The importance of upvoting

Consider two users: Bob browses HN and upvotes about 1000 articles a month. Jill, on the other hand, upvotes only articles she considers to be exceptional and upvotes about 1 article a month.<p>Should Bob have 1000 times more influence than Jill? Personally, I&#x27;d like to see what was so special about that one article Jill voted for, but a naive upvote mechanic considers it just a single vote, and is not noteworthy when compared with Bob&#x27;s thousands upon thousands of votes. It would be nice is Jill&#x27;s single vote was equal to 1000 votes from Bob.<p>Do any systems like this exist? It sounds good in theory, but I wonder how it would stand up to abuse?

Most of the time I don&#x27;t upvote because the link isn&#x27;t good enough. It&#x27;s very rare that I see a link I think is really worth people&#x27;s time - maybe once or twice a week.<p>I could lower my bar, but the real problem is the binary nature of the vote. There&#x27;s content that I really want more of, and then there&#x27;s content that&#x27;s better than average. If I vote both with my single vote, I&#x27;m not delivering the right level of information. It&#x27;s almost like I want a supervote that can only be applied once a day, or once a week, that&#x27;s worth more than one normal vote.

I believe the author is unaware of the 1% rule on internet culture and argues that people shouldn&#x27;t follow it. Making an impassioned plea isn&#x27;t going to do much. The internet is full of people that don&#x27;t want to interact and only consume . <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)</a>

I don&#x27;t know, this seems a bit like taunting Goodhart&#x27;s law? [1] I&#x27;m thankful that voting on Hacker News works as well as it does; maybe we shouldn&#x27;t mess with it.<p>The Hacker News moderators are doing what they can to provide a quality website. To the extent your voting helps them achieve their goals, it&#x27;s useful. On the other hand, encouraging more noise voters won&#x27;t improve things; it will mean that quality submissions need more votes to break through the clutter, and the moderators will have to look for alternate ranking signals.<p>Still, it probably wouldn&#x27;t hurt to look at the &#x27;new&#x27; page more often.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goodhart&#x27;s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goodhart&#x27;s_law</a>

I think this is a misidentification of the true problem.<p>We&#x27;re dependent on voting to determine &quot;best&quot; or &quot;most important&quot;. Even if the sampling were statistically valid, populism does not equate to quality.<p>We should have automated systems for scoring articles on vectors of likely importance, relevance, accuracy and literacy so we can apply these to aggregators in conjunction with basic populism.<p>Because populism is easily gamed and has many known degenerate cases that are not fixed by throwing more populism at it.

It feels nice to spot something on the new list, give it its first upvote, and then the next day see it on the front page.<p>I&#x27;ve also seen a lot of interesting stuff on &#x2F;newest that never makes it to the front page. Sometimes stuff that I personally find useful, even if it isn&#x27;t relevant to the community at large.<p>Also, pro tip: page 2 has new posts with a handful of upvotes where one or two more votes can easily propel them to the front page. You can make a difference!

I just sent 100 more visitors to your website. (And it took way more than half a second - I had to read the entire post before doing so.)<p>Btw, tldr; &quot;I know it&#x27;s fun to dismiss social networks as frivolous, <i>but link aggregators are a special type of social network that we should value higher.</i>&quot;

I always felt &quot;down-voting&quot; should cost something. Maybe 1 karma&#x2F;point&#x2F;etc. so that people who would down-vote should feel they are invested enough to do so. As it is right now, down voting is too easy and detached to other&#x27;s thoughts even after reading it.<p>Fundamentally, this is to create some value towards the point system so that people would put more thought into posting as well as down-voting. If someone wants the ability to down-vote, then they should write meaningful comments to gather the karma needed to do so.

I&#x27;m not sure I <i>totally</i> buy the concept that &#x27;good&#x27; up&#x2F;down-voting saves people time. I rarely come to hacker news thinking &quot;I&#x27;ll just check the top n posts, filtering out posts below a certain score threshold&quot;; typically, I&#x27;m thinking &quot;What are the posts I can spend X time reading instead of doing something else?&quot;.

It&#x27;s very ok to abstain if you have no informed opinion or interest.<p>The flaws of the system won&#x27;t be fixed by gaming it even more.<p>That this type of information retrieval is portrayed as mankind&#x27;s last hope, makes me miss <i>Google Reader</i> even more than already.<p>For lack of an better alternative HN is more of a baseline I check my twitter feed against.

Amusingly, more people than normal who&#x27;ve read the blog post are going to upvote this post.

I think I agree with the sentiment, but try to ignore the statistics.<p>I think the average user is more than 10x as likely to click a 1k link than 100pt.<p>Personally, if it&#x27;s massively upvoted I&#x27;ll click and skim even if it doesn&#x27;t sound like it will interest me - if it&#x27;s that important to the community, I &#x27;<i>should</i>&#x27;, right?

I feel that ranks should be a combination of explicit and implicit activity.<p>If a story link is followed a certain number of times, if a certain amount of time is spent on a page, etc. these indicators might contribute to an “implicit upvote” for a story or contribute in some way to its rank regardless of explicit up-votes. It’s also really important to have a good way to recognize and consolidate duplicates and reward them equally.<p>Activity in a comment subtree should also implicitly increase the rank of a comment. I have occasionally seen comments that were mysteriously not upvoted even once, despite spawning multiple levels of subtree discussion; in such case, isn’t the comment implicitly “more valuable” by creating a lengthy discussion, even if no one ever explicitly upvoted it?

Funny enough to shadowfacts comment, I think when you remind people that you can share&#x2F;upvote&#x2F;promote, you generally get a higher return rate. At least, that&#x27;s what common wisdom seems to say. For example, if at the end of a blog post you say &quot;tell us your story about x&quot; where it relates to the post, you&#x27;re more likely to get responses than if you didn&#x27;t. This of course doesn&#x27;t help bad content that you don&#x27;t reach the end of.

No. Don&#x27;t even try to guilt me into action.<p>The current landscape may favor you more if I take certain actions, but that does NOT obligate me at all.

Why haven&#x27;t any link aggregator sites tried automating the voting system?<p>Take something like view time and commenting&#x2F;opening the article as a vote and perhaps still have a flag function to help remove off topic or illegal content.<p>Manual voting seems like such a ham-fisted approach at finding what people want, and it disproportionately rewards those who vote over more passive observers.

Maybe I am out of date, but to the best of my knowledge, with my usage pattern I <i>can&#x27;t</i> upvote in a meaningful way.<p>I am assuming it&#x27;s still correct that upvoting on &#x2F;newest is the most effective (or only) way to do it.<p>Just looked this up, I joined this site 2061 days ago, before that I was a logged out reader for a while. I don&#x27;t think I visited &#x2F;newest more than 10 times - I only read via RSS, and usually only once or twice per week - skimming over a lot, reading the comments for many - usually 100 - 300 posts at a time. If HN ever stops providing a RSS feed, I am probably gone anyway.<p>This is not a critique towards HN, but the OP maybe takes his own usage pattern as the default (maybe it is, I wouldn&#x27;t know).

There&#x27;s no evidence supporting the idea that every upvote brings additional 100 visitors to the upvoted link. Even if there&#x27;s such evidence, it&#x27;s not immediately clear from the article. The author doesn&#x27;t consider the fact that some upvotes don&#x27;t increase the point counter. There are other major flaws. The article doesn&#x27;t disclose methodology used to obtain the results. It just makes the claim that an article with 500 points generates 50,000 visits, so every point is 100 visits, and expects us to believe it and take it as a fact. The author doesn&#x27;t bother to prove that fact.

There also seems to be a mechanism where high-karma users boost a story more than one point. It would support Julian&#x27;s point even more. I was at one point just boosting stuff in New that I thought people would be interested in across various topics based on prior front page results.

Upvoting on Facebook definitely does impact distribution. More likes translate to more people seeing it in their feed. This of course has a cumulative effect and leads to more re-shares. Virality is highly dependent on initial likes.

why not get 1 upvote automatically just upon opening&#x2F;viewing? (please forgive me because i do not understand the entire process(and did not search to find if there is one))

For <i>members</i>, change HN to display new posts as the default page, replacing the &quot;new&quot; navigation item with &quot;top&quot;

indifference <i>is</i> voting.

Link agregators have a free rider problem. Just like democracies without mandatory voting.