The downvoting here has been ridiculous for a while now... I think posts with lots of upvotes and downvotes should be marked as interesting rather than bad.
Yeah right, people will downvote without comment for having a different opinion. I've been told this was intended behaviour, but not exactly why. Happens to everyone, I suppose.
I've recently been voted into the lighter shades for calling out questionable ideology in an article. Even though it was not even a popular news item, I got at least eight or nine downvotes, and still ended up at +2 after waiting a day. That's because other people who read my comment decided to upvote (or at least anti-downvote), as I am wont to do when I see this kind of thing going on.
I also think, you as viewer should at least be able to choose if you want to order by "goodness" (upvotes-downvotes) or by "controversiality"/"interest" (upvotes+downvotes).
There's no such thing as a perfect comment moderation system, and I've seen worse than this one. That said, I've seen far, far better as well. Ultimately this forum exists to serve the interests of the Y Combinator founders, and as long as they don't see anything wrong with perfectly coherent, intelligent, and on point comments being downmodded into oblivion in every single topic, well...what can you do?
Thankfully there are a handful of us here who will upvote to counter the "for the lulz" type downvotes even if we don't always agree with the point of view of the comment itself, but I've noticed this forum (like all Internet forums eventually do) is slowly succumbing to the lowest common denominator crowd.
Seems this has two problems. One is promoting highly-voted on comments only encourages more voting, ensuring those comments stay at the top. Two is that extremely downvoted comments would be raised to the top, regardless of upvotes. It may prove to surface spam, trolling, or other nasties.
Yup, upvote for fact! I realised this like about two minutes after I walked away from my desk! :)
Maybe it would be best to have a "raw stream" which gives both the number of upvotes and downvotes, so you can inject a local js file to reorder stuff according to whatever you find is sensible?
The fact that they have taken 3 odd years to add a few style rules for mobile I have no idea how long completely changing the way hacker news works will take :^)
Customisable, domainable "reddit as a service" should really exist with custom templates etc. ala shopify.
I was thinking the same.
The text was pretty gray without any questions or comments on the content.
I thought it was a good story, with solid arguments.
Or are we aiming for blandness here?