As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected!
I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of
Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4)
But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments
I always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.
I've been meaning to ask for quite a while now: What exactly is "flag" supposed to indicate?
I assume it's something more specific than "dislike". I take it to mean something along the lines of, "I think this is (sneaky) spam", or "This does not fit on a technology news site, even tangentially.". Or, perhaps something broader like, "I can't describe what the problem is, but this submission/comment should be reviewed by a moderator."
It's just never been particularly clear what the intention of it is.
> The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away. But there's a new 'hide' link for people to click if they'd just like not to see a story.
I meant to reply to John who was asking where someone was getting the 32768 number from. No idea if it's true, but that's the significance of that number.
Yeah that's the lore page does look like there's no downvoting submissions then and people are just trolling.
They come in mobs or waves, too. Historically, they show up first while the reasonable people show up later, sometimes reversing those votes. Others here have noted that phenomenon.
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.
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.
Maybe there is an API to downvote posts and some bots found it?
Edit: Actually I would wager that it’s some kind of automatic downvoting when the system detects bad votes or comments. Something like “friends shouldn’t vote”. Since we see voting on posts and not comments we could see it go negative.
I suspect there’s downweights the system can apply - and if five people voted it up, the -5 downweight was applied, and then four of the upvotes were removed, you’d end up at -4.
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.
It has happened to me and I'm not coordinating with anyone. I have also experienced very rapidly upvoted submissions flagged, then I notified HN admins, had the post unflagged, but after that time it was deep past page 12 and got like 5 more votes over 24 hours.
I haven't seen the negative votes on submissions that people are reporting within this submission, but anyone who thinks HN isn't a target for myriad bad actors employing every means available to them to manipulate votes in whatever direction is a fool.
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.
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.
Seeing as how HN normally automatically strips "how" out of a title such that "How I Journal" becomes "I Journal", having both "how" and "why" in the title may have been just too much for the modbot to handle on a Tuesday morning.
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?)
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.
On HN I almost never downvote. On reddit this was different. Not sure why but I feel that on HN karma is so much harder to get that I don't want to be an obstacle. On reddit I could more easily downvote. It also was easier to get karma. (Reddit is annoying with regards to its censorship though. That is one arbitrary censorship over there ...)
But that means more people will get enough karma to be able to downvote, and they likely won't share the same ideals as you so they will downvote more often, making it even harder than it already is for new users.
This reminds me, I've wanted to make a bot to automatically upvote the most downvoted posts in a thread with the HN api. I'd call it anti-echochamber.HN or something like that.
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.
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.
Users aren't in agreement of the needed karma threshold for the downvote button to appear on submissions, though.
There seems to be a way through URL-params, as mentioned in another comment[0], but I'd consider that method an auth-related bug, rather than an existing downvote feature for submissions.
I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4)
But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments
there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.
I've been meaning to ask for quite a while now: What exactly is "flag" supposed to indicate?
I assume it's something more specific than "dislike". I take it to mean something along the lines of, "I think this is (sneaky) spam", or "This does not fit on a technology news site, even tangentially.". Or, perhaps something broader like, "I can't describe what the problem is, but this submission/comment should be reviewed by a moderator."
It's just never been particularly clear what the intention of it is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809
> Although submissions cannot be downvoted, [...]
[0]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...
Yeah that's the lore page does look like there's no downvoting submissions then and people are just trolling.
only one of you can be right! where did you find that specific number?
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.
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.
Edit: Actually I would wager that it’s some kind of automatic downvoting when the system detects bad votes or comments. Something like “friends shouldn’t vote”. Since we see voting on posts and not comments we could see it go negative.
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.
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
LGTM
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.
Here's a snapshot from when the count was 0 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycom...
Is that people looking at the new page and seeing/upvoting your post and then it falls off the front.
I haven't seen the negative votes on submissions that people are reporting within this submission, but anyone who thinks HN isn't a target for myriad bad actors employing every means available to them to manipulate votes in whatever direction is a fool.
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?)
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
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.
There seems to be a way through URL-params, as mentioned in another comment[0], but I'd consider that method an auth-related bug, rather than an existing downvote feature for submissions.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107572
Although negative profiles have always been a thing.
You cannot easily downvote submissions, in fact I'm not even sure if you can.