Yes this will be great. Any comment that has personal attacks,abusive language, racial slurs, trolling, off-topic self-promotion/marketing etc. should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Usually, comments like these get a lot of downvotes pretty quickly but I am sure there are a few who upvote those comments as well for their own reasons.
May be comments like those should not be allowed upvotes once it reaches a number of downvotes ? Also, not sure if you guys already do this but really bad comments should be killed automatically once downvoted a certain number of times within a short time span ?
Now, when it comes to unpopular comments which are not necessarily outright bad, I am sure those are tough to program because how do you handle the sudden upvotes and downvotes at the same time ?
I've experienced minority view comments being hit with downvotes, so I'm not a fan of creating permanent statuses...or rather creating coarse rules for applying permanent status.
It is also the case that comments with poor tone can be rehabilitated and getting people to edit poorly presented thoughts to be presented more clearly and directly.
Totally this. I've normally been well received but believing state discrimination is bad regardless of what ones personal beliefs are saw a wave of down votes rain down (re: eich- don't even try to reply to that point, I've given up arguing about that here).
Hopefully the algos take into account that sometimes one just holds views which go against the community but aren't malicious.
> Any comment that has [xyz] should allow downvotes to be more powerful.
Hmm, that's an interesting interpretation of that phrase. I assumed that "make some downvotes more powerful" meant that more weight would be carried by some (algorithmically identified, probably based on how they voted on some manually analyzed comments) users' downvotes, or possibly by downvotes made in certain (algorithmically identified) circumstances. The following paragraph ("The majority of HN users [...] reliably downvote jerks and trolls") makes me pretty sure it's the first interpretation. Still, your comment makes me think.
For an HN change to do anything to comments identified by the fact that they contain "personal attacks, abusive language, [...]", it would have to rely on either manual tagging or algorithmic analysis of comments, and the latter would inevitably be rife with false positives. However, your comment makes me realize another option: have an algorithm somewhat-clumsily tag comments based on their content, and give the tag no direct effect, but make it cause downvotes to that comment to be more heavily weighted. It's still sort of algorithmic censorship, but it has no effect except insofar as humans manually express their intent. ... Maybe useful.
I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments?
I too, tend to post comments that immediately get about 3 downvotes then many more upvotes. It seems like I frequently elicit knee-jerk reactions, but then get support from others. (Who I think of as the smarter readers.)
Once in a while I post a comment that starts out in negative number territory before those smarter readers come along. :) But I think most of those cases are cases I encountered before the most recent algorithm change.
I get that too. When your comment gets negative votes it turns grey and attracts a lot of attention. More people read it out of curiosity to see what's so bad about it. In turn it attracts upvotes.
Yes this will be great. Any comment that has personal attacks,abusive language, racial slurs, trolling, off-topic self-promotion/marketing etc. should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Usually, comments like these get a lot of downvotes pretty quickly but I am sure there are a few who upvote those comments as well for their own reasons.
May be comments like those should not be allowed upvotes once it reaches a number of downvotes ? Also, not sure if you guys already do this but really bad comments should be killed automatically once downvoted a certain number of times within a short time span ?
Now, when it comes to unpopular comments which are not necessarily outright bad, I am sure those are tough to program because how do you handle the sudden upvotes and downvotes at the same time ?