alt.hn

5/12/2026 at 10:29:24 AM

A HN post with negative points – how?

 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663

by donohoe

5/12/2026 at 12:05:22 PM

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.

by OuterVale

5/12/2026 at 12:09:19 PM

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.

by Imustaskforhelp

5/12/2026 at 12:24:57 PM

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.

by OuterVale

5/12/2026 at 3:23:23 PM

Not at all related, but I love your work! Your photographs betray a subtle, curious, particular, and respectful eye. Keep shooting!

by throwanem

5/12/2026 at 11:59:28 PM

Thanks. That is really nice of you to say.

by OuterVale

5/12/2026 at 1:24:40 PM

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.

by hans-l

5/12/2026 at 2:13:07 PM

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.

by bombcar

5/12/2026 at 12:48:18 PM

A guess would be it got a story flag -4 points.

Then something happened that overrode the show score, which is not the same as the real score for stories.

Like you did a edit? (after it got one flag, which would not be seen)

(Random guess)

[Edit] Up votes wouldn't change it until it got back to zero since -3 is not valid.

The external -10 might be too many comments with a low score is not good

by aaron695

5/12/2026 at 1:38:14 PM

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

by lifeisstillgood

5/12/2026 at 1:46:05 PM

the interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment.

there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.

by john_strinlai

5/12/2026 at 1:57:53 PM

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.

by jermaustin1

5/12/2026 at 2:00:24 PM

I have not hit it yet, if there is one. Only options are upvoting, flagging, etc.

by mplanchard

5/12/2026 at 2:06:29 PM

Same. Maybe flags count as -1 after enough?

by MBCook

5/12/2026 at 4:40:41 PM

83,000 karma and no downvote button on submissions for me.

I think that a submission might get negative votes for being flagged, though, so if 11 people hit the "flag" button that might take it to -10.

by nostrademons

5/12/2026 at 7:44:27 PM

A bit offtopic but seeing your karma, I remembered that sometime ago I had made a website which finds how many words a person has written on hackernews and leaderboard stats around it.

I got curious so I checked it with your account and you are globally #23 in that you have written most words and you have written 1,822,427 words which is like 6+ games of thrones (if one GOT has around 300k words)

I also just saw that you have been on hackernews since feb 2007

Your hackernews account is older than me as I was born in 2008 ;)

I am curious how did you find hackernews and what you made stick to the platform for so long and are you perhaps some user number x of hackernews itself like say user number 230 of hackernews, I would be curious to find this data if you might know.

I do wonder if there are any tips in general life that you have for a person like me and I would love to hear your answers!

Thanks for reading and have a nice day :-D

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/

by Imustaskforhelp

5/12/2026 at 2:39:19 PM

(Open question to anyone reading this)

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.

by registeredcorn

5/12/2026 at 2:44:10 PM

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

by benoau

5/12/2026 at 2:50:56 PM

Ah, interesting. Thanks!

by registeredcorn

5/12/2026 at 3:59:03 PM

Regardless of the intended purpose. The most common use case is super dislike.

by tstrimple

5/12/2026 at 3:33:12 PM

FWIW: I have over 135K karma and I can't downvote submissions.

by ColinWright

5/12/2026 at 2:08:06 PM

Yes there is.

by fortran77

5/12/2026 at 2:07:25 PM

[flagged]

by belthesar

5/12/2026 at 3:34:23 PM

I think you are mistaken.

FWIW: I have over 135K karma and I can't downvote submissions.

by ColinWright

5/12/2026 at 2:12:51 PM

i have 2000 karma and i am not able to downvote submissions.

by john_strinlai

5/12/2026 at 3:12:51 PM

Are you able to downvote stories?

by c22

5/12/2026 at 3:44:53 PM

Nope

by thunderbong

5/12/2026 at 2:44:49 PM

Nope I have 10k

by michaelmrose

5/12/2026 at 2:09:27 PM

[flagged]

by fortran77

5/12/2026 at 2:45:26 PM

It's the maximum value of a signed 16 bit integer. But there's a GitHub page that explains hn lore.

by tnelsond4

5/12/2026 at 2:53:28 PM

What HN-lore page are you referring to? This[0] one explicitly states:

> Although submissions cannot be downvoted, [...]

[0]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...

by whilenot-dev

5/12/2026 at 3:11:32 PM

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.

by tnelsond4

5/12/2026 at 3:45:19 PM

Nope

by thunderbong

5/12/2026 at 7:32:51 PM

> But in the end HN is biased for positivity

Ha ha ha.

by genxy

5/12/2026 at 2:14:13 PM

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.

by nickpsecurity

5/13/2026 at 10:07:03 AM

dang:

>Looks like we have a race condition that someone triggered by using a script to rapidly upvote and then unvote the submission. I'm not sure whether to be grateful or pissed. Perhaps I'll settle on grateful once I've fixed it.

>In the meantime, please don't anybody else do this!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114191

by r721

5/12/2026 at 12:21:05 PM

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.

by nomilk

5/12/2026 at 12:28:22 PM

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

by sebastianmestre

5/12/2026 at 1:06:49 PM

Pointers are hard

by madibo3156

5/12/2026 at 1:09:37 PM

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

by edu

5/12/2026 at 12:54:16 PM

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.

by gchamonlive

5/12/2026 at 6:42:43 PM

I tried this and had no change with either down or the subsequent un, using my own upvote link's token.

Perhaps someone coincidentally upvoted the post at the same time you attempted to undown the submission, rather than upvoting when you attemped to downvote it.

by LocalH

5/12/2026 at 6:50:58 PM

Good to know! So the hypothesis is false.

by gchamonlive

5/12/2026 at 2:26:58 PM

This.

by 1970-01-01

5/12/2026 at 1:30:19 PM

I bet some anti-spam measure was inadvertently tripped that dampened the submission popularity, while a bug failed to conceal it.

by benoau

5/12/2026 at 12:21:36 PM

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

by Bender

5/12/2026 at 3:55:21 PM

Emailed him shortly after this comment.

by Bender

5/12/2026 at 2:55:35 PM

Someone? Who are we going to choose?

by nathanmills

5/12/2026 at 3:20:11 PM

You needn't; I just did.

Mr. Gackle isn't really all that frightening, you know. There's no need to fear talking with him.

by throwanem

5/12/2026 at 12:03:54 PM

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

by paulnpace

5/12/2026 at 12:09:56 PM

> 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.

by helsinkiandrew

5/12/2026 at 2:32:46 PM

That is many people's posts when I am reviewing new submissions.

by paulnpace

5/12/2026 at 1:05:02 PM

That's probably the submitter's friends voting.

by svara

5/12/2026 at 2:45:07 PM

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.

by paulnpace

5/12/2026 at 1:17:14 PM

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.

by yuppiepuppie

5/12/2026 at 11:53:14 AM

Now upvoted, but it was negative

by helsinkiandrew

5/12/2026 at 11:55:33 AM

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

by rzmmm

5/12/2026 at 12:00:40 PM

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

by tux3

5/12/2026 at 12:07:36 PM

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.

by GaryBluto

5/12/2026 at 1:52:08 PM

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.

by pavon

5/12/2026 at 1:06:46 PM

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?)

by kotaKat

5/12/2026 at 12:04:44 PM

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

by bryanrasmussen

5/12/2026 at 12:05:47 PM

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.

by Imustaskforhelp

5/12/2026 at 1:47:32 PM

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 ...)

by shevy-java

5/12/2026 at 3:32:52 PM

I downvote obvious fallacies and bad faith. And people who fan the flames in a thread. I don’t downvote posts because I disagree with them, but that’s just me. (I don’t upvote because I agree either)

Overall, it is common to see greyed posts downvoted for questionable reasons, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead post that did not deserve it. So overall it seems to work and I avoid overthinking it.

by kergonath

5/12/2026 at 3:07:08 PM

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.

by nathanmills

5/12/2026 at 2:55:20 PM

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.

by Der_Einzige

5/12/2026 at 3:21:42 PM

I surf with showdead on and often find myself upvoting grey comments that don't seem factually incorrect or rude, perhaps just espousing an unpopular opinion. But man, a lot of grey comments are correctly moderated. I'd leave the most downvoted ones alone for sure.

by c22

5/12/2026 at 3:36:49 PM

When you press the downvote button, the points decrease. This number can go below zero, into the negatives.

by distantsounds

5/12/2026 at 12:46:41 PM

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.

by notepad0x90

5/12/2026 at 11:58:20 AM

[flagged]

by hrak0

5/12/2026 at 12:17:42 PM

-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.

by ramon156

5/12/2026 at 12:52:34 PM

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.

by 1970-01-01

5/12/2026 at 3:41:23 PM

According to tomhow, there isn't and there isn't going to be one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46298942

by ThrowawayR2

5/12/2026 at 4:24:23 PM

Explain how the submission got to less than 1 without a downvote then.

by 1970-01-01

5/12/2026 at 9:47:37 PM

How this submission got negative votes is the oddity that people are trying to figure out. Regular users can't downvote, and I don't see a reason why it'd be a moderator action for this post, so I'd assume some bug/edge-case in vote handling.

No other /newest submissions (current or that I've previously seen) have negative score. I checked a bunch of your submissions (using https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663) and none appear to have ever been negative.

It's possible that this issue was happened to be caused by a bot, but what you're describing as a regular occurrence ("Down always comes first") is probably a misrecollection about comment downvotes rather than submission downvotes - or about reddit which does have submission downvotes.

by Ukv

5/12/2026 at 5:04:42 PM

Do you realize that tomhow is an admin on this site?

Anyway, it doesn't have to be bots... maybe some 3rd-party client app is implementing the downvoting of submissions via (unofficial) API calls.

by whilenot-dev

5/12/2026 at 5:16:22 PM

None of that changes the root cause. Bots are downvoting.

by 1970-01-01

5/12/2026 at 1:15:46 PM

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.

by hoppyhoppy2

5/12/2026 at 2:10:51 PM

[flagged]

by 1970-01-01

5/12/2026 at 3:02:47 PM

Then they should show us a screenshot of the interface that allows it.

by nickthegreek

5/12/2026 at 2:54:02 PM

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107572

by whilenot-dev

5/12/2026 at 4:23:35 PM

Whatever it is, the bots learned it and they actively exploit it, hence this entire post.

by 1970-01-01