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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Pointers are hard
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.
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.
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.
Someone should email dang as that would be a bug or a fundamental design change or a site compromise. hn@ycombinator.com
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.
HN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.
That's probably the submitter's friends voting.
> 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.
Now upvoted, but it was negative
HN has downvotes but you need to have enough karma to access the feature.
Downvotes on comments need a little bit of karma. Now downvotes on submissions, those are not normally doable by random users.
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.
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?
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
right, I have reasonably high karma and I can't downvote submissions, although I can flag them.
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.
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.
Behold: my account has -1 karma.
-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.
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.