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.
(I like the style, too. It's good to see Helvetica get a deserved reevaluation, now that the millennial generation is aging out of even being able to imagine we are cool. Or ever were.)
My own profile on this website may help elucidate my perspective on the matter. I'm both shadowbanned and have applied a hundred-year "noprocrast" countdown, and it's frankly embarrassing how little that actually does to get the website not to accept those few contributions I still care to make.
It is as if the folks who run this place were getting a little desperate! - both for the "crowdsourced" unpaid work that goes into making this website worthy of interest, and for the last dwindling taste of what was once termed the "hacker spirit" by fringey weirdo ideologues like Stallman and Barlow.
(The idea that HTTP GET requests must be idempotent for safety, for example, has totally passed by this site's implementors and maintainers, or maybe never made a dent. Hence the subject of this very thread!)
In any case I regret the misplaced comment, and apologize for the dismay it likely caused. This website is embarrassing, and has just about run its course. Yours is not embarrassing at all, and I hope you're just getting started!
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 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.
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.
Ha ha ha.
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.
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.
Here's a snapshot from when the count was 0 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycom...
Mr. Gackle isn't really all that frightening, you know. There's no need to fear talking with him.
Is that people looking at the new page and seeing/upvoting your post and then it falls off the front.
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.
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.
Although negative profiles have always been a thing.
You cannot easily downvote submissions, in fact I'm not even sure if you can.
