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bellowsgulch | on: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
Generally speaking, HN seems to have more of a problem now of people just drive-by downvoting things because they don't like someone's opinion.

I know you hate the supposedly "noob" comment, as you've put it over the years, and as it is written in the guidelines, that HN is or isn't turning into Reddit, but this aspect of HN makes it indistinguishable to me as a long-time reader here whether you accept it from your perspective as a long-time moderator or not.

Because HN moderation allows people to downvote or flag things simply because they don't like something, it will always be like Reddit. There is no distinguishing feature to separate it otherwise.

One thing that would, would be forcing users to say why they downvoted or flagged something.

Edit: If you spend years saying "no, no, it isn't true" to people, you're just sticking your fingers in your ears. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Aachen | parent | next
Yeah, even if this is very hard to get it perfect, I keep thinking there has to exist a better voting system than what we have. We can do a presumed step in the right direction and evaluate.

- To give an outlet for (dis)agreement: We could have two arrows on each post, one for agree/disagree, the other for 'legitimate post that helps the conversation'. Someone posting wrong info rarely helps the conversation, but also often enough it's an opinion matter and you can disagree while leaving the latter arrow alone. The latter determines sort order (most helpful first); the former is displayed as a fun fact on posts that are deemed helpful (author sees exact counts just like now)

- A system that seems to work better: A local tech site uses a system where you assign a quality level to a post. The short labels are (translated) "flamebait", "irrelevant but well-intentioned", "relevant but well-known", "useful contribution", and "exceptionally useful". Each one has a numerical value, ranging from -1 to +3, and it'll take the median of all votes (with a half-vote bias towards +1 I think, but that's an implementation detail). If your median comes out to -1, it's collapsed by default; at +2 and +3, it gets highlighted. Incorporating opinion into your quality assessment is a problem here, too, but then you might get +0 instead of +1 and not (like on HN) a score of -7. Not just does that feel a lot more fair, the system and its UI also just makes more clear to everyone that you're supposed to objectively score the comments on the mentioned guidelines (it shows a description every time you hover over a vote option)

DANmode | parent | next
It’s not necessarily that it isn’t true - the most common problem voters have is that it just isn’t interesting or unique.
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bluefirebrand | parent | next
Don't you need a certain number of upvotes on your account before you can even use the downvote button? I seem to remember that being a thing, has it changed?

The fact you can't just make an account, log in and start downvoting is already a massive improvement over Reddit

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abustamam | parent
To add to this, it does make me think what the difference between down vote and flag is. I mean down vote is obviously the numerical opposite of upvote but why else would people downvote if it not be inappropriate for the forum? (Other than the obvious "I dont like this commenter/their opinion")

Just thinking out loud I suppose.