Tell HN: upvotes don't register if you take the time to read the article

[hyp0]

Instead, you have to refresh the comments page. This is caused by the specific upvote hyperlink becoming stale.

Unfortunately, the consequence is a systematic bias towards knee-jerk votes based on the title; and towards people who quickly skim the article, as opposed to taking the time for careful reading and reflection.

[kogir]

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, but as stated it's false. Vote links don't expire, and require no saved state on the server. In fact, they never change.

If you're still seeing strange behavior, please email me at [email protected], since I'd like to track it down and fix it.

[hyp0]

It's exactly as e12e describes: if you've had the page open for a while, and click an upvote, then the arrow disappears and it looks like you have voted.

But if you refresh the page, you'll see that the arrow is still there. If you upvote now, on this fresh page, the upvote is counted - you can tell, because if you refresh the page now, the arrow will be gone. (This proves to me that I haven't been disenfranchised or banned in some way - I can vote, it just has to be on a fresh page.)

I get the same behaviour on both firefox desktop, and the stock android browser.

Why not try it, and see if you get the same behaviour?

Of course, I don't know the details of how HN implements voting - it just behaves as if the link expires in some way...

For a regular link on HN, if you leave it too long, it will explicitly say "link expired". But for upvotes, you don't see that message (presumably it is what gets returned to the up arrow though).

[e12e]

I think the main issue is that upvotes will seem to work, even if the link's timed out (ajax magic!).

So for me, that often look at the front page, open up a handful of interesting stories (comment pages) in new tabs -- read a few of the stories -- and maybe go an errand -- and then come back and decide, yup, I'll "save" (and upvote) those stories, because they were intersting -- I'll click the upvote, the arrow dissappears -- and then I'll reload the front page and see that my upvotes weren't registered after all.

I'm not asking hn to cater to my (perhaps eccentric) use-pattern -- but there should be some feedback that voting isn't registered (eg: an on timeout in the page, that disables the vote-arrow a little while before the link expires).

[kogir]

What I'm saying is that the link can't time out.

[jon2512chua]

Any idea what the upper limit is? Pretty sure an hour's fine, as I usually open a few article together with their respective comments page and then go through them at leisure. I would upvote after I finish reading, then reload the comments page to see the latest comments, and the upvotes stay.

[_pmf_]

> the consequence is a systematic bias towards knee-jerk votes based on the title

That's the success recipe of all social news sites (all news in general, in fact).

[justintocci]

wow, that is going to be a challenge to fix.