Being rude isn't helpful. It's not their fault, it's the unavoidable reality of treating complex social signalling as one-dimensional. At minimum Hacker News would need to separate approval/disapproval signals from assessments of whether a comment is constructive. That’s not a simple change given the obvious abuse vectors. It would require reliably distinguishing good-faith participants from bad actors. It can be done, but it's not easy.
The main reason sites avoid this approach is institutional rather than technical. Adding algorithmic mediation invites accusations of algorithmic bias whenever results are unpopular.[0] Simple manual interventions are often sufficient to nudge community behaviour so that majority outcomes broadly align with the moderators’ priors, without the visibility or accountability costs of a more complex system.
[0] Case in point being X. People routinely accuse the new management of "juicing" the algorithm to favour their politics, when outcomes are adequately explained by the exodus of contributors on the other side. Isolating innate community bias from algorithms is a philosophically impossible problem.
The reason I left there was the down vote brigade that really killed most genuine criticism that disagrees with the sites pre formed opinions on certain topics. So I'm not sure it's a solved problem. Unless it's gotten better since 2011?
I think the specific community and some of the ways it does moderation and voting are seperable and I would love to see the latter tested on an open source discussion platform
When I review the link posted by @dang it says talking about downvotes is boring. Maybe that's why your comment is grey. (This comment should turn grey as well)
It's not 'downvote abuse' if it's working exactly as intended. The community decides what's 'perfectly fine and neutral.' If your comments follow the guidelines, at least they won't get deleted.
This is pretty obviously false? I get downvoted quite frequently on HN for posting comments that go against what people typically think. For instance, I find it quite difficult to discuss the productivity gains of AI because any comment I make saying that AI makes me more productive immediately gets downvotes. I am not making inflammatory comments - my comments with a similar tone about other things that boost my productivity, like Rust or whatever, never get downvoted.
It's genuinely pathetic to care about downvotes. People downvote me all the time and you don't hear me crying about it. People disagreeing with you is simply the price you pay when you decide to have hot takes, and don't say you didn't understand this up front.
I'm here to have interesting conversations. Downvotes naturally inhibit that by pushing my comment out of sight. There is nothing "pathetic" about that.
You'd have to be f'n dumb to think anybody cares about votes, if it was just votes. No it fucking hides the comment and prevents you from replying for a while.
And it's so one sided: If just the first 3-5 people who see your comment downvote it, it can prevent hundreds or thousands from seeing it. Way too easy to bury the truth and sometimes used that way.
And look: I downvoted you but you can't downvote me, because I replied to your comment. How dumb did they want this system to be?
Also, timing matters: Sometimes if I post a ""hOt TaKe"" and it gets downvoted immediately, if I delete it and repost the same shit, right away or at a later time, sometimes it gets upvoted on the 2nd or 3rd time try: Proving that only the first few votes really matter. Even a 2020 AI could game this crap.
Working as intended my ass
And I'm not just talking about my own comments and didn't have a part in this post's conversation, I see this shit happening to others all the time and point it out to dang whenever he talks like HN is some posh upscale establishment above the shenanigans of the rest of the net.
Going gray gets more eyeballs on your comment than if you were to stay at 1, people will actually stop and read whatever it was that's so controversial. You really are caring far too much.
How does that make it “obviously false”? The community doesn’t want to hear about how AI isn’t working for people on every AI article. That’s the current balance of votes in the community.
Don’t read AI articles. The vote balances are a reflection of the current majority opinions. That’s how these voting based social site work, by design.
