A HN post with negative points – how?

ddonohoe about 3 hours ago 27 commentsRead Article on news.ycombinator.com

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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

nomilk•about 1 hour ago

When I click on 'A HN post with negative points – how?' from the HN homepage (currently ranked 12 for me), it goes to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 instead of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 (I found the latter via google search for the title string)

I suspect the same is happening for some others too, based on the comments on that article.

Bizarre!

Update: 2 minutes later and the link from the hn home page now correctly leads to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316

Never seen that happen before.

sebastianmestre•about 1 hour ago

This post you are commenting on (*6316) is a link post that points to the other one (*4663)

The normal behavior for link posts in HN is that the title takes you to the link address, not to the post address.

To enter the post address, you need to hit the "discuss"/"x comments" button.

So, what you describe is HN working as expected AFAICT, it's just a bit counterintuitive because it's an HN post linking to another, which is uncommon

madibo3156•24 minutes ago

Pointers are hard

edu•21 minutes ago

This post has been added as a link, instead of a comment one. Then when you click on it you go the linked page.

LGTM

OuterVale•about 1 hour ago

Original poster of the thread here.

Doesn't appear to be negative anymore, but here is what it looked like: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652

Screenshot was taken at 06:50 UTC.

Imustaskforhelp•about 1 hour ago

Do you have any idea on what caused it?

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663

This seems to have gone to -10 and then went up according to this, which matches what your comment had said that you were seeing -10 on your android.

Edit: (actually it had gone all the way to -15) and seems that this website has been still stuck at -8 upvotes at the moment of this comment and this link has also been the proof for me to finally see/confirm this as the submission now has positive upvotes.

OuterVale•about 1 hour ago

It is hardly a satisfying answer, but I haven't the foggiest what caused it. I submitted it the same as I've submitted many other submissions in the past.

hans-l•6 minutes ago

Maybe there is an API to downvote posts and some bots found it?

gchamonlive•36 minutes ago

Take this post for instance, the link to the upvote is https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48106316&how=up&auth=26...

If you change `how=up` to `how=down` it downvotes the post.

I tried it once, didn't change the vote count, but I issued the inverse operation with `how=un` and the vote count went up, so I'm guessing someone upvoted at the same time I downvoted. That or it doesn't really work like it says it does, but it does respond with a 301 followed by an OK, so I think this works.

Bender•about 1 hour ago

Someone should email dang as that would be a bug or a fundamental design change or a site compromise. hn@ycombinator.com

paulnpace•about 1 hour ago

HN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

helsinkiandrew•about 1 hour ago

> I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

Is that people looking at the new page and seeing/upvoting your post and then it falls off the front.

yuppiepuppie•13 minutes ago

Ive been curating HN Arcade for a few months now. One thing I noticed is the vast amount of ShowHN games that get 5 karma points. I was thinking this was some sort of boosting system that low karma ShowHN posts get.

svara•25 minutes ago

That's probably the submitter's friends voting.

helsinkiandrew•about 2 hours ago

Now upvoted, but it was negative

rzmmm•about 2 hours ago

HN has downvotes but you need to have enough karma to access the feature.

tux3•about 2 hours ago

Downvotes on comments need a little bit of karma. Now downvotes on submissions, those are not normally doable by random users.

GaryBluto•about 1 hour ago

Perhaps some kind of auto-downranking system used for moderation of specific topics or thigns (without explicitly removing them) that accidentally targeted said post? Just idle speculation.

kotaKat•24 minutes ago

which is weird, because normally they just ratelimit you to oblivion and back - not even allow the post in the first place. or just set you to be automatically dead.

unless this is just a glitch of early ranking to get posts onto frontpage that posts start with an invisible negative amount of points and get upvoted out of new and the invisible negatives to frontpage? (eg all posts start out with some value of negative points between -10 and 0 or something and the new votes will help nudge it out to the frontpage?)

Unai•about 1 hour ago

That's correct AFAIK, submissions can't be downvoted.

If anyone's interested, here's a list of undocumented HN features/rules (although I don't know how up to date it is): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

bryanrasmussen•about 1 hour ago

right, I have reasonably high karma and I can't downvote submissions, although I can flag them.

Imustaskforhelp•about 1 hour ago

Yea you can't downvote submissions.

Now, the post linked itself has been upvoted so it doesn't have negative submissions but it seems to have had been the case.

I don't quite understand how posts can have negative points :-/

A hunch but maybe a post which got confused as comment id of some other comment which got downvoted so you had negative karma, but I am unsure of this spooky action at a distance. It would be really interesting to know the reason behind it.

notepad0x90•44 minutes ago

Karma systems in general are opaque. The assumed or advertised behavior is never fully accurate, if it was, it would be all too easy to game.

hrak0•about 2 hours ago

Behold: my account has -1 karma.

ramon156•about 1 hour ago

-5 now! Made it -4 for you

Although negative profiles have always been a thing.

You cannot easily downvote submissions, in fact I'm not even sure if you can.

1970-01-01•38 minutes ago

Bots. I've posted many popular and unpopular takes here. Down always comes first, and as the bot votes evap into the ether, the true human take is almost always revealed after an hour or two.

hoppyhoppy2•15 minutes ago

As stated elsewhere in this discussion: downvotes exist for comments on HN, but not for submissions, as far as anyone is aware, which is what makes it puzzling.