Upvotes on comments, or on submissions? How do you know they don't count? What tests have you done? With no more information than just "my votes don't work" it's like a user saying "the internet is broken."
HN has lots of features to help protect itself against spam, sock puppets, voting rings, and more. Maybe you inadvertently tripped something, maybe you've fallen foul of some detector, but there's no chance of working it out when all you say is "It's broken."
It would be rather trivial (if not constructive) to make a throw away account, submit something, and upvote it. It'd be pretty easy to correlate any upvote with an a personal upvote (not to mention how easy it would be to "disprove" that upvotes worked: no change on reload) ?
I'd argue this whole shadow ban idea is a bit of a dead end, and it should just list this stuff on the profile page or something.
I know it doesnt work because I click upvote and it doesnt assign any points while a friend sitting right next to me could do the same thing and assign points. Both he and I have under 100 Karma points
Spammers aggressively try to game email. Likewise, promoters aggressively try to game HN.
How do promoters try to game HN?
Voting Rings
If you're not familiar with that term, a voting ring is basically a group of people (or robot accounts) that collude to upvote certain stories.
It shouldn't be surprising that Paul Graham would take a similar approach to Voting Rings as he did to Spam.
In one of your comments, you said: "I know it doesnt work because I click upvote and it doesnt assign any points while a friend sitting right next to me could do the same thing and assign points."
If you and another account always seem to upvote the same stories, yet no one else seems to upvote them at the same rate, then it starts to look like a voting ring.
Just like with spam, there will be false positives. I've heard of this happening to folks who have an audience that are also largely HN users. When they send out a new post, then many of that audience upvotes the post, but since it's often the same people, the voting-ring protections get triggered and the post will quickly drop off the front-page.
There are probably many signals that pg uses to detect voting rings. I'm sure they're not perfect, but I'm glad they're there. Otherwise HN would be overrun by aggressive promoters and HN would quickly lose its usefulness.
Advice to promoters: 1) create valuable content that helps users be awesome (no one cares how awesome your brand is), 2) submit it to HN, and 3) don't ask your audience to upvote it
Many promoters just can't help themselves and will do #3 anyways. Just be forewarned that you will likely trigger the voting-ring protections and will be shooting yourself in the foot.
Unfortunately, voting rings work. They work because the number of people actually reading the new page is vastly smaller than the number of posts being submitted.
I actually did a semi-controlled experiment a while back and submitted a series of blog posts I was writing, all on the same topic. There were seven of them all together. On four of them, I asked a small number (a single digit) of people to upvote the story. For the other three, I didn't. All four of the gamed stories ended up near the top of the home page. The other three didn't get a single upvote. If you do the math you will find that this is a statistically significant result. (And I have since submitted many other stories. Not a single one has gotten more than one upvote.)
The trick is to get enough upvotes early enough to get onto the home page. It doesn't take much, it just has to be fast. Once you're on the home page, people actually pay attention and you get a lot of organic traffic. But your odds of getting off the new page at all unless you game the system are extremely small.
Some changes that would help the situation:
1. Provide some incentive for people to read the new page. I'm not sure what this incentive would be, but the fact that very few people read the new page is the nub of the problem.
2. Incorporate the submitter's karma into the ranking of the new page to allow stories submitted by high-karma users to stay there longer. Depending on the time of day, a story typically has between 30 minutes and an hour before it drops off the new page, after which it will surely never be noticed.
3. Don't start the timer on a story when it is submitted. Instead, start it only after some time has elapsed (at least a few hours) or it gets its first upvote.
4. Make it cost something (like a karma point) to submit a story. Throttle the cost so that submitting a large number of stories in a short period of time costs more.
Asked my gf to post two stories that she sent to me, because I found them interesting. When she did, I naturally upvoted them... from the same IP. Now I seem to have lost my voting privileges.
I get why systems like that exists, I just dont understand how I got caught in that flag. If we are sitting in a coworking space and all come from the IP, does that flag us as a ring?
> If we are sitting in a coworking space and all come from the IP, does that flag us as a ring?
Quite probably. If you know a good way to distinguish between such a circumstance and a deliberate voting ring then let the site designers know!
I'd just avoid voting on your collegues/friends' stuff. HN is so highly trafficed that if it was going to get near the front page it would anyway without those few extra votes and if it wasn't it wouldn't anyway even with those few extra votes.
EDIT: Actually, cancel that last bit. I see some of the items on the front page currently don't seem to have many points so a few friends voting could make a difference. Though I'd still refrain as most major sites that include user voting will have this sort of voting ring detection so you will get nobbled at some point.
Are you sure you lost them? Scanning through the posts here, it seems a lot of people just don't know where to look. You have to click "link" on a comment, or reply to the comment to be taken to the text editor screen. From either of these screens, the "flag" option appears.
Now, whether this is good or bad UX is up to the admins to decide. I assume "flag" is buried a little bit to prevent abuses of it, just as replying to someone's replies to yourself is delayed a little bit to prevent rapidfire back-and-forths.
I lost my flagging ability long ago. I habitually flagged political stories that others upvoted. Apparently going against the crowd flagged me for flagging. Heh.
Not the way I'd design it to work, but then it's not my site.
Yeah I've wondered about that. I've flagged some BS political stories too and wondered if I was endangering my flagging privileges by disagreeing. I don't really care, but interesting to know.
I have flagging, in the ~1000 karma range, so it still exists. I've hardly ever used it.
I'm not sure that flagging is meant for shooting down topic matter you'd rather not see on HN. And that's why the ability is removed from those who overuse it. Flagging is for blatant spam or personal attacks or other abuses, it's not a content-selection mechanism. Upvotes select content.
AFAIK there's no "flag" on comments, just stories (conversely, there's no downvotes for stories, just comments). Or maybe I just don't have enough karma to see it (or I lost it long ago).
An other weird thing about HN: sometimes I can't see the "reply" link on a comment for a while, even if I reload.
Like, I wanted to reply to your post earlier but I couldn't even though ch0wn had already posted his own. I don't understand what triggers that behaviour.
There is flag on both submissions and comments. There is downvote on comments, but not on submissions. The "Reply" link is deliberately delayed on deep threads to help mitigate flame wars. These are all well-known features.
I agree it is not obvious to those who first come across these things. However, it is very well-known to anyone who searches for the countless threads about this very issue. Sadly, most people just ask the question without first researching the issue, and that then prompts several demonstrably incorrect answers.
It's also in the FAQ and the guidelines if you read hard enough, but some of the subtleties of the questions are not explained there (probably because they were fluid for a while).
AFAIK there's no "flag" on comments, just stories (conversely, there's no downvotes for stories, just comments). Or maybe I just don't have enough karma to see it (or I lost it long ago).
There were flag links on both comments and stories before they disappeared for me.
An other weird thing about HN: sometimes I can't see the "reply" link on a comment for a while, even if I reload.
It's a feature to help prevent long flamewar threads.
> Do you mean there if a karma threshold on something else?
There's a karma threshold for downvoting and flagging. Those are not new but I ventured a guess that there may now be a similar threshold for upvoting.
I thought it was "common knowledge" that there's a 500 karma threshold to upvote? However, I couldn't find anything "official" right now, other than a reference under:
Given that most people in this thread complaining about their upvotes not registering seem to have a karma below 500 it might well be that. If that's the case I'm surprised they didn't make it explicit by removing the arrow altogether (like the down arrow is not displayed when you don't have enough karma for it). Seems a bit deceitful.
Same here. Lost it on the day when Jobs died trying to get at least something different on the front page.
Also I've been long suspecting that my downvotes don't work either. I have the arrows and they are clickable, but they seem to do anything. Pretty annoying actually.
I noticed that with a new user account the upvote arrow disappears when I click it, but if I refresh the page it comes back and you can see that it didn't really upvote.
I have to refresh the page to see the score change (FF24, ubuntu). Also, if the page is too old (e.g. if you read the article and spent time considering it), then your vote might not register.
So, refresh (to get a fresh page), vote, and refresh again (to see your vote reflected in the score).
OTOH, HN sometimes experiments with karma thresholds and various tricks. So that might be it if the above doesn't work.
Completely off-topic: 6ren is there a good way to send you a private message? I'd love to send you a quick note if you don't mind sharing some way to get into contact (im stukearney@gmail.com)
Roughly, the number of upvotes on their submissions and comments, minus the number of downvotes. (The numbers won't exactly match up, because some votes aren't counted to prevent various types of abuse.)
All your links submitted after the JustFab thing are dead. The two threads discussing that issue also vanished off the front page shortly after they gained traction. Seems like a case of manual censorship?
Even if your upvotes are not getting counted, you may still want to consider upvoting articles that you like so that they get added to saved stories. Click your name in the upper right corner and then click saved stories. Everything that you've ever upvoted should appear there. That may explain why the arrow still appears for you.
I would first like to say, holy crap. I posted this early in the morning and went for a run, showered, came into work and just checked expecting only a couple of answers. I am really stoked to see so many people taking an active interest. Working on answering each post now.
Your comments page - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ressaid1 - shows no comments posted in the past 39 days. If you were 'dead' I'd see them but as dead so it seems something unusual is going on here if you have posted a comment in the past 39 days.
My upvotes also don't "count" anymore best as I can tell. I assumed it was either because A. I upvoted too much stuff and overflowed a counter somewhere, or B. accidentally getting flagged for spamming for upvoting too much.
The thing is, since HN doesn't have a separate "save" feature, upvoting something is the only way to "save" a link for later. And I'm an obsessive bookmarker, so I upvote anything that looks even vaguely interesting, if I don't have time to read it right now. shrug
It might be that the Karma system here depends on the validation of the user by the community. HN might keep a score of how many upvotes other users have given you and not allow your upvotes to count until you hit a certain threshold. Account age might be taken into account to limit new ones from upvoting each other for to grant privileges.
Hmm, I guess that 1 upvote does not always equal 1.0 karma. Maybe you could find out more about that by reading through the HN source code ...
Also maybe your voting behavior tripped off some heuristic. If I was trying to prevent spam I'd probably disable voting privileges for accounts that regularly upvote submissions that get flagged/banned.
I guess that 1 upvote does not always equal 1.0 karma.
It definitely doesn't when it comes to posts. I believe it does for comments however.
PG's always been exceptionally protective and elusive when it comes to how karma is handled. I assume it's to deter people/organisations from gaming the system.
I've been on HN for years and I still have absolutely no clue how upvotes are handled for posts.
As a relatively new user, I tried to post a job listing in the October Who's Hiring thread only to find that my comment doesn't show up when viewing the thread as an anon user. Yet, I see plenty of job postings made by brand new accounts.
I think that there is no actual system in place, and loss of functions- even hell-banning- rests entirely upon the whims of the mods. No matter what contradictory explanations are given by said mods.
No doubt the exceptionally high score for this post is primarily down to folk upvoting to check if they have the same problem.