It's very annoying that 100+ karma users could act as really good trolls, they could just go around and downvote everybody without ever loosing karma, but costing the commenter karma.

Don't get me wrong I really enjoy the HN community, there are a lot of bright people here and very good content and discussions, it's just that the system discourages you to have your own opinion on anything, because if you write something that a 100+ user doesn't like he can simply downvote you irresponsibly.

TL, DR: I don't know maybe it's me, maybe I have too radical opinions on stuff. But overall I feel that the downvoters should loose some karma too, and maybe force the downvoter to write a reason for it, to make sure that they downvote responsibly.

PS: I am not saying neither that I'm always right nor that I never deserved the downvote.

I'm glad downvoting was removed for new users because it is usually just used to indicate that you disagree with a point of view, though the HN elites seem just as fallible if not more fallible in this regard.

It should be optional.

The reason won't be part of the discussion thread. A small button close to the comment can link to the for the down vote.

Why add this?

People who get down voted (esp noobs to the community) have no idea why they were. As a result can't figure out how to change our avoid such in the future.

Also trigger happy down voters might get to think carefully about WHY before they do.

Punishment without reason in real life is known as wickedness, cruelty, bullying...

This would be better for not just community but for the internet as a whole.

I'm wondering whether this pattern might be a site feature struggling to be born.

Perhaps every single article should come with a tiny button to press, with a label: "I believe this article is offtopic for HN".

I'm not talking about a downvote option, exactly. The downvote button on submissions has been suggested thousands of times by now, and a counter-argument -- a good one, IMHO -- is that enabling the downvoting of articles empowers gangs of organized downvoters to kill content from the site for arbitrary reasons. Everyone knows the kind of trouble that causes.

But that presumes that the downvote button is hooked up to something in the site's software. It doesn't need to be. Just display a tiny number that is the number of accumulated downvotes. Let the people who read each article, and decide whether to upvote it or not, choose whether or not to ignore that number.

In the absence of this feature, the users reinvent it for themselves, as we have seen again and again.

You may ask why the people who wish to express disapproval of an article can't just write a thoughtful post that explains why, instead of clicking a little DOWNVOTE button. The short answer is that to acknowledge a troll is to feed the troll. The longer answer is that some trolls are much more subtle than others: The ones who use rude one-liners are easy to spot, but there are others who will suck you into endlessly circling, long-winded, bad-faith arguments filled with chaff. You'll refute something, and they'll respond with a mixture of inaccurate and irrelevant bullet points; and you'll introduce good points of your own, and they'll be ignored in future posts; and if by some miracle you create a really compelling counter-argument, the troll will go away for two days and then come back, advancing the same argument that he did two days ago, as if the counter-argument had never existed. You can't avoid such people by engaging them -- engagement is what they want. You have to learn their reputations and politely but firmly avoid them.

Which I do. But that doesn't mean I want to sit idly by while effluvia overflows the front page of HN. The site could really use a "cold shoulder" button.

    Just votes. First let Us skip the renaming of downboats. But introduce 
    a behavior upon each instance of VOTing, like this:
        Some dumfuck posts on reddit, and gets a lot of "meh..." for his 
        posting:
            Some one (idiotA) has a chuckle out of that posting and he/she
            upboats the posting.

            Another user (idiotB) sees the chuckling (the upboat) and _his_ 
            "meh" grows into the frustration of "this is insolentio!, 
            i must be acting it right now out!" and downboats the 
            poisoned posting.

        Now! An alchemy of site-behavior starts bubbling!
        First, when the VOTING period is OVER, ALL the VOTERS get their 
        "LOCAL karmic action Judgement day"

        The Karma gets calculated, the posting is "frozen" now, and:
            Karma application RULEs:
                ?
                    All the upboaters get "+1" on their comment/content karma.
                     Nothing more, even if they _voted_ after the fact of:
                        their !!Karmic_weight = upboats/downboats <> goodness_threshold!
                    ALL the downvoters GET AWAY with their downboat instance
                        if:
                            their !!downboats <> current: goodness_threshold!
                            (say 4, or the mean of all the upboater's 
                                (default: goodness_threshold config...whatever...
                            )
                        otherwise:
                            They get punished somehow:

                                1) Their comment/content karma gets
                                    reduced: -1, so that it hinders 
                                    their further VOTING

                                2) They ARE BANNED from voting on the OP's 
                                    thread/posting

                                3) ??? You can go on with the HELL creation

                                ...
                                    This is my Word, and I expressed it to 
                                    the fullest in the best way 
                                    I am capable of.
                                    Goodbye for now! 

                                    Have fun for this is the true 
                                        purpose of the Internet!

I'm sure the response to this suggestion will be predictably something along the lines of 'what is a meaningful comment'.

It's simply, anything other than just entering a string of random text to full-full the length validation. That's it. An actual sentence.

If it's rubbish, great, that's still helpful because the original poster of the downvoted comment knows the time and effort they've put into writing a thoughtful comment still stands; meaning the downvote was bullshit, petty, or just flawed reasoning.

There will always be people that are going to downvote just about anything. And of course this will limit knee-jerk downvotes, along with causing one to pause before doing it because they'll be open to a downvote if their reason for the it is flawed.

I predict if this comment gets any traction it'll quickly get flagged. That's the next most common way for people to shut-down conversations they don't agree with.

Since around a year ago, there's been an increase in grayed-out comments that didn't say anything that doesn't belong in the spirit of HN, but just stated a disagreement against the prevailing sentiment.

I thought about collecting a few examples before posting this, but those of you who know what I'm referring to must have noticed them too.

Another Reddit'ty behavior is "grudge downvoting" where all the comments of a user in a thread are reflexively downvoted after they post even one disagreeable comment.

It's very apparent in heated political discussions and platform skirmishes.

How do dang and other users who cherish HN for its differentiation feel about this?

I'm concerned that as it gains users, HN is acquiring an attribute common to other social news sites where users simply downvote a comment because they don't agree with it, or because it criticizes something that they favor or like. I believe that downvotes should only be used on content that does not generate interesting discussion, is spammy, or patently and generally offensive.

I've noticed that there is not much language addressing general appropriate voting behavior in the Guidelines (at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). Is this something we want to address, or not?

I think a good way to help curb inappropriate downmodding is to invoke a small cost for each downvote. StackOverflow does this and it seems to work pretty well.

Has anyone else noticed this trend recently? If so, what are your feelings regarding it?

I am working on a website where users can share jokes. It uses a modified version of the HN ranking algorithm that allows downvotes. Do you think the implementation is usable?

Here is how jokes are ranked:

(p-1)/(t+2)^(1.8s - (s-1)0.85)

Where:

p = votes_for - votes_against

t = time since jokes was posted, in hours

s = 1 if p-1 > 0

s = 0 if p-1 = 0

s = -1 if p-1 < 0

Essentially if s = 1, then it works the same way as the HN algorithm, and if s = 0, then the numerator and the final score are also 0.

If s = -1, then the formula changes to:
(p-1)(t+2)^(0.1)

Which looks like this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28-1%29%28t%2B2%29^%280.1%29+from+0+to+24

So when p-1 is negative, the score will gradually decrease with time, with the rate of decrease slowing down.

Do you think this is a good approach to downvotes? Also should I be taking the ratio of upvotes to downvotes into account, or just the difference?

I'm also thinking that maybe the rate at which jokes with negative scores loose points should increase with time, instead of decrease. That way a joke which got downvoted right after submission will have a higher chance of being seen by people and upvoted, where as a joke that's been in the negatives for a long time should get buried further down.

The website by the way is www.QuickHaha.com

With content moderation, there are a couple different signals that are both important, but that shouldn't be conflated.

1) The comment is on-toptic relevant, and adds value to the discussion (quality).

2) Whether a user personally agrees or disagrees with the content of a comment (content).

Downvotes are a negative signal. There isn't a clear way to distinguish between "this comment is low quality" (quality moderation) and "I disagree with it" (content feedback).

Downvoting has the aggregate effect of suppressing speech. In the case of low quality, this is a good thing. In the case of disagreement, it runs the risk of discouraging expression and diverse ideas.

Perhaps people have ideas they'd like to discuss, but don't want to risk "losing points" because the idea may be unpopular. I know that I have personally experienced this, and stopped myself from expressing an idea because I've been pretty sure it wouldn't be popular. Given the overall high quality of discussions on HN, this chilling effect is disturbing. Have others experienced it?

Upvotes are a positive signal, it seems to me that the risk of conflating positive signals is less than that of conflating negative signals, since it doesn't have a suppressive effect, it has an uplifting effect.

Would it make sense, and improve the community, to eliminate downvotes and to only have positive signals?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting getting rid of flagging a comment, just downvotes.

The reason for an upvote is pretty obvious. The upvoted author usually explained his point.

But what is the meaning for a downvote? This info could be very valuable.

For example, today I posted this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11361031

What do I learn from the downvotes it got? That my post was too unfriendly? That the facts are wrong? That people disagree in some other way?

I would really like to know.

Having a community built, opensource alternative to HN would allow us to implement the features we want and could be a pretty fun experiment.

I know HN is itself opensource, but it's written in an obscure language and, as far as I know, does not accept 3rd party contributions, so it pretty much negates the main advantages of an opensource project.

This new project would be based on these principles, which (IMHO) HN fails to address:

- Opensource code, built using a mainstream language/framework, so contributing is not just easy, but actually encouraged.

- Community transparency: Everything is public, including upvotes and downvotes to stories and comments.

- Moderation transparency: Having moderators which modify the titles, etc… is fine and sometimes a must. You just have to show a log somewhere attached to the story where users can see which changes were made and by whom.

- Have a nice and complete REST API, so 3rd parties and mobile/desktop applications can properly interact with the site without resorting to hacks or scrapping.

I would gladly spend a week writing the MVP and opensourcing it, to kickstart the process. So, what does the HN community think about it?

Simply make your points and counterpoints.

I vote that the Earth is not flat. I don't want to hear down votes or up votes, I want to hear coherent and concise theories why I am right or wrong.

Down votes are cowardly without comments at the very least.

This place should be a venue for peer revue, not an exercise in US politics.

Just a thought.

1. Anything that's not constructive or not in good faith. Trolls, personal attacks, etc.

2. Anything that's interesting but off topic.

3. Anything that's relevant and interesting, but the comment has factual errors.

4. Anything that's relevant and interesting, but primarily opinion-based and you disagree with that opinion.

I noticed that I sometimes perhaps downvote a little too much. Perhaps we should standardize on only downvoting 1,2,3 but not 4? Or perhaps we do want to downvote all four, or only the first two? Any thoughts?

Why not charge for downvotes? Make downvoting cost a tiny sliver of karma. Or perhaps make it a statistical model: with every downvote, there is a small chance you will lose 1 karma point.

People who strongly disagree with something will still downvote, but if something you hate is already -5, why pile on? You'll save your downvotes for things closer to zero.

The problem is that it makes this website more of an echo chamber than it should be. If anything non-conformist could mean the loss of karma, then people are incentivized to just conform to the prevailing opinion.

This is important because as we’ve now seen, Trump has won even though (almost) nobody here on HN expresses anything positive about Trump. This is a big problem for HN because apparently it’s disconnected from reality. Yes I’m here to talk about geek stuff, but I am especially interested in a reasonably unbiased opinion of what other engineers think. I don’t think the downvoting system helps with this.

Unlike downvotes, there is no visibility into how others use flagging. What does everyone else do? Has anyone thought through the endgames and decided they have a best strategy?

They are outliers by definition.

In one sense upvotes may mean you have a good handle on what is acceptable and can model that well.

But on the other, it may also mean that you aren’t taking risks or that your ideas aren’t that original.

Of course some types of originality will be popular.

In other words, don’t feel bad about your downvotes!

Check to be sure you are delivering your ideas in a way that is consistent with the community, but having some downvotes is probably a good signal (or at least, shouldn’t be immediately viewed as a bad signal).

The first is posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Right now, dang is the only one doing this, but other moderators may in the future. We've learned some things about how to do it: 1) the feedback should be as neutral as possible; 2) it should be about the comment, not the commenter; and 3) where possible, it should say what would make the comment better.

Other HN users have been pitching in with feedback too, which is great! If you'd like to help, please do. Just try to follow the three guidelines above.

The second experiment is a change we made to the comment scoring and ranking algorithms. These algorithms do more than just counting and sorting because pg wrote a lot of code to address systemic issues as they came up over the years. But the community doesn't stay static, so the algorithms shouldn't either.

After studying the data, dang and kogir tuned the algorithms to make some downvotes more powerful. We've been monitoring the effects of this change, and it appears to be reducing toxic comments.

The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls (and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this). What dang and kogir found was a way to turn the volume up on this kind of downvote. We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community.

We will be trying a lot more experiments. We'll stop the ones that don't work and continue the ones that do.

dang and kogir, great work so far. I'm enjoying reading HN much more.

Any opinions about the types of flags there should be, and how
they should work?

A little about me: I am highly knowledgeable in HTML/CSS/JS, website development, wordpress, graphic design, online marketing, and social marketing. I've worked with companies such as ARCO Gas, AMPM, HiteJinro, Ballantines Whiskey, and the LA Dodgers.

I have experience and understanding of the current state of the web and effective marketing.

An idea: buy cheap high quality phone cases from China

* The $5K / mo would give us a variety of cases to choose from, as well as bulk discounts. Obviously, we would start small to test the market, maybe invest $1K in inventory

* Simple, modern website that makes purchasing easy on the web and mobile

* Highly targeted market. Example: (Item: a Justin Beiber case) Facebook ad target teenage girls in the USA who have liked Justin's facebook page

* Analytics, A/B testing, whatever I can do to maximize profits

* Sell $1 cases for ~$10; should result in very high ROI

* Even though the case market is saturated, with targeted ads I'm thinking it would be possible.

Any other ideas?

edit: Don't get whats with all the downvotes :/ We are legitimately trying to start something that would help us get out of living paycheck to paycheck, and are simply open to hearing ideas. Isn't this what the whole entrepreneurial spirit is about?

It's a small nitpick, and I think it's cool that downvotes are delayed from new users to prevent abuse, but not having the option to downvote for so long (~1 year) has me beginning to think that doing away with all downvotes altogether isn't necessarily a bad thing. Anyone else agree?

It's not that I have been unaware that such bias can occur, I catch inaccuracies all the time when it comes to my own profession. I however realize that politics created a blind spot for me, along with social media, which I now increasingly rely on for news, because it's fast, and there are no nuances, like in a longer analysis, and because it's social. There is nothing like being surrounded by people who agree with you and support you in your outrage or virtue signalling, comfortably outmatching any potential detractors. Upvotes and downvotes clearly tell what's right and what's wrong, there is no uncertainty. I'm on the right side and feel good about it.

I can now see the effects of this on myself. I think I used to be more thoughtful, more interesting. I spoke when I had something to contribute. Not to be right. Not to have my ego satisfied. Not to pretend that I'm something that I'm not. Not to be a part of the mob. I used to think, write and read more. I used to be more creative. I used to have a richer inner life.

My father have died today. We weren't close. He made many mistakes in his life. He maneuvered himself into a pit of darkness, finding comfort in hate and manipulation, then mediocrity, hiding from those he wronged. He was as smart as they come, but had no empathy, to the point of psychopathy. His parents taught him that the world is his, but his pathology was too severe to help with that. He failed both as a politician and a businessman. He made many enemies. He abused his children, psychologically, physically, he beat them and starved them, kept them locked into the car for hours, for years, while doing business or cheating on his wife. He was a force to be reckoned with, the coldest and scariest, then suddenly warm with big promises. Four children had to reckon with him. One a doctor, severely alcoholic, often cruel. One with bulimia and Stockholm syndrome. Two with self-harm for a long time.

With this colorful background it should be clear why I don't like the type of person social media tends to create. I made this post, because I think there is an important lesson here, one I'm not quite able to elegantly express, but it goes something like this. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it can also change us for the worst. 90% of my activity on social media is a waste of time. It doesn't contribute to my life, on the contrary. Worst it doesn't contribute to your life. I would like to do that instead. Let's do that instead. Life is short. Let's make it better.

The news item was about my father, he died a hero. The local police made a mistake arresting him, which made him a political figure, a symbol of resistance against a tyrannical government. Celebrated by the media, he gained momentary international fame not long ago, with country leaders calling him on the phone to ensure him of their support. Now he is dead, and big, lofty political speeches are ahead about the man who couldn't ever hide who he is, except for one last time, if for a moment.

I won't explain how Pagerank works, there is a good explanation here:

http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html

Let's drop the "every vote counts equal" scheme. Say you want to get a global measure for how important every person's votes are to the site. This means you want to assign a number to every person. This is analogous to the pagerank number assigned to a web page. The votes a person has got on all his comments and submissions corresponds to the inbound links of a webpage. The votes a person gives correspond to outbound links from a webpage. You would like that the authority every user gives equals the authority every user receives (both via upvotes, let's ignore downvotes for now). Every user's importance gets divided equally among the submissions/comments that he has upmoded. These are exactly the rules Pagerank operates on, except that one user may have upmoded another several times and you need to account for downmods too.

What are the advantages this would bring to sites like news.YC? Such an algorithm would be pretty resistant to voting circles in the same way pagerank is resistant to spam (one user with lots of karma will weight more than a lot of sockpuppets with no karma). It gives a global estimate of people's importance to the site and it should allow a site to preserve it's culture better as it scales.

Drawbacks? Some people may object that it is unfair not to count votes equally. It is harder to implement (especially as you need to modify the karma-rank on the fly, although if this turns out to be hard, you can use an approximation and recalculate karma-rank daily, for example). Last but not least, it puts serious performance requirements on the site implementing it that Arc is probably not ready to handle.

Several users including PG have proposed to add "downvote" for stories, thus prevents news "lynching" Michael Arrington, Twitter etc... to go far up the hill.

Assuming a story or comment meets the YC standards (grammar, vocabulary...) and is not disrespectful to anyone or any group of people, I think "downvoting" is against evolution. It is a few step backwards for a community driven news portal.

I have witnessed several times users being downmoded simply because they did not agree with another user. Although they may give a valid reason, they are being prosecuted for having their own thoughts about a particular subject.
This is bad to the point where if one cares for karma, which noone should, they may slightly alter their thoughts so they won't be condemned for thinking differently.

"Thinking differently". Now this is not to say that all users must have opposing views, but it is truly acceptable to have a different opinion, and noone should suffer the loss of karma points for having an opinion. This reminds me of Galileo's story.

I suggested yesterday that "silence is louder than downvoting" and that cost me 3 Karma points. Being hit for speaking your mind is clearly a "violation of the first amendment". Now, how is this different from firing an employee who doesn't agree with a certain company policy. I am confident that if a user could see who downvotes his stories, there will be a lot less of that. If you are doing something you would not do if you knew your identity will be made public, then there is "integrity" in question here.

Downvote is a clear step backward. How can you evolve in an environment where you risk being prosecuted for speaking your mind? This concept sounds like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. If one does not agree with another, then one should simply reply and make his argument in a civilized manner. Words are your tools, and if ones need "immunitions" to get his point across then one needs to learn how to communicate. Only those who cannot defend themselves using words, would use bullets.

I truly apologize if anyone feels offend as it is not the purpose of this article. Each and everyone is free to speak his mind respectfully and elegantly without fear of retributions.

EDIT: The first amendment enforces the FREEDOM OF SPEECH, which is disencouraged by Donwvotes.