[corysama]

Hi, Peter. Welcome to Hacker News!

If you get downvoted, it's because HN community takes a somewhat strict approach when moderating comments that contribute noise to the conversation. "Nice article!" comments are routinely downvoted. As is sarcasm, witticisms, memes, references and other styles of comments that occur frequently but do not contribute to the discussion. It's a knowingly doomed attempt to hold back the flood of noise that covers Reddit.

[Others]

That last part feels a little aggressive in this case... The Wikipedia article he linked to is actually pretty interesting, relevant, and appropriate. Sure the presentation is tongue and cheek, but so are half of the comments on this site...

[corysama]

> but so are half of the comments on this site...

Yeah... There are a lot more jokes and sarcasm being voted up on HN these days. It's always been around, but it used to be voted down a lot more. Can't say I'm happy about that change. It seems the fate of all vote-based communities to eventually devolve into Digg 3.0...

[tray5]

I agree that his comment didn't add all that much, but I think the snark on your end was a bit more distracting and irrelevant than his comment, and honestly his comment was kind of on topic. This site is thankfully strictly moderated and usually the discussion in the comments is very on topic, jumping at the chance to be smug like that degrades the quality of conversation much farther then being semi-relevant with a bit of a joke. Downvote and move on

[corysama]

I started making comments like this after the tenth time seeing a green account make a joke, get downvoted to hell and reply "WTF! Why is Hacker News so mean to noobs!" (Peter was green an hour ago)

[petersjt014]

I certainly understand where you're coming from and what you're probably thinking of (Eternal September is the name I know it by)--but I did try to make my comment both relevant and funny. I personally think I did okay there, but I'm fine with disagreement on that part.

[corysama]

I don't disagree. I shoulda waited to see if you were downvoted first before commenting. Meanwhile, I thought my comment was nice. I used to get a lot of support for a slightly less polite version of the same message. But, apparently today a lot of people read it as aggressive, snarky and smug :P

That's the problem when forums have a lot of sarcasm. It becomes even more difficult for anyone to judge your intentions. When people in "witty" forums say mean/dumb things they get surprised by how many readers think they are serious. And, some of them respond with mean/dumb things in seriousness. And, in not-seriousness... Usually there's an indistinguishable mix. And, even when you say something constructive, a lot of people will assume a negative intention and get upset that you are so disparaging.

So, yeah. Every few months I get in the mood to welcome a witty noob. Doesn't always go well :P

[taneq]

Wait, green means new?

[tomsmeding]

I believe it means "throwaway"

[honestoHeminway]

Proposed solution - a colour picker of Information quality as vote tool? Factual disputed - Factual accurat? (Red - Black) Information Rich - Information Poor? (Black - Faded Text)

[coldtea]

That's what Slashdot did. Didn't help very much in the general case.

[pbhjpbhj]

I think the Slashdot voting system was excellent and loved the multi-dimension approach. In what way did/do you feel it didn't work.

FWIW Steam has a second voting dimension for humour in users game reviews.

[honestoHeminway]

Maybee analyse the discussion following with a NN for quality indicators? Long statements, comenting part of the original post and a absence of sarcasm/name calling should allow for a good evaluation of productive posts. Maybee the bot could even Merge uniform opionion posts into a stack, so that ideology biased posts shrink from view and the interesting nuggets show up earlier.

[coldtea]

I'm more for KISS and YAGNI.

This sounds too convoluted a process.

We have vote up and vote down buttons. If the people like and upvote a funny (but trivial) comment, in the end it's their prerogative.

[walterstucco]

Slashdot is still a better community than HN