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Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments indiscriminately?
23 points by pondekawna on April 25, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments
I have noticed comments on another HN account being consistently downvoted, once or twice, about 24 hours after they were posted, regardless of the comments' content and the subject matter of the OP. This has been going on for several months.

There may be a number of reasons someone or some group of people would employ this tactic, but is it "fair game" with respect to HN's policies and the sensibilities of HN's readership?



I've noticed the same thing on reddit for as long as I can remember. Obscure comments that are polite, useful, and avoid controversial topics routinely get down to 0 or -1 points.

I know this is all rather meaningless, but something about it is very upsetting to me and I always upvote such comments.

On that note, I like the Stack Overflow model: you have to pay reputation to downvote.


StackOverflow actively deletes content and does so without mercy. That's a more important part of the utility of its model than the mechanics of downvotes. And flagging costs nothing except a daily flag, and the reward for good flags is more flags.


You can always write dang at hn@ycombinator.com when you spot stuff that might be circumventing the rules.


What remedies would HN have for indiscriminate downvoting?


A number of things could be done, though the long-term effect of them might not be desired.

Perhaps the threshold whereby you are permitted to downvote should be raised.

Perhaps HN could allow karma to be 'spent' as downvotes. The act of downvoting would be something that costs you, and unless you're a top 100 commenter that's probably going to make you hesitate.

HN probably already check for and punish the malicious downvoter, i.e. so-and-so said something that I didn't like and so I'm going to go through their historical comments downvoting all. That stuff is really easy to detect.

HN could probably check whether downvotes given by a person occur on a few topics, or for a few individuals. These are probably slightly angry downvotes, they could be reversed.

Ultimately though they'd hit a grey area. There are obvious and easy things to deal with, and once those low hanging fruits are grabbed then everything else is nuanced, it has context and requires understanding to moderate fairly.


Eliminate downvoting. Replace it with "flag as abusive, reason required". Require the reason to be selected from a very short, concise list, e.g., "rascist, mysogynistic, homophobic, espouses violence, spam". Block userids that flag inappropriately.


Removing the person's ability to downvote if they're clearly severely misusing it.


What if it actually is dang/HN that's responsible for these downvotes? I think the downvoting is a new version of "rankbanning" mechanism. Users that are anti-immigration reform are rankbanned on HN (this means that no matter the number of votes on the post, their comments fall down in the page. Users like eli_gottlieb, larrys, etc. are rankbanned for these various reasons; some people detected this and called HN on it, and I think their response is to make a new system which auto-downvotes users... then it makes it seem like their comments are organically falling down the page, rather than being targeted by rankbans.)


If the comments are consistently reflect some political position then the downvotes are not content independent. Moreover irrespective of what the political position is, there are people, including myself, who generally find political partisanship in HN comments detrimental to the community in most cases.

If as you postulate, there is an identifiable faction with a political agenda, then either user, moderator or software intervention would hardly be surprising. There are plenty of places on the internet where promoting a political agenda is considered fair sport. HN, for better or worse, is not among them.

Anyway, if it is Dang, then you can live with it or find someplace else for politically partisan posting.


[deleted]


See blogpost by michaelochurch where he proves this.

Examples of users currently on rankban include larrys, eli_gottlieb, thinkcomp, DanielBMarkham, etc.

This is verifiable quite easily if you go into the comment history of these users. Take eli_gottlieb, for example. Sure, he often voices quasi-Marxist views, but why do his posts on technical things fall down so rapidly? Even below heavily downvoted trolls? Why did his post in 'Who wants to be hired?' so heavily sink to the very bottom?

Lastly, some users who have engaged with HN moderators via email were taken off of rankbans, so they have never denied that these rankban mechanisms exist, they generally remain silent when this is brought up, and try to force the conversation surrounding it to a private medium ("please email us at support@ycombinator.com", etc.)


>Take eli_gottlieb, for example. Sure, he often voices quasi-Marxist views, but why do his posts on technical things fall down so rapidly? Even below heavily downvoted trolls? Why did his post in 'Who wants to be hired?' so heavily sink to the very bottom?

That happened?

Ok, look, I don't count it a good thing, but I'd been assuming it was an automatic mechanism that kicks in when you take too many downvotes to one post. And my views are outright Marxist, not quasi-Marxist, but on some level, figuring out how to speak clearly across the massive inferential gap of "everyone else thinks Elizabeth Warren is solidly leftist and hasn't read all the same background literature as me" is my problem.

And besides which, I did get a number of emails based on that "Who wants to be hired?" post, and based on the "Who's hiring?" post for April I responded to an ad that ended up finding me a very nice new job.

So, overall, thanks for being angry on my behalf, but HN is really here for the business and technical stuff, for which it works well for me, and it really is my job to make my own points clear in a discussion.


I appreciate your thoughts, however it's already been established beyond doubt that rankbanning mechanisms exist and have been in effect for quite some time. I apologize for having called you out, I only did because people usually insist on getting "proof".


Hmm. Interestingly, both of us are being downvoted in this very thread. I spent a whole post saying, "I don't mind automatic moderation mechanisms", and am apparently being downvoted for that.

Well, now I kinda do mind.


There was a time when "average karma" on your recent posts influenced your ranking. This was explicitly mentioned by pg at one point. However, dang has recently stated that avg karma has been removed and wasn't used for much anyway. So who knows?

That being said, downvoting due to disagreement is currently deeply harmful to this site, but the mods seem to be fine with it. Since that's their stance, I've taken to being quite liberal in my use of downvotes. If that's the way it is, it's dumb not to do the same.


[deleted]


Do you really want me to just start linking comments of the users I named? I thought I'd leave that rather simple exercise to you, so I wouldn't be accused of cherry-picking.


edit: DanBC asked for proof, but has deleted the comment in which he asked for proof. This was my reply to that.

Okay.

Let's agree on one assumption: largely, comments on HN will be voted upon fairly. That is to say, trollish comments will be downvoted (and I'm sure you know of the basics, that heavily downvoted comments will sink down). And going further in this continuum, HN voters are intelligent enough to distinguish between good-faith, substantive posts from content-free, low-substance posts -- and vote as such.

By this logic, eli's more substantive posts in a certain comment thread should be higher than its sibling-level posts. But they're consistently not. They're either at the very absolute end, or one above the absolute end.

Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9430757

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421905

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402551

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9370954

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371219

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358256

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9346313

Do you really want me to keep going? Because this is too easy. All I'm doing is going in his comment history page, picking out comments that are substantive, good-faith, clearly non-trollish, clearly non-partisan... and I assume they should be ranked above comments that are better than his by any reasonable criteria, and consistently you find they're either not or only barely above the negatively-scored comments. You can do this exercise for any other user on rankban.


I feel I'm fairly impartial here, as I regularly vote up comments by members that you list as victims. I looked at all the posts you linked, and did not see any evidence for the pattern that you claim. This doesn't mean you are wrong, but I think it at least means it isn't as obvious as you feel it is.

  > Let's agree on one assumption: largely, comments
  > on HN will be voted upon fairly.
I see no strong reason to make that assumption, and further doubt the existence of a universally agreed upon definition of "fairly". I think the simpler explanation is that some comments that you (and I) think are good are downvoted by others who think they are bad.

Perhaps some of these are "vendetta" votes against the individual, but I think most downvotes are based on the content and tone of each individual comment. While there are sometimes extreme short-term swings to the negative, I think the process tends to balance out with extra upvotes for comments the majority considers (rightly or wrongly) unfairly grayed out.

But in my opinion, the result is majority rule, rather than anything universal or conspiratorial.


So, after I made that comment, something pretty fantastic happened: for the links I provided, the rankings changed pretty significantly. Eli's comments were mostly at the very bottom for the links, now they are at the top.

I was going to make an edit note pointing out this change since having made my comment, but chose not to.

Trust me, the rankban mechanisms exist, some really smart users did some tests to confirm it, and a lot of people are in the know by now. We had this dispute about hellbans, shadowbans, and slowbans, that was much easier to prove. Rankban has been studied pretty extensively at this point, and everyone has been convinced of it. The current effort is to study the downvoteban and policy changes.


Why do you assume that? It could just as easily be someone holding a grudge against the user whose comments to you link to and habitually downvotes him or her. That the comments got upvotes after you linked to them isn't strange either; you drawn attention to that they were unfairly downvoted so people want to correct that.


Immigration reform? What's that supposed to mean?

Huh, and here I just thought I took too many downvotes for expressing Marxist views on a site where everyone's supposed to want to be an entrepreneur (ie: petite bourgeois).


larrys has 2 negative-rated comments in the last 59 days (where I stopped looking at more pages), are you sure there really is a pattern? eli_gottlieb looks like he takes contentious stances a bit but his are mostly positive too.

If there is a pattern what makes you think it's dang vs some other group pushing the opposite viewpoint?

I've probably emailed him a couple dozen times with reports of hinky stuff and never felt like he was protecting anything, I would give him the benefit of the doubt and ask him what's happening.


What does the automatic downvoting of comments, regardless of their content, from marked users accomplish? Especially if rogue users are marked by virtue of their controversial opinions, rather than genuine rogue users (spammers, abusive commenters, etc.) That is, presuming this happens at all...


Got a link to the call-out regarding the rankbanning? I've never heard of that happening.


https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/heres-why-pa...


Rampant, indiscriminate downvoting is one of the main reasons I generally dislike reddit and prefer HN. There's a natural decline to subs over there, as anything or anyone who deviates from mainstream opinions gets downvoted into obscurity.

I'm just a casual reader, and I have no expertise on HN's policies, but it definitely offends my sensibilities to see anyone gaming this system.


HN should have built in mechanisms that prevent downvote sprees.

May I ask whatthe username is? (Feel free to email me if you don't want to make it public).


As far as I know, HN's only policy regarding downvotes is that you shouldn't complain about them when you get them.

Although what you describe might expose some flaw in their brigade/voting ring detector, the site and the culture appear to be far more concerned with stopping indiscriminate upvotes than downvotes (which is understandable, given the financial incentives for startups and entrepreneurs to want to game the system.) With downvotes, the more the merrier.

Edit: reading this thread, i'm wondering whether being able to delete posts after they've been replied to isn't a bigger problem than downvoting. That and drive-by edits.


One approach if you notice this (aside from contacting mods of course) is to up-vote the comments...


[deleted]


> If you care then you're doing something wrong.

Seem contradictionary with:

> This is why there are so many people who post with one off accounts. Every post is a risk and there are no controls, no safeties.


[deleted]


You still didn't address the contradiction - when you first claim that "if you care then you're doing something wrong", then where's the risk if you "do it right" and don't care?


Your post seems to read a lot into the OP; more than I did.

> Every post is a risk and there are no controls, no safeties.

A few people have the ability to downvote. Everybody with an account has the ability to upvote.


I wonder (though not enough to go digging, and I'm not sure how I'd do it anyway) how many active posters have the 500 karma necessary for downvotes.


Lots of nerd jealousy exhibits itself via downvoting. I'm sure it's based on insiders and outsiders. I'm also sure many try to repress ideas that might be competitive to their own. I've seen this happen and this is repulsive. Change needs to happen on HN.


You will be punished if you criticize communism and angular.js among other subjects where political correctness and idiotical consensus have more weight than reason. The kool kidz rule with an iron fist, and they know no mercy.


Statistically, downvotes correlate to comments that the community deems low quality. Throwing out buzzwords in lieu of clearly articulated views supported by rationales, reasons, and examples often falls in that category. So do comments that assume that people with contrary views lack reason.

Statistically, the way to avoid downvotes and earn upvotes is with thoughtful well-written comments that contribute to improving or maintaining the quality of HN.


The thing is, despite what many people here seem to think, HN doesn't really have a consensus. If it did, it wouldn't be as paranoid about the Eternal September effect as it is, as one of the symptoms of Eternal September is users not agreeing with and following the consensus set by older members.

What HN does have is a number of mutually opposed consensuses each believing the others are destroying the site by astroturfing and posting irrelevant nonsense. So yes, if you criticize angular.js and communism, you might be punished. But if you criticize capitalism and praise front-end frameworks, someone else will have their knives out for that as well.


You do realize that you're trying to provide a calm, reasonable explanation to a party who believes HN is plagued by communists.


Does karma play a part in the YC selection process?

Restated: who cares?

If any prospective hire told me their handle under the notion that karma indicates anything useful, I'd show them the door.

EDIT: Exactly.


I'd be surprised if it was just to see one's karma points. Reading the actual comments would be more useful.


Yeah, sure. I'm in Illinois, so I can discriminate based on political ideology... totally valuable.

EDIT: My point is this can be a bad idea.


I've seen job ads that ask for your StackOverflow ID, presumably to check your karma total there.


stack overflow can also include code examples, and the quality of questions you ask.




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