I am in no way worried about internet points. My concern is trying to parse social signalling. Downvotes can express rebuke of undesirable behavior here. Ignoring that fact is not a good thing.
I am very leery of concluding that downvotes can be wholesale ignored simply because I am a demographic outlier and many people will knee jerk disagree with me. That fundamentally breaks an important social feedback loop.
I didn't make it to the leaderboard by assuming I was getting pushback merely because I am female and men here are clearly sexist pigs and I can ignore their rebuke. I put quite a lot of time and effort into sorting out what I could ignore and what I needed to take seriously as an indicator that I needed to do something differently.
Granted, what I did different wasn't necessarily what other people thought I should. But that social feedback loop matters. It never works well to suggest that minorities can and should simply wholesale ignore such feedback. That goes bad places.
It has been extremely helpful to me that really ugly comments aimed at me are often flagged to death. Unfortunately, this sometimes only happens if I point it out. Then my comment pointing it out is often also flagged and/or downvoted.
It has also been extremely helpful that some people give corrective upvotes. I, also, do that to comments that I don't think really deserve to be in the negatives. Getting back to even after being downvoted feels much, much more to me like "Okay, others don't see it that way and your viewpoint is an outlier for this forum" and much less like "Shut up, bitch. No one wants you here anyway."
> My concern is trying to parse social signalling. Downvotes can express rebuke of undesirable behavior here. Ignoring that fact is not a good thing.
My point, which I didn't convey entirely well, is that you can't use downvotes as a signal because there is no agreed upon criteria for when they should be used. Don't agree with the comment? Downvote is fine. Don't think the comment is on topic? Downvote. Have an emotional response to the comment? Downvote. I'm not sure how you can pull signal out of that noise.
I say ignore downvotes because they should not be used as the anti-validation of an idea, thought, or concept. The groupthink can be (and often is) wrong.
> It has been extremely helpful to me that really ugly comments aimed at me are often flagged to death.
Flagging does have guidelines for their use, and ugly comments should (IMHO) be flagged to death. There is a line between disagreement and incivility, but that's what HN mods are for (thread detachment, ban warning, bans) and their attention can be requested with those flags.
With all of that said, I think the HN moderators are fairly astute as to whether someone is participating in good faith, and taking corrective action if they're not. Sorry if we've gone off track. People are hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Assume positive intent until observation proves otherwise.
My point, which I didn't convey entirely well, is that you can't use downvotes as a signal because there is no agreed upon criteria for when they should be used. Don't agree with the comment? Downvote is fine. Don't think the comment is on topic? Downvote. Have an emotional response to the comment? Downvote. I'm not sure how you can pull signal out of that noise.
Very, very carefully and with a low statistical confidence level, relying quite heavily on other factors to inform your conclusions.
As stated above, I think it is problematic to ignore them entirely. I don't see how I could state that more clearly.
I'm aware that I generally think a great deal more about social stuff than most people I meet. I'm aware I do sometimes overthink it and sometimes the answer is "Someone fat fingered it and there really is no social signalling to be derived from it."
I have doubts about what exactly the signal is you're receiving in any case. Superbowl ads are popular. Agatha Christie is popular. Racism is popular. Many, many awful things - indeed, most awful things, are very well liked by most people.
As I see it, the only possible content of votes is popularity - which, when it comes to quality, is a very bad metric. In a relatively small, educated group like HN, it's a little bit less diabolically awful than it might be if it was in, say, 1930's Germany, but it's still the same metric.
I am very leery of concluding that downvotes can be wholesale ignored simply because I am a demographic outlier and many people will knee jerk disagree with me. That fundamentally breaks an important social feedback loop.
I didn't make it to the leaderboard by assuming I was getting pushback merely because I am female and men here are clearly sexist pigs and I can ignore their rebuke. I put quite a lot of time and effort into sorting out what I could ignore and what I needed to take seriously as an indicator that I needed to do something differently.
Granted, what I did different wasn't necessarily what other people thought I should. But that social feedback loop matters. It never works well to suggest that minorities can and should simply wholesale ignore such feedback. That goes bad places.
It has been extremely helpful to me that really ugly comments aimed at me are often flagged to death. Unfortunately, this sometimes only happens if I point it out. Then my comment pointing it out is often also flagged and/or downvoted.
It has also been extremely helpful that some people give corrective upvotes. I, also, do that to comments that I don't think really deserve to be in the negatives. Getting back to even after being downvoted feels much, much more to me like "Okay, others don't see it that way and your viewpoint is an outlier for this forum" and much less like "Shut up, bitch. No one wants you here anyway."