There's an additional rarely-noticed feature tied to downvotes, that no one considers when they propose this: If a post gets a huge number in a tiny duration (like, -10 in under a minute after being posted), a bot will close and delete the post.
This is a way for regular users to immediately eliminate inappropriate content, such as porn or advertisements. I've seeing it go off many many times in my years at the SciFi stackexchange.
> It's especially troubling that the posts aren't removed, but rather, get softly automatically downvoted over time, making the process almost invisible.
Seems perfectly reasonably to balance the expression of users with "fading" spam. If a post really has strong merit, it can still get some visibility, whereas a deleted post can not.
That happens to every single popular post on Reddit. They have lots of weird fuzzing algorithms to counter votebots and adjust for a constantly growing userbase. It's not nefarious, and it's pretty common to see some picture at 4000 points that was at 6000 an hour ago. The score is only abstractly related to the number of votes.
The posts would get auto-deleted if their vote count got to -5. It was popular enough at my university that this kind of community moderation worked reasonably well, but in a lot of other locations it got abused.
One problem is the severe rate-limiting. I don't think downmods get rate-limited (I rarely downmod), so someone could downmod (which is not undoable), write up a response and get rate-limited, and never follow through with posting after their limit is up.
Reddit is also having some pretty serious problems with bots reposting highly upvoted content, both in posts and comments. Sometimes it gets spotted -- especially when the bots pick content which was specific to some point in time, or when they repost a comment out of context -- but a lot of it goes unnoticed, especially in comment threads.
> In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter
This is not true.
I am active in a small (local area) subreddit, and there sometimes a post totally disappears from the "hot" listing. Not only from page 1, but it cannot be found on pages 2 or 3 either.
When there is a recent post with 4 upvotes at the top of the hot list, a recent post with -1 votes still would deserve to rank higher than a week old post with a small positive vote score, don't you think?
I was really wondering, do the mods remove posts that quickly get 2 downvotes. But this bug explains my observations.
It's a precaution, both against bots and users. I see you submitted another thread 8 minutes later so it works and was hopefully only a minor inconvienience.
This is starting to seem more common. Posts I see under new section that make me cringe inevitably shoot up to the top of front page. And seems like an increasing number of good posts are getting drowned out.
Agree downmod would be helpful. Even if it had a very high karma or HN usage period requirement in order to use I think it would help the community.
There is an option for mods to accelerate or slow the decay function of the post.
This is a practice that all content platforms use and few know about. Burying content down, or removing from feed (for Facebook/YouTube) is a soft censoring that avoids user and regulatory backlash.
I would like the platforms to be more transparent about the practice. They could display a ‘derank’ or ‘delisted’ label to all users.
This is a way for regular users to immediately eliminate inappropriate content, such as porn or advertisements. I've seeing it go off many many times in my years at the SciFi stackexchange.
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