and I think from flag/vouch as well. I think there was a period where I was too aggressive in moderation and it must have triggered something.

I can test this by checking a poster's karma before and after voting - I used to be able to see the increment/decrement and now I can't.

I can still upvote stories.

shock2• 4 years ago

Same in my case. At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship. It broke the illusion I had of HN being something special and I'm glad it did. Better spend that energy elsewhere.

throwawaysea3• 4 years ago

At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship.

This is how I feel right now, since there doesn’t seem to be a good way to openly debate the policies (or dark patterns like shadow bans) once you become subject to actions taken under those policies. All you can do is appeal to the moderators by email. It’s something, but a private conversation isn’t the same as a community debate. And a community debate isn’t possible once you are silenced. I’m not sure what the right solution is.

In my case, someone called me a nitwit and my response to them was deemed engaging in a flamewar even though I was mostly just clarifying my earlier comment/stance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599). And then upon further investigation from the moderator, I apparently didn’t have the right mix of topics I post on and was deemed to be engaging in ideological battle. It seems arbitrary to me because here are the topics I see in my recent comments: Canada protest, climate change, Neil Young, biometric identity verification, a tool to contact representatives, the Olympics, MacBook Pros, Google Slides, GoFundMe (I had many comments on this one admittedly), search engine results, Delta airline policy, compensation trends, cars, Microsoft Teams, mathematics, Roku spyware, and rent increases.

So what is a well meaning user to do if they want to just engage on the stories most meaningful to them? Is it really a bad thing to post on topics that are controversial rather than straightforward? On the other hand, I am not sure what other community is better than HN, even if I dislike censorship. So maybe they’re doing something right and I’m on the wrong side of it after all.

version_five5• 4 years ago

There is a shadow banned sibling post to this, which given the subject would be worth including. I did vouch but I don't think my votes count as I explained. If you turn on showdead in your settings, you can see the post and vouch for it

cmeacham98• 4 years ago

I, for one, hope that HN never becomes this unmoderated hellscape many people seem to want it to be.

HN has had moderators from day one. If you want a censorship-free forum those do exist - there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums, and that isn't a coincidence.

eternalban• 4 years ago

Agreed - my last post. I am so livid learning that this is how HN works. And there is -no excuse- for this so called "dark pattern". Want to take away certain features, well just disable arrows for that user.

And this also reminds of the completely opaque privacy position of this forum. Who are these 3rd parties, and what precisely do they get from YCombinator?

- Ciao and thanks for the fish!

haswell• 4 years ago

For what it’s worth, this could also be a scaling thing, with upvotes taking longer to be processed in some queue somewhere.

version_five5• 4 years ago

Yes I considered this, and I can't be sure without some "official" information. But I've played with it enough that I've convinced myself of it. I could create another account to compare, but it's not important. Eventually I'll start fresh from a new account and I'll confirm then that there is a difference.

iqanq2• 4 years ago

You did not trigger anything, they take your privileges manually. But I don't know if it's permanent.

krapp• 4 years ago

AFAIK mod actions are always permanent unless you notice (they won't always tell you, and sometimes when they do, it's in a comment days or weeks back that you probably won't notice unless you manually review your entire comment history on a regular basis) and contact the mods and apologize, or the mods just happen to change their mind.

version_five5• 4 years ago

How do you know this? There must be the threat of bots that automatically mod, for example, or people that just up or down mod every comment for vandalism or to see what happens. I assume there would be some automatic safeguards against this built in

FridayoLeary2• 4 years ago

I just tested it now and i had no affect on your karma. I suspect it's only half- blocked (i.e sometimes works, sometimes doesn't) but i'm a little bit miffed, what with my high karma.

commoner• 4 years ago

I can confirm that I've upvoted your comment and did not see a change to your karma. However, when I upvote a submission and refresh the page, I always see the submission's points go up. I can't tell whether my comment votes are being ignored (or diminished or delayed) by HN, or if this is just the result of how HN tabulates points and karma. (I don't think comment/submission upvotes from users with less than 10 or 11 karma count at all.[1] This is also how I remembered it when I first joined HN.)

Reddit uses a formula to transform upvotes into karma that awards less karma for each additional upvote.[2] I suspect that HN uses 1 or more similar formulas to transform (i) comment upvotes -> comment points, and/or (ii) comment points -> user karma. Since points and karma are only displayed as integers, the formula would sometimes prevent your comment upvote from visibly affecting the user's karma.

I don't think HN uses a formula to convert submission upvotes -> submission points, though I could be wrong. On the other hand, we can easily verify that the submission points -> user karma transformation is not 1:1 by looking at a throwaway account that has only made 1 submission and no comments.[3]

If dang could clarify what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439396

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/e9c88r/upda...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=throwawaygoaway (300 karma) / https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=throwawaygoaway (911 points)

version_five5• 4 years ago

Interesting. Maybe there is a delay then? I know that when a comment I make is up or down voted, it accrues directly to my total karma.

junon• 4 years ago

Uh... nobody here is going to mention caching? This is clearly the effect of caching. Why would everyone here be shadow banned?

Wiseacre• 4 years ago

How do you know cached pages are being fetched? One would be shadowbanned for the same as reasons one is banned. Every large social media company does shadow banning.

sillysaurusx3• 4 years ago

It’s not. My other accounts have been blocked this way too. It’s also in the original codebase.

shock2• 4 years ago

I think I know when it happened to me: I vouched for a comment that I thought made a good logical argument, by a user who is perpetually shadow-banned (redis-something). That's a good lesson to not vouch anymore.

ungamedplayer2• 4 years ago

I have learned from past experience that moderation and COC end up being used to push an agenda. If you don't agree with whatever that agenda is, leave the site quickly and find another community worth your time. Don't spend time on someone else's spilled milk.

MerelyMortal• 4 years ago

My votes fail silently if I click on whatever link to read the article to see if it's any good or not, then click the browser back button to go back to HN to then upvote. After I vote, I always manually refresh the page, and indeed it didn't go through so then I have to click the upvote button again.

bmarquez• 4 years ago

I can confirm this too. Sometimes I'd quickly scan through comments, then go back to the top and upvote good ones (usually faster than 1/second). Since a child comment sometimes gives greater clarity to a parent comment. When refreshing and noticing votes weren't applied, I thought I triggered some shadowbanning mechanism.

pingsl• 4 years ago

Think about this, there is no notification system on HN. If you got any errors, you'd better send an email to the moderators here.

I did this when I first created the ID, the moderator helped me out. Or my ID will be shadow blocked. :D

TheRealNGenius2• 4 years ago

Can confirm, I'm not able to downvote, so censorship is real

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

You don't have enough karma. I think downvote is 500?

david_allison• 4 years ago

You need 501 karma: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

TheRealNGenius2• 4 years ago

whoever downvoted me is proving my point

caseymarquis• 4 years ago

Sounds like a feature.

Tell HN: Voting on HN Fails Silently

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