Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments indiscriminately?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438440

by pondekawna • 11 years ago

23 28 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have noticed comments on another HN account being consistently downvoted, once or twice, about 24 hours after they were posted, regardless of the comments' content and the subject matter of the OP. This has been going on for several months.

There may be a number of reasons someone or some group of people would employ this tactic, but is it "fair game" with respect to HN's policies and the sensibilities of HN's readership?

benologist2• 11 years ago

You can always write dang at hn@ycombinator.com when you spot stuff that might be circumventing the rules.

walterbell• 11 years ago

What remedies would HN have for indiscriminate downvoting?

plorkyeran• 11 years ago

Removing the person's ability to downvote if they're clearly severely misusing it.

buro9• 11 years ago

A number of things could be done, though the long-term effect of them might not be desired.

Perhaps the threshold whereby you are permitted to downvote should be raised.

Perhaps HN could allow karma to be 'spent' as downvotes. The act of downvoting would be something that costs you, and unless you're a top 100 commenter that's probably going to make you hesitate.

HN probably already check for and punish the malicious downvoter, i.e. so-and-so said something that I didn't like and so I'm going to go through their historical comments downvoting all. That stuff is really easy to detect.

HN could probably check whether downvotes given by a person occur on a few topics, or for a few individuals. These are probably slightly angry downvotes, they could be reversed.

Ultimately though they'd hit a grey area. There are obvious and easy things to deal with, and once those low hanging fruits are grabbed then everything else is nuanced, it has context and requires understanding to moderate fairly.

PeterWhittaker• 11 years ago

Eliminate downvoting. Replace it with "flag as abusive, reason required". Require the reason to be selected from a very short, concise list, e.g., "rascist, mysogynistic, homophobic, espouses violence, spam". Block userids that flag inappropriately.

pen2l• 11 years ago

What if it actually is dang/HN that's responsible for these downvotes? I think the downvoting is a new version of "rankbanning" mechanism. Users that are anti-immigration reform are rankbanned on HN (this means that no matter the number of votes on the post, their comments fall down in the page. Users like eli_gottlieb, larrys, etc. are rankbanned for these various reasons; some people detected this and called HN on it, and I think their response is to make a new system which auto-downvotes users... then it makes it seem like their comments are organically falling down the page, rather than being targeted by rankbans.)

xtrumanx• 11 years ago

Got a link to the call-out regarding the rankbanning? I've never heard of that happening.

Xophmeister• 11 years ago

What does the automatic downvoting of comments, regardless of their content, from marked users accomplish? Especially if rogue users are marked by virtue of their controversial opinions, rather than genuine rogue users (spammers, abusive commenters, etc.) That is, presuming this happens at all...

benologist2• 11 years ago

larrys has 2 negative-rated comments in the last 59 days (where I stopped looking at more pages), are you sure there really is a pattern? eli_gottlieb looks like he takes contentious stances a bit but his are mostly positive too.

If there is a pattern what makes you think it's dang vs some other group pushing the opposite viewpoint?

I've probably emailed him a couple dozen times with reports of hinky stuff and never felt like he was protecting anything, I would give him the benefit of the doubt and ask him what's happening.

brudgers3• 11 years ago

If the comments are consistently reflect some political position then the downvotes are not content independent. Moreover irrespective of what the political position is, there are people, including myself, who generally find political partisanship in HN comments detrimental to the community in most cases.

If as you postulate, there is an identifiable faction with a political agenda, then either user, moderator or software intervention would hardly be surprising. There are plenty of places on the internet where promoting a political agenda is considered fair sport. HN, for better or worse, is not among them.

Anyway, if it is Dang, then you can live with it or find someplace else for politically partisan posting.

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

Immigration reform? What's that supposed to mean?

Huh, and here I just thought I took too many downvotes for expressing Marxist views on a site where everyone's supposed to want to be an entrepreneur (ie: petite bourgeois).

jkoudys• 11 years ago

Rampant, indiscriminate downvoting is one of the main reasons I generally dislike reddit and prefer HN. There's a natural decline to subs over there, as anything or anyone who deviates from mainstream opinions gets downvoted into obscurity.

I'm just a casual reader, and I have no expertise on HN's policies, but it definitely offends my sensibilities to see anyone gaming this system.

jqm• 11 years ago

One approach if you notice this (aside from contacting mods of course) is to up-vote the comments...

DanBC• 11 years ago

HN should have built in mechanisms that prevent downvote sprees.

May I ask whatthe username is? (Feel free to email me if you don't want to make it public).

fixxer2• 11 years ago

Does karma play a part in the YC selection process?

Restated: who cares?

If any prospective hire told me their handle under the notion that karma indicates anything useful, I'd show them the door.

EDIT: Exactly.

fsk• 11 years ago

I've seen job ads that ask for your StackOverflow ID, presumably to check your karma total there.

dec0dedab0de• 11 years ago

stack overflow can also include code examples, and the quality of questions you ask.

jakejake• 11 years ago

I'd be surprised if it was just to see one's karma points. Reading the actual comments would be more useful.

fixxer2• 11 years ago

Yeah, sure. I'm in Illinois, so I can discriminate based on political ideology... totally valuable.

EDIT: My point is this can be a bad idea.

jere• 11 years ago

I've noticed the same thing on reddit for as long as I can remember. Obscure comments that are polite, useful, and avoid controversial topics routinely get down to 0 or -1 points.

I know this is all rather meaningless, but something about it is very upsetting to me and I always upvote such comments.

On that note, I like the Stack Overflow model: you have to pay reputation to downvote.

brudgers3• 11 years ago

StackOverflow actively deletes content and does so without mercy. That's a more important part of the utility of its model than the mechanics of downvotes. And flagging costs nothing except a daily flag, and the reward for good flags is more flags.

tremols• 11 years ago

You will be punished if you criticize communism and angular.js among other subjects where political correctness and idiotical consensus have more weight than reason. The kool kidz rule with an iron fist, and they know no mercy.

brudgers3• 11 years ago

Statistically, downvotes correlate to comments that the community deems low quality. Throwing out buzzwords in lieu of clearly articulated views supported by rationales, reasons, and examples often falls in that category. So do comments that assume that people with contrary views lack reason.

Statistically, the way to avoid downvotes and earn upvotes is with thoughtful well-written comments that contribute to improving or maintaining the quality of HN.

krapp2• 11 years ago

The thing is, despite what many people here seem to think, HN doesn't really have a consensus. If it did, it wouldn't be as paranoid about the Eternal September effect as it is, as one of the symptoms of Eternal September is users not agreeing with and following the consensus set by older members.

What HN does have is a number of mutually opposed consensuses each believing the others are destroying the site by astroturfing and posting irrelevant nonsense. So yes, if you criticize angular.js and communism, you might be punished. But if you criticize capitalism and praise front-end frameworks, someone else will have their knives out for that as well.

whybroke• 11 years ago

You do realize that you're trying to provide a calm, reasonable explanation to a party who believes HN is plagued by communists.

krapp2• 11 years ago

As far as I know, HN's only policy regarding downvotes is that you shouldn't complain about them when you get them.

Although what you describe might expose some flaw in their brigade/voting ring detector, the site and the culture appear to be far more concerned with stopping indiscriminate upvotes than downvotes (which is understandable, given the financial incentives for startups and entrepreneurs to want to game the system.) With downvotes, the more the merrier.

Edit: reading this thread, i'm wondering whether being able to delete posts after they've been replied to isn't a bigger problem than downvoting. That and drive-by edits.

StopGamingHN• 11 years ago

Lots of nerd jealousy exhibits itself via downvoting. I'm sure it's based on insiders and outsiders. I'm also sure many try to repress ideas that might be competitive to their own. I've seen this happen and this is repulsive. Change needs to happen on HN.

Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments indiscriminately?

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