People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg provides no evidence to back up a claim that obviously needs it). Flagging should be because it is simply inappropriate for usually offensive reasons.
I rarely comment now. I often don't see the point.
I've also often considered a tool to only provide the RSS feed for interesting article discovery then mostly ignore the comments completely. Comments on the ask/show sections are usually more signal than noise. Sometimes even the noise is interesting.
Upvotes should exist to make interesting content rise. Uninteresting content then simply sinks to the bottom.
But votes are a difficult problem to solve. I'm sure there are too many corner cases I've no idea about.
Absolutely. I agree with everything else you bring up as well.
I would love to see down-voting vanish completely and the flagged/dead threshold increased dramatically. It is too easy to drown out otherwise thoughtful, quality contributions to discussion. Instead we see two to three word witty quips float by unscathed. It is the antithesis of the type of discussion described in the guidelines and runs counter to the curation of substantive, meaningful discourse.
Every downvote must must be accompanied by a comment. That comment is bound to the downvote, and whether that downvote is counted is contingent on the quality of the accompanying comment.
The accompanying comment must give supporting reasons for the downvote. If the comment is something along the lines of: "I disagree", "NO U R DUMB", "asdfasfdasfd", or is blank, then that comment's downvote can be flagged for review, and ultimately discounted.
A good accompanying downvote-comment should do something like: (1) point out logical errors or fallacies in the parent comment (2) point out logical or methodical errors in the parent comment's sources. [1]
I'm sure we'll get some mental gymnasts who try to twist things, but with this system, the added friction with downvoting should reduce the number of "I disagree" downvotes by a meaningful amount.
[1] edit: even this can be a problem though, because these kinds of logical or methodical refutations can be insightful to some people, which they won't see if the downvoted comments fade into the abyss
However, the fact that this comment was downvoted into negative numbers without any criticism is quite disappointing. It's a good demonstration of where the system doesn't work.
This is not stopping me from using HN as such but there are plenty of posts I'd otherwise comment on. But what is the point if they just vanish? If the goal is to only be seeing the approved groupthink, what is the point?
A possible solution is to force people to comment if they want to downvote.
I think I'll resurrect my old reader tool and ditch the HN web site as such. This little experience has reawakened an old gripe.
- A way to signal disagreement with a comment.
- A means to flag a comment as clearly misleading or incorrect.
- A way of signalling a 'low value' comment (obviously subjective).
- A way for the downvoter to simply express his or her displeasure at what has been posted regardless how reasonable the comment is. (This probably happens more often than people care to admit it. It's subtly different than just disagreement.)
One might argue all the above examples are types of 'disagreement'.
An idea: clicking downvote adds the following line to the end of a comment:
1 reader disagrees or 3 readers disagree
It doesn't capture the other examples, but maybe it will deter the other uses.
On the other hand, this might be a terrible idea. It's a difficult problem to solve!
The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse.
There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality
true / false
funny / serious
insightful / wrong
kind / hurtful
agree / disagree (useful for votes)
Someone anonymously disagrees with a statement - but why?
Upvotes, on the other hand, makes sense inherently. Someone agrees to the statement, which is rationalized by itself.
What you see as ‘the obviously true thing everyone should accept, positively affirm, and shun dissenters of’ may not be that. At the very least, none of us should expect HNs to be tailored to our particular set of ideological values, no matter how deeply held - imo.
One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.
If I wanted to read the headlines and first paragraph of articles in the NYT I'd just sign up for their daily email digest.
I'm settled in to ride out the inevitable decline as I've done for all feed based aggregators like twitter, medium, reddit et al. From experience, when it reaches ~50% block worthy I will stop trying to upvote solid posts and prolong the suffering of others.
Dang is my favorite part of HN
I have found some of the most fascinating and thought provoking gems on HN over the years which would have otherwise been lost to antiquity. That is something unique that HN brings to the table as opposed to the multitudes of curated headline feeds out there.
As other commenters state here, the paywalled MSM stuff should take a backseat.
Old timers should be encouraged to submit some of their time-tested and well-worn articles to foster a more stable grounding in the tech industry for the newcomers.
There are certain topics that have to be avoided. Ironically the attitude is very anti-startup and against newer, unproven technology.
I'd actually love to see a community where we could discuss startups and new tech. Subbreddits tend to swing too young - opinions are strong but unfounded, and there's a strong bias against the tried and true. Something like Indie Hackers attract the idealists who have big dreams but do not act on them.
There are a lot more people in the second group.
That said, I'd like to be able to change my username and be able to archive or delete my content at will. Even a pseudonymous identity and history on any platform can be a liability these days.
There is so much goodwill and history and HN attracts great people. Also say you built something better than HN - people won’t leave HN for that they’ll probably use both.
No paywalled sites.
No sites that require sign-up, even if just using FB/Google/etc login.
No sites that demand that I remove ad-block.