From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format.
In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years
On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.
One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
Although the level of discourse on HN is (in some ways) better than your average article-comment-section, I think the reason negative feedback cycles don't happen as much here as they might elsewhere is just the minimum number of posts before you can even downvote. You have to carry a grudge a long way to get to act on it here.
The low volume of users on this site also makes it unappealing to children, so you are far less likely to interact with them. Places like reddit and IGN have very different demographics. Who you expect to read your comment and who actually is reading it are very different in larger communities.
Perhaps a better way to make upvoting/downvoting work better would be to use rules such as some of the ones described on r/NeutralPolitics [1]. Here's the summary:
Downvoting: reserve downvotes for posts that are explicitly breaking subreddit rules. Do not downvote someone simply because you disagree with them.
Upvoting: legitimate evidence, solid reasoning, or respectful discourse; Upvote someone admitting that they are wrong. Upvote outstanding use of logic where evidence can’t be had
That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior. You don't upvote/downvote because you agree, but because you see that there's something good about it, whether or not you share the same point of view.
That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior.
It might, if "legitimate" evidence, "solid" reasoning, and "respectful" discourse weren't all subjective terms where people's subjective impression will be substantially influenced by agreement/disagreement with the thesis of the post.
Comments
From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format.
In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years
On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
And I don't keep an enemies list.
One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
I definitely notice that forums that have avatars have much higher rates of ego-driven commenting than forums that do not.
Parenthetically, I'd go even farther than HN has gone and make the reader navigate to another page to see the username.
Although the level of discourse on HN is (in some ways) better than your average article-comment-section, I think the reason negative feedback cycles don't happen as much here as they might elsewhere is just the minimum number of posts before you can even downvote. You have to carry a grudge a long way to get to act on it here.
The low volume of users on this site also makes it unappealing to children, so you are far less likely to interact with them. Places like reddit and IGN have very different demographics. Who you expect to read your comment and who actually is reading it are very different in larger communities.
Perhaps a better way to make upvoting/downvoting work better would be to use rules such as some of the ones described on r/NeutralPolitics [1]. Here's the summary:
That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior. You don't upvote/downvote because you agree, but because you see that there's something good about it, whether or not you share the same point of view.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/ptgxf/meta_...
It might, if "legitimate" evidence, "solid" reasoning, and "respectful" discourse weren't all subjective terms where people's subjective impression will be substantially influenced by agreement/disagreement with the thesis of the post.