One of the problems for subreddits is people coming from the front page or from other subreddits, who are not part of the community of that subreddit, and begin to downvote things etc.
HN is lucky in this regard; there is just one HN, not uncountable “sub-HNs”.
Of course people can still come from other places to HN. But to earn downvote privileges here you first need some amount of karma. So hopefully this makes it so that downvote privileges on HN are mostly handed to people who are at least somewhat aligned with the broader community here.
Blocking downvoting hides gamed/promoted comments, so it's a situation that moderators would generally prefer. It's definitely the reason Youtube did it; because it was ditching individual creators without professional production values and trying to promote corporate traditional broadcast content.
50 inauthentic upvotes for something no one likes, while hundreds of frustrated potential downvoters fume. Then someone puts up a reply designed to be upvoted as a proxy for the lack of ability to downvote the inauthentically boosted comment, and that reply is quickly deleted as trolling or a personal attack.
Showing the total number of views like Twitter does now is a positively-vibed kludge for people who hate the whiff of negativity, although all of Twitter's stats seem wonky as hell under new leadership. Still, a low upvote/view ratio can also represent indifference or people not believing they're qualified to comment on something, rather than being a great signal for disapproval.
So you can still game that pretty well by Gish Galloping with a ton of broad references (entire papers or books rather than passages from them or reasonable summaries), and lots of people will disqualify themselves from downvoting because they aren't going to click through to the papers, while others will upvote just because it looks like the commenter is making an effort.
Is that actually possible now? I remember a few years ago, some moderators removed downvoting for people who aren't subscribed to their sub using custom css, but of course it was easy to circumvent and didn't affect mobile users.
codetrotter|2 years ago
HN is lucky in this regard; there is just one HN, not uncountable “sub-HNs”.
Of course people can still come from other places to HN. But to earn downvote privileges here you first need some amount of karma. So hopefully this makes it so that downvote privileges on HN are mostly handed to people who are at least somewhat aligned with the broader community here.
pessimizer|2 years ago
50 inauthentic upvotes for something no one likes, while hundreds of frustrated potential downvoters fume. Then someone puts up a reply designed to be upvoted as a proxy for the lack of ability to downvote the inauthentically boosted comment, and that reply is quickly deleted as trolling or a personal attack.
Showing the total number of views like Twitter does now is a positively-vibed kludge for people who hate the whiff of negativity, although all of Twitter's stats seem wonky as hell under new leadership. Still, a low upvote/view ratio can also represent indifference or people not believing they're qualified to comment on something, rather than being a great signal for disapproval.
So you can still game that pretty well by Gish Galloping with a ton of broad references (entire papers or books rather than passages from them or reasonable summaries), and lots of people will disqualify themselves from downvoting because they aren't going to click through to the papers, while others will upvote just because it looks like the commenter is making an effort.
mahathu|2 years ago
all2|2 years ago
pessimizer|2 years ago