As was a bit to be expected, the “low quality” downvote option is now being used as a catch-all to downvote things users don’t want to see rather than using filters to just ignore those stories.
I like that HN forbids downvoting by new users who don’t have enough karma. It discourages downvoting things before users learn how the site operates, and encourages users to post comments or good stories to get enough karma.
What are your thoughts on implementing such a restriction?
A rate limit on new submissions may also be helpful. My personal threshold for “low quality” is apt to get higher and higher when many similar posts are submitted in short order.
Yes, please. The same two “people” posting from the same blog and/or consulting web site is getting old.
I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to prevent downvotes for “green” users (as marked on /u/). It would give new people some time to get used to the community here.
I’ve implemented that as a compromise. No karma needed, just wait a week and downvote privileges are granted. If it still is a problem in the future, the privileges can be granted based on karma.
I feel like instead of a time based delay, users should gain the downvote ability after reaching a certain level of karma.
If it’s time based, people don’t have control over it and might get bored and not come back. Not that the goal should be discouraging people from returning.
Which is why making it karma based would be better. It would encourage users to contribute to the community on order to gain the privilege of downvoting. An extension of this idea is rate limiting downvotes based on karma. Users with lower karma can only downvote once a day, etc
How about if down voting cost karma?
No, it will discourage users from downvoting spam content, etc.
I don’t see what value karma currently has. It’s just a bauble right now. If it isn’t a status symbol but rather a measure of trust earned and to then be used, it doesn’t have to discourage.
HN requires a base level of karma to take certain actions after which, it has no value and you see the “I got karma to burn” response.
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So that the moderators don’t have to do all of the policing.
To make it abundantly clear since DyslexicAtheist/valbonneconsulting (both accounts belong to one person) is going on a tirade accusing me of hiding something, I received private messages this morning from both of his accounts asking to delete each account.
Since the software didn’t have account deletion functionality yet, I implemented it and manually marked both accounts for deletion. This causes all of the user’s comments to be marked for deletion, which is why they appear as “Comment removed by author”. I believe this is pretty standard for any discussion site which has to retain some user and post information to preserve threading, but he is apparently upset that his comments appear to be deleted without him manually deleting them.
Perhaps just [comment deleted]? The joy of the passive voice is it leaves the actor unspecified.
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I disagree. A post with no upvotes means it wasn’t very interesting to anyone, so either nobody read it or they read it and just didn’t care enough to upvote it. It’s not spam and isn’t off-topic, it’s just not that great. There are plenty of posts on this site that never got any upvotes that don’t deserve to be downvoted. Downvoting should be reserved for actual spam, off-topic for the tags or site in general, etc.
Right, so as for the rest of your comments, perhaps you should just take the time to learn how the community operates before complaining and saying everything should change.
Why not separate out some of the downvotes into a flag system? After a certain number of flags or flags vs up votes a moderating request shows up?
Tangential, but you might consider changing your username. I’d prefer to believe I’m talking with a person and not a company.
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I think the community agrees that upvoting your own content and sockpuppeting is not desirable. However, it might make sense to codify it.
I propose two new rules:
A. One human, one account.
B. No ring-voting
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Makes sense to me.