🦞🌯 Lobster Roll

I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but it seems that new users *still* can't figure out how to say "I don't like this post and I wanted to let you know". I'm assuming this is true, because I still see downvote reasons that make absolutely no sense. Is there something we can do to help new users u...

One of the things that I love about Lobsters is the fact that you can attach meaning to downvotes. However, too often I will see people derail conversations with straw man arguments, even when it's fairly obvious that they've missed what the other person was saying. Straw man arguments balloon...

It seems that the limited downvote options are very good at preventing superfluous downvoting, and in my opinion the list of options should be kept as short as possible. Any new option must prove to not be a specific case of an existing option. It seems that the "Parent Misunderstood GP" use case...

Sometimes people accidentally submit the same comment multiple times. It would be great if one of the reasons for downvoting a comment was "duplicate".

Some submitted stories are on topic but just seem to be of low quality. In an ideal world you'd just leave it alone and it would fall off fairly quickly, however the user base is not quite that large yet. Is there a way we could downvote stories for low quality? I suspect "off topic" is currently ge...

I submitted a post called "BBVA acquires Simple", gave it a "news" tag and it got two down votes for being "off-topic". I guess I am a little bit curious what the "news" tag should be for, if not for actual events that changed how the world is?

I think the "low quality" downvote is not helping lobsters, and I think it is hurting it a little bit. I think that it should be removed. It was suggested [two months ago][0], and I think that it was used properly for a week or two, but since then has not been useful. It seems like people are u...

It's been a week since I [removed](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/commit/9535b054907cb80cc78d20badbf4acb462e3ba2a) story downvoting and replaced it with the hide functionality after some [discussion](https://lobste.rs/s/qwfnr0/remove_the_low_quality_downvote). Do you think this has made things b...

A few days ago, I no longer had downvoting as an option on submissions. I didn't think much of it as during my time on lobste.rs, downvoting as come and gone a few times. However, I've noticed stories submitted after that point in time that have been downvoted. I'm curious as to what is going on.

Everything is in the title, but here is some context: I recently noticed some of my comments in a thread were downvoted as "incorrect" for no reason obvious to me. I recognize that participants in a discussion can disagree and I'm of course ok with that. It can even fuel the discussion in a posit...

On occasion, I've found myself wanting to downvote a comment for being unreasonably mean to someone. There really isn't a category for that -- "incorrect" comes closest, but I feel like taxonomically that's for "the statement is incorrect" rather than "the rhetorical style is incorrect". So I reac...

I think it would be nice if the people who downvote comments were exposed. Two people in a bad mood (holding a grudge against you, etc.) are enough to make your comment (and the whole discussion tree) virtually disappear. A recent example for this: https://lobste.rs/c/4wb5vy Though a bit cynical, ...

Why not remove the downvote feature on comments? If a post is seriously bad it can be flagged as spam/abuse or something. Otherwise it just degrades the quality of discussion.

In the past couple days, I've seen several users point out that there's no way to flag story as incorrect, whereas we do have that option for comments.

Lately I've noticed that comments that people disagree with are getting downvoted. This is not the traditional way downvotes are used on Lobste.rs, and I'd hate to see this become the standard. "Incorrect" should be reserved for things that are objectively incorrect (for example, a command that will...

Looks like this policy is now in effect? It would be nice to get announcements of changes like this. Led to some confusion for me this morning when someone said that downvotes were back, but I couldn't see them.

Currently, the available downvote categories for comments [are](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/blob/108baedb39206198e442a5bb0828c644862a79e0/app/models/vote.rb#L6): - Off-topic - Incorrect - Me-too - Troll - Spam It is unclear from this list how comments that can be construed as inap...

Folks! Inspired by [this thread](https://lobste.rs/s/wei3a9/downvote_category_for_inappropriate), I figured it might be time to go and kick off a refresher/discussion on the different downvotes we have here, and how we use them. The current list of downvote types are: * Off-topic * Incorre...

Hiding downvoted comments causes multiple UI/UX problems: - You cannot link to them or to any reply to the comment. Whereas usually when you send a link to a comment Lobsters will scroll to it and highlight it, making it clear to whoever you're sending it to what you're asking them to read, this ...

Lately I've been a bit put off by the abrasive tone in a decent part of the comments, both towards submission content and in reply to other comments. It seems wrong to downvote such comments as "troll", since they often have a sensible core message, even though that comes closest. So, in the spirit ...

the comments section has downvote flags for `me-too` and `spam`, what would you think about adding options like `missing-reference` or (`missing-citation` || `missing-source` || `where's the proof?`) ?

i'd like to propose the idea that stories or comments which are downvoted aren't immediately hidden when reaching the karma threshold, but only after a grace period. lobsters is used in waves, due to the different time-zones. with a grace period these stories/comments would have a chance to be upvot...

In theads like those tagged `ask` the only replies that matter (at first) are those at the top of the tree (the roots of the comment trees, per graph theory). It is mildly annoying (specially on mobile) to scroll past 20 replies to the first comment, then another 15 after the second one, and so o...

If a story is mostly downvoted it doesn't show up on the front page. If a story is heavily-downvoted but upvoted more (say +10 -8), it stays in the front page. These posts usually seem to be incendiary, controversial flamebait that end in everybody getting mad at each other, which generates more "di...

Recently I caught myself worrying about karma points when submitting a new comment. They seem to induce a state of competitiveness for me, making me come up with things to say that may be popularly received. This is not fully coincidental with the general positive attitude that accompanies the excel...

I think what makes lobste.rs unique is that the community is generally thoughtful. Low effort comments that are snarky or negative will degrade this over time. I propose adding a "low effort" tag to identify these comments.

Why is "already posted" a downvote? Isn't that what merging is for?

It felt good to be able to `#karma {display: none;}` in Refined Hacker News to hide the meaningless Internet points. It would be great if there was an option to do the same on the Lobsters settings page, without having to install an extension or keep track of site-specific CSS.

I’ve seen this come up in a few different threads and there doesn’t seem to be a consistent way of handling it. * “Misleading”: the story is relevant to Lobste.rs but it is misleading (particularly its title) about the truth of the situation. This is not an applicable flag for subjective/opinion ...