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What's going on with DesignerNews?

4 years ago from Riho Kroll, Lead UI/UX Designer

  • Matthew Hollingsworth, 4 years ago

    Howdy!

    I honestly don't believe the downvoting feature is being abused by bots. As for the conversation generally, I can see the argument that downvoting may be doing more harm than good to make sure the best content is the most visible. I also think that people need to be more active and upvote the content they like rather than just down voting the stuff they don't. Just my opinion.

    That being said, we introduced it because it was the feature that was the most requested to try to solve some of the problems that we were facing last year. The hope was that it would self moderate and allow the community a more direct way of hiding the lower quality content. If that's not the right move, then that's fine. All we're looking to do is figure out what the best way to get the conversation going around the most interesting and relevant posts. If removing downvotes is the way to do that, then that's what we'll do.

    So -- question to the group. Do we go ahead and remove the downvotes? (upvote for yes, downvote for no) Any other ideas related to the downvoting?

    15 points
    • Ken Em, 4 years ago

      "All we're looking to do is figure out what the best way to get the conversation going around the most interesting and relevant posts."

      Hasn't this been discussed previously? One of the big ideas was to go back to an invite registration system so that less junk initially makes it onto the site. Another would be to blacklist known domains who spam the site repeatedly.

      As for downvoting, it's clear it's being used in a retaliatory manner. If that behavior can't be reeled in by other means, I say kill it.

      12 points
    • Jim SilvermanJim Silverman, 4 years ago

      the obvious thing to do is remove downvotes while you figure out how to fix the issue. i know self-moderation is key to keeping this running as a cash cow, but the site is currently useless. i can't remember the last time i saw an interesting post here besides these complaints about how the site isn't what it used to be.

      4 points
    • Radley MarxRadley Marx, 4 years ago

      I think HackerNews obscures/hides posts when they hit a certain number of downvotes. Maybe try something similar? We'll see fewer negative comments, plus it'll protect people who might have been unfairly downvoted from taking a big hit.

      I'm also pretty sure HN users cannot vote until they hit certain thresholds. Upvoting requires 10 points (?) while downvoting is after 100. Finally, I think voting is removed after a period of time, like 2 weeks.

      4 points
    • Matthew O'ConnorMatthew O'Connor, 4 years ago

      How about making up/downvote weighted based on the user voting.

      E.G. more karma = higher weight on a vote. So if a post has 10 ups and 10 downs, but the 10 ups were from high karma users, and the downs were from new accounts, the post would show 0, but rate higher in the backend.

      E.G.2 Downvotes are weighted 0 (or close to it) until the user has more karma.

      E.G. A user (bot) that just downvotes without upvoting, or has an overly negative proportion gets weighted down.

      Just some ideas, as I don't believe every vote should be counted equally. Youtube have recently been talking about how their trending page works and they give each video a "temperature" that scores the video on the speed that it's gaining engagement and then ranks the videos on that. Therefore the highest viewed video isn't the highest rated, but the one gaining traction quickest.

      P.S. Please can you fix the comment box! It's like less than 3 lines tall and not expandable (at least for me).

      -3 points