> This is (part of) why I upvote anything even remotely helpful, explaining that some command switch does (or doesn't do) X, or syntax clarification, or even having the best formatted and/or written answer, asking a question I didn't know I had, and so on.
I recall listening to the stackoverflow podcast and Jeff was asked about his threshold for upvoting.
I recall he said he upvoted something like all answers that were nor spam. Since, people are trying to help for no benefit to themselves, so why wouldn't you at least give them that?
> out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge.
I regularly come across helpful answers on SO with 0 or 1 upvotes, so I wouldn't judge your contributions' impact solely on that. You've likely helped many people with your answers, even if there's no proof of it.
> I honestly don't understand the necessity or want for something like this.
Here's what I wrote elsewhere:
"Imagine you're a programmer. For us coding geeks, sites like Stack Overflow are a lifeline to getting work done. In fact, we're reasonably convinced that when Stack Overflow goes down, all programming around the world just stops. (Well, at least that's the excuse we use.) Yet, when we read an answer from someone who has fixed that (Javascript) problem we've spent hours debugging, we want to kiss that person's feet with the appropriate Wayne's World salute. It's times like those when a thank you and a (worthless) upvote just don't seem enough. That person saved us from hours of wasted effort and aggravation. That geek deserves more."
tl/dr: I want it because I don't expect something for nothing. If someone provides me value, I want to exchange something in return.
> Certainly true, but there can be a gap between providing such tips and having them be accepted/upvoted.
Reality tip: accepted != upvoted.
This is going to get a bit deeper than HN readers normally care about, but ask yourself what your reason is for posting -- to get upvotes, or to be helpful to other people?
Another way to look at this is that votes can be tallied and turned into a statistic, but being helpful is pretty much intangible. And the relationship between votes and helpfulness isn't strongly correlated.
In short, helpfulfulness isn't quantifiable. So it all comes down to why you post.
One more thing. Having posted in this and other fora for more than twenty years, I can report that some people only vote, and others only read for content and never vote, and the two groups are only loosely associated. I've noticed that some posts get wildly upvoted or downvoted but without many comments, other get lots of comments with few votes. This means that if your goal is to get votes, you would write in an entirely different way than if you wanted to create a productive conversation.
> You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.
I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons.
Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation.
> the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise.
> but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
> the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to
- stop frequenting racist forums,
- if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable)
>The best way to express your approval of a submission? Upvote it. //
Except with hidden vote scores it doesn't express anything at all (except changing a number on the OP's interface; the OP doesn't even know that you upvoted them).
If you want to express your approval to anyone other than the parent/OP or have anyone know who is expressing approval [that is occasionally relevant] then you have to comment.
> I don't feel that I should have to beg for a privilege
> that is afforded even the newest account on HN. It just
> bugs me every now and then such as in cases like these.
Finding out what happened at least might afford some insight into the thinking behind it. Then you have more information.
> I probably lost my upvote capability due to some perceived
> slight and I'm very much tired of that sort of thing.
Or you got fat-fingered, or it's a false-positive and they'd appreciate the heads-up to help them improve the accuracy, or you really did do something they disapprove of. Without knowing more it's hard to say. HN is a complex place in these regards.
> ... if a user interface component is non-functional it
> should be grayed out or not there at all. At least that
> would be clear, open and honest.
Much of the behavior is driven by the anti-spamming, anti-trolling concerns, and this could easily be one of them. Openness just gains more knowledgable trolls, as I've discovered. I can understand the stance they've chosen, although it is at times frustrating.
> edit: and some smart-ass flagged it. Too bad.
Indeed. I got down-voted for suggesting that the item on Llanfair PG was not really of intellectual interest. <fx: shrug /> I'm learning that not everything can be fixed, not least because some people don't think it's broken.
> But I'm also beginning to suspect that there are people who enjoy hammering others. Giving upvotes is no fun to them, but giving down votes makes their day.
It’s entirely possible, but also pure conjecture unless you’ve got confessions from them.
> If I posted this on meta stack overflow, it would immediately get downvoted. And my post would probably get closed.
Yes, because you’re supposed to search for duplicate questions first and not ask them again. Meta is littered with thousands of prior questions exactly like this one. People have been naysaying for 15 years, but the site has been quite successful. At some point you just have to give up arguing with success.
> Even constructive criticism seems to be illegal there.
Stack Overflow choose a particular set of rules, and not everybody likes them. Few will say that they are perfect, but most will say that they are better than no rules at all.
In particular, one problem with the rules is that new users are usually new to the technology that they are asking about as well. They frequently lack the ability reliably _recognize_ duplicate questions. Some minor details will be different, or the wording will be unexpected, so they fail to get any help from the existing answers. You should see the Emacs Stack Exchange: hardly a week goes by without someone asking how they can add a key binding to do X while in mode Y. Since the answer rarely depends on either X or Y, the answer is invariably the same, but nothing seems to slow them down.
Learning to generalize is not the easiest thing to do. Neither is admitting that our first questions weren’t brilliant. It is difficult to have the grace to recognize that a question was already answered elsewhere, or that we phrased it badly, or that we didn’t do enough research before asking the question. That is a problem that predates Stack Overflow! See http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#stackover... for a resource that goes back even further, and has its roots in Usenet decades earlier still.
Luckily nothing requires you to care about Stack Overflow’s curious rules. If you want a community with different ones, there are plenty tools you could use to create your own. Open–source forum software such as phpBB or Discourse is readily available and already in wide use. There are thousands of existing communities out there that are not part of Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange. Just be courteous and search their archives before you ask the same questions all over again.
> but HN has always felt to me like a display of how working within constraints can improve quality.
Definitely in the same boat. When I started reading through this rare opportunity for legitimate meta discussion I was about to advertise the missing vote direction indication on the unvote button. Because it's so easy to hit the wrong direction on mobile and that would be an elegant way to fix it.
But now I think that even this might be more feature than bug: knowing that there is a chance that it might have been just clumsy upvoters makes it easier to do the right thing when getting downvoted.
> While blatant voting manipulation may be the status quo at a certain other startup-oriented link aggregator, it is never good because it breaks the integrity of the service.
Why does it break the integrity of the service? Sockpuppets, sure, but why does asking friends/acquaintances with established HN accounts (presumably the HN software can distinguish these cases) for upvotes work contrary to the goals?
Presumably if you have an account and you "vote well" -- that is, your upvotes are well-correlated with what other people upvote and don't downvote -- you know what people like to see. If a friend asked me to upvote their spam listicle, or a question they could just ask me and get an answer, or some politics story irrelevant to hackerdom, I'd say no. If I "manipulate" a friend's post, I'm making as much of an endorsement of the content as HN-appropriate as if I upvoted something I saw on the front page. (And if I abuse that, my upvotes should get disregarded.)
To be clear, I'm not advocating that bugging your friends for upvotes is a good system. I am advocating that posters asking people who care about HN for endorsement is explicitly desirable, and the software and community norms should be designed to reflect this, instead of the community norm deciding that vote manipulation is an acceptable means to an otherwise-technically-unsupported end.
> In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise.
No, absolutely not! You can only tell that other non-experts agree in some path-dependent fashion.
I'll occasionally see highly-upvoted nonsense in an area that I'm expert in. This is very bad.
This is some kind of cognitive bias.
EDIT> I should clarify that it's entirely possible for experts to disagree. So this isn't the you disagree with me so you dumb argument.
> a lot of people are trying to use their vote to move the total vote towards what they think it should be, rather than purely expressing an up-or-down opinion independent of the existing vote
I definitely do this on reddit, and probably on HN too. I don't know if such a thing exists, but I would use a widget that gave me an 'upvote iff karma < 1' button.
> Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button as an "increase visibility" button.
I think Mastodon tries to make that distinction with like vs boost. Boost seems to be about making a post more visible ("hey look at this!") and like is more about "thanks for posting". At least on the server I use.
> The threads are also flat and you cannot upvote posts.
THIS.
You have to conduct REAL interaction with the "thread". Not just artificially by voting for stuff you like.
Information is everything that matters. The only upvote-like mechanism is posting in a thread.
There are still people posting stuff without additional informations to show their approval, but they have to type something and type a captcha, which prevents the whole mass from skimming over boards and randomly vote as they go.
I recall listening to the stackoverflow podcast and Jeff was asked about his threshold for upvoting.
I recall he said he upvoted something like all answers that were nor spam. Since, people are trying to help for no benefit to themselves, so why wouldn't you at least give them that?
reply