BlackDeath3's argument was that a voting system is the means through which the best comments, as deemed by the majority of users, receive the most exposure. You misunderstood them and referred them to the current top comment, pointing out that it was quite substantial. Without realizing it though, you were demonstrating their point.
Quite ironically, comments, and especially voting on comments, do not seem perfectly aligned with encouraging thoughtful, civil discussion without completely quenching dissent. The inevitable result is either group-think or scorched earth flame wars.
I'm not a fan, either. On the one hand, the voting system is very good at getting rid of bad comments. OTOH, more often than not, the comments that get downed aren't actually the right ones, and the right ones are violating the rules anyways, so downing them is pointless. Unfortunately, that would mean that not upvoting is now an implicit down...
But yeah, voting systems in general aren't great: one of the worst comments I ever wrote got heavily upvoted, before dang (quite rightly) detached the subtree and chastised me.
Voting systems encourage a site to move toward a circlejerk, as everybody vigourously agrees with each other, any dissent silenced. Every community is a little bit of a circlejerk, because communities are brought together through some kind of shared value. But if you full-on circlejerk, you're left with a boring echochamber, which doesn't challenge anybody intellectually, because everybody agrees.
However, any alternatives to the voting system have their own problems (see 4chan): a good community doesn't succeed because of their thread ranking system: it succeeds in spite of it (see lainchan and HN).
And yes, I put HN in the good group: despite how broken voting is (pretty much by design), HN works pretty well.
You're missing the point by a wide margin. I voted because I felt they were lousy comments. Whether I agree with them or not is hardly relevant, as I don't think they're even worth paying that much attention to.
The whole idea that comment moderation should be based on whether you agree or disagree with the message is a toxic one that has killed civil conversation on dozens of sites, replacing it with thoughtless and instinctual groupthink that frankly makes everyone dumber. (I won't even pretend to be above it at all times myself, but I try, and would hope to not be alone in that.) Ultimately, you can't stop everybody from voting that way, but you can discourage it, and that's what my post was about.
> The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector.
Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.
But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.
So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.
But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.
But it doesn't just penalize flamewars, it penalizes all conversations. For example, I have now posted two comments in this discussion and only upvoted the article once. Does that mean this is a worse article than one that I only upvoted and never commented on or a better article than one I upvoted and commented on three times?
I'm seeing this often enough to think it's worth telling people about.
HN has a an automated simple proxy for flame-war detection. One characteristic of flame-wars is that people get into a to'n'fro over the issue, and the number of comments balloons. However, no one else is really interested, so they don't upvote the submisson, and the participants can only upvote a submission once, so the number of points doesn't increase.
Result is that a simply proxy for a flame-war is the number of comments on a submission out-stripping the number of votes.
A side-effect of that is that if there's a mildly interesting submission that lots of people comment on, but very few upvote, then the flame-war penalty will be triggered, and the submission will sink like a stone, never to be seen again.
It's a reasonably interesting collection of suggestions and comments from a fairly wide range of the HN community, but it's now lost, because while people commented, they didn't upvote.
So this is a public service announcement ... if something is interesting enough to comment on, consider upvoting as well, so others can see your comment, and you can then see theirs.
"Upvote should have nothing to do with who said it or how many points it has already received"
Not necessarily. While I'll agree with that the current score of the comment should have little to do with your vote, who said it is necessary for context. Consider this hypothetical comment:
"The backend code behind the current search functionality at google is absolutely horrible. The search ranking algorithm is pathetic to say the least."
Had this been said by an SEO guy or an employee of yahoo/bing, I'd have downvoted the comment. However, if it were a comment by Matt Cutts (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts), it presents itself in a whole different context. It's no longer a flamewar comment, but rather an admittance of areas where someone/something needs to improve.
Well, I agree that Reddit's voting system encourages groupthink, but I'd rather that unpopular opinions were silenced by other commenters rather than all opinions being silenced.
Do you think that comments belong anywhere on the web (on aggregator sites, for example)?
i think it's more that the wrong people have voting rights on the site. i mean, obviously so if the actual content of the message counts less than starting the comment with 'actually', right?
It's not though. If you're not arguing a pro-groupthink position you'll get down voted regardless of the quality of your commentary. See just about any politics related thread for an example of that.
Note that only applies to subjective topics. If you're commenting about a purely technical topic then the voting system does seem to work more effectively.
The voting system invites this by its very nature. People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes.
Plenty of good potential conversations are derailed by, not flame bait (obvious flame bait gets deleted), but, "very engaging" conversations that start off on some tangent that is only the slightly bit related to the story.
Comment voting is good to filter out spam/off topic and then sadly it can be used to create an echo chamber where dissenting opinions of all sorts gets shut down.
The Reddit voting system works fine. On both Reddit and HN I usually learn more from the comments than the actual article, but I still wouldn't want comments in the New York Times.
Heavy handed censorship turns rude commenters who should be simply ignored into internet terrorists, Facebook comments dilutes the conversation by making people self consciously edit themselves and Twitter or Tumblr replies are like shouting into the wind.
Good old semi-anonymous Reddit comments still perform though, even with a user base of millions of bratty kids the best stuff usually floats to the top.
"The voting system exists so that the community can raise productive comments, and lower unproductive comments" sounds like "a voting system so people can democratically decide what content is good or bad". What's the distinction you're trying to make?
The author points out that users upvote a comment based on whether they agree with it or not, and not based on how useful it is to the discussion. Did you really expect it to work any other way? You're expecting internet commentators to be impartial? Even supreme court judges have a hard time remaining impartial. Why do you think someone who spends 15 minutes a day reading articles about technology here would give a shit?
Of course votes reflect agreement / disagreement. What else can they realistically reflect?
>This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with. //
Disagree, a lot.
I've railed against it, but pg (the site owner) noted that voting as a proxy for like/dislike was not improper use on HN, much to my chagrin. In the early days (of my use, back on my first HN account) voting seemed mostly to be done to move a comment to it's "proper place".
Nowadays very good comments get greyed to non-readability. I find myself so often vouching for things I disagree with because comments that add well structured, logical, or interesting thoughts get voted out of view because they go against the group norms.
No it isn't. There's nothing about the content of the comments on anything on the internet that automatically means one comment warrants more attention than any other. The reason why we have voting systems is so the community can push things to the top. That's tempered by the fact Reddit moves fast so people who comment later are much less likely to get to the top of a thread, but really it just shows that people who vote in r/space value puns a lot. That's the community you're a part of.
It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
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