> 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.
> Maybe it's just me, but HN started to be awfully aggressive recently. E. g. posting something already posted is not a upvote, but an instant IP ban. So use it with care.
Really? That seems ridiculously draconian and is likely to punish a lot of legitimate users who didn't realize something was actually submitted.
> 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.
> Also, a thing to note is that HN has user hierarchy, meaning certain users have more power than others, more or less based on karma. Which does mean that if you're thinking an easy of expressing your thought doesn't align well enough with those above you, your experience of HN will be crippled.
I have no idea what you're talking about here, apparently more than just newbies not being able to downvote - could you give an example or two? Maybe it's just a sinister way of describing being downvoted but not being able to downvote others.
> There have been times when seeing what gets up voted and what gets down voted really made me think twice about what people that are running this website are actually thinking.
Uh, it's not the "people running the website" who do the voting, not sure what you mean. If you really are curious about what the people running HN are thinking, email dang at hn@ycombinator.com and just ask. It's not a hidden, mysterious, shadowy entity. Or, reading his comments on here for an hour or two should answer most questions.
p.s. It seems likely you meant way but typed eay or esy and it was auto-corrected to easy?
Meh, HN already has hidden functionality that they don't tell users about, and honestly it feels like psychological torture. For example, all of my posts lose points after posting. For a long time, I thought a bot was following me and downvoting me. No, I was just being tortured by dang, feeling like I was crazy for all of my posts receiving down votes. Unless I consistently only post things that subscribe to the norm, I will be in a points deficit. I will never be able to downvote posts and participate in the community at large. I've effectively been cancelled, mostly for having different opinions and partly for responding to trolls in an unhelpful way. I'm working on the second part, but I don't think that's the problem.
I'm not interested in trying to psychologically harm people, especially in a time when social activities only really exist on the internet.
> The inscrutability of how page ranking works in HN is increasingly a problem in my eyes. I understand it's an attempt at preventing gaming the system, but I'm not convinced it works.
HN downweights threads that receive more comments than upvotes. It's a quite useful heuristic to avoid flame wars, in my opinion.
> I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest
Of course we can only guess about that. No doubt the users who flagged the article feel the same way as you. On the other hand, I disagree because I can feel it touching my own intellectual curiosity: it's extraordinary that a 5-year-old could and would do that. Yes it's strongly sentimental, which is not usually our thing here, but it's important for HN to have the occasional story in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram.
This is one of the cases where a moderator's individual taste affects the site. Is that fair? No it is not, but there's an interesting reason to do it anyway: you need some sort of individual judgment affecting the site, in order to prevent it from converging into the brown noise of everyone-put-together. A system like HN can get itself into a rut otherwise, becoming too predictable and too common-denominator. I don't think that I'm the best individual to supply the perturbations; it's just that someone needs to, and for whatever reason I ended up in that role. Since this function is about bumping the system out of its grooves, sort of like the mutations in a genetic algorithm, it probably doesn't matter that much if I do a fabulous job on that point. I just need to not suck at it, and if that were the case, HN would probably be screwed for more significant reasons.
> I've learned to not give a rat's ass about downvoters.
Well. I wouldn't care that much too.
BUT HN comment rely on an invisible karma value and if it is below a certain threshold, the accounts "suffers" aka, certain functions have no visible effect. Then suddenly upvoting other comments/stories doesn't do anything (looks fine to you, but doesn't increase the value for everyone but you) and your comments start with an (invisible) negative score, so you will find your comments instantly on the bottom, almost no matter how many upvotes. It's an intransparent system, and it used to be more transparent, when HN was still open source software. Correct me if I am wrong, but that's how I experienced it and put together the puzzle. I certainly would prefer if there would be only upvotes (like Facebook) and no downvotes/flagging - it doesn't work anymore, the community got too big and changed.
> I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits
You can keep replying - you just need to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page and the reply box will appear there.
> given that, again, the people in the article literally own HN [...] Again, given your incentives, that's worrying.
What people and what incentives are you talking about here?
> that is what upvotes are for
HN has never operated by upvotes alone. It would be a completely different site if it were (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). HN a curated, moderated site and always has been, and we've always been completely open about this.
> This is my 3rd HN account - I've abandoned the others (with lots of karma on them) specifically as a protest for (what I thought were) valid opinions being down voted and dismissed.
Hi there from my 2nd account! I have also abandoned about 1K points of karma, because I thought I should censor myself less and care less about it.
Surprisingly, I didn't get downvoted as much as I expected. Lot of comments I make and consider really silly get high karma, and yet other my comments which I consider to be a really good points are sitting there with 1. The moderation system seems quite random.
I think the big problem of modern moderation systems is the fleeting nature of all those discussions. Having a persistent discussion about a topic is difficult. I think something like Wiki or Stackoverflow works, but only to an extent.
> That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about
You weren't talking about anything other than indicating that you need clarification on what face-to-face cues are missing.
> I’m saying the indicator on the top should be able to be removed if you don’t want to see it.
That's all well and good, but what does that have to do with the aforementioned cues?
> I also don’t really agree that giving a up or down vote really means someone read your message.
Ultimately they can't tell you anything at all other than that something triggered an event that was recorded in a database. But, assuming bots and programmer error are sufficiently filtered out, you can determine that a human was in proximity to your message and as such it is likely that they read it.
Like I said, a reasonable degree of confidence, not an absolute guarantee.
> Even more interestingly, there was negative karma. I don’t even know how this came to be.
Brand new account commenting with very low value but not worth flagging. For example "I read the article yesterday" or "Why is this article even on HN?". I've seen a couple that had negative karma on the first days. Often though it's simply spam and the account soon gets shadow-banned though I don't understand the process that does that. Example user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151
> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive."
> "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago."
Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata?
> "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree."
I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd definitely add to the overall HN experience.
> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.
I really dislike that. But, I have put in CSS so that bad posts don't fade away, and enabled show dead so that all messages can be seen. But at least we have the choice!
> But if I had said that I wouldn't be getting sweet Internet points right now.
Yes, you would. Criticizing and complaining about HN is popular on HN.
I think you nailed it though, it's the "points" thing. You're creating an incentive for people to desperately say witty things to get more points, but when people forcefully try to be witty or helpful they end up being formulaic in the worst way ... they find patterns that people almost always approve of and use that.
I wonder what would happen if you actually hide all the numbers ... all karma/etc is still there, just not visible to the user.
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