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Not when used correctly. I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now. Downvoting is not to be used to show disappro

Not when used correctly. I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now. Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content. If you use downvotes to show your disapproval and add nothing to the conversation, then I suppose you're right they are tantamount to DH0 comments, but when used correctly they can (in theory anyway!) help provide better, more intellectually stimulating conversations by burying useless banter.

elblanco 17y ago
Perhaps a better system would be to tally both up and downvotes rather than upvote-downvotes. This way comments with a score of 0 might still have 1000 upvotes and a 1000 downvotes, showing that it is both a popular as well as a polarizing opinion.
- chrischen 17y ago
  That's a good idea. I think the central issue with the voting system is that it's supposed to be a mechanism for determining quality, but it's being used for determining popularity of viewpoints. And popularity does not correlate with validity. So some way to clearly define and separate mechanisms for these purposes would resolve the issue.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    popularity does not correlate with validity. On the other hand, if this site was seeded initially with thoughtful participants (as I believe it was before I got here, and as I believe it continues to be by visitors who come here from pg's personal website), being popular (upvoted) rather than unpopular (downvoted) may be a fairly reliable mark of a comment worth reading. Everyone here reads a lot of the best of what is on the Web, and observes the behavior of other users here, and I think there are many examples here of highly upvoted comments (or, from another point of view, participants with high karma) being signals of good quality. It may be that there are some equally clear examples here of comments with many downvotes, all the way down to the system-imposed limit of a score of -4, or users with very little karma, being examples of poor quality. After edit: so my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here, so even if not every popular comment is factually valid, and not every factually valid comment is popular, noting popularity can still be a guide to busy readers here about what to devote time to reading.
    - jazzdev 17y ago
      my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here Unfortunately, this doesn't scale. It is true now and that makes HN valuable. As HN grows there may be more people who express opinions that are not thoughtful and well reasoned, and then popularity no longer corresponds with useful. I think that's the problem that pg is trying to solve.
chrischen 17y ago
The issue is that in equilibrium, it is not used correctly. It's better to design the system to model natural behavior than theoretical behavior.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Precisely, pg has put some interesting controls on the site based on lessons learned at other places. For example, new users can only post so fast, and can't downvote until they hit some karma threshold. The idea being that new users are forced to observe the community conventions on the site and decide if they want to conform to them. By the time they "grow up" they can then move about with greater and greater freedom. This seems to work pretty well regarding arguments and comments. However, as this topic most clearly demonstrates, the pain point on the site is not the nature of the comments or forms of argument, it's the up/downvote problem. The theory was that higher quality posts would naturally end up with higher scores from more upvotes. Lessons learned from this site should show that to not be entirely true.
ajb 17y ago
There is a generic problem with mechanisms of this nature: it is difficult for a crowd to learn. I saw an excellent example of this at the Festival of Lights in Lyon earlier this month: During one exhibit, there was a giant game of 'breakout' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29) projected onto a large ferris wheel. The crowd was supposed to play it by all waving orange lights. If you remember breakout, you know that there is a limit on the speed at which the bat is allowed to move, so if you let the bat get too far from where the ball is going to be, there will not be enough time to fix it before the ball hits the floor. It was impossible for the crowd to learn this, however, because an individual in the crowd gets no noticeable feedback from their actions once they have been averaged with those of the rest of the crowd.
tokenadult 17y ago
I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now. There is a previous comment by pg on this subject http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 that I have had bookmarked for a long time now that says, I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. As we can see from this thread itself, pg is currently considering a different approach to marking comments for disagreement by multidimensional flagging. I am happy to adapt to any rule that this site sets up. For the moment, there is NOT a rule here that "Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content." On my part, I mostly only downvote to disagree if there are thread-contribution-dimension reasons to disfavor the comment as well, and of course I upvote a lot to show agreement to try to emphasize the positive, but there currently isn't a rule about this here from the keyboard of the site management.

elblanco 17y ago

Perhaps a better system would be to tally both up and downvotes rather than upvote-downvotes. This way comments with a score of 0 might still have 1000 upvotes and a 1000 downvotes, showing that it is both a popular as well as a polarizing opinion.

chrischen 17y ago
That's a good idea. I think the central issue with the voting system is that it's supposed to be a mechanism for determining quality, but it's being used for determining popularity of viewpoints. And popularity does not correlate with validity. So some way to clearly define and separate mechanisms for these purposes would resolve the issue.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  popularity does not correlate with validity. On the other hand, if this site was seeded initially with thoughtful participants (as I believe it was before I got here, and as I believe it continues to be by visitors who come here from pg's personal website), being popular (upvoted) rather than unpopular (downvoted) may be a fairly reliable mark of a comment worth reading. Everyone here reads a lot of the best of what is on the Web, and observes the behavior of other users here, and I think there are many examples here of highly upvoted comments (or, from another point of view, participants with high karma) being signals of good quality. It may be that there are some equally clear examples here of comments with many downvotes, all the way down to the system-imposed limit of a score of -4, or users with very little karma, being examples of poor quality. After edit: so my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here, so even if not every popular comment is factually valid, and not every factually valid comment is popular, noting popularity can still be a guide to busy readers here about what to devote time to reading.
  - jazzdev 17y ago
    my assertion, in friendly disagreement with you, is that popularity DOES correlate with validity to a useful degree here Unfortunately, this doesn't scale. It is true now and that makes HN valuable. As HN grows there may be more people who express opinions that are not thoughtful and well reasoned, and then popularity no longer corresponds with useful. I think that's the problem that pg is trying to solve.

chrischen 17y ago

The issue is that in equilibrium, it is not used correctly. It's better to design the system to model natural behavior than theoretical behavior.

elblanco 17y ago
Precisely, pg has put some interesting controls on the site based on lessons learned at other places. For example, new users can only post so fast, and can't downvote until they hit some karma threshold. The idea being that new users are forced to observe the community conventions on the site and decide if they want to conform to them. By the time they "grow up" they can then move about with greater and greater freedom. This seems to work pretty well regarding arguments and comments. However, as this topic most clearly demonstrates, the pain point on the site is not the nature of the comments or forms of argument, it's the up/downvote problem. The theory was that higher quality posts would naturally end up with higher scores from more upvotes. Lessons learned from this site should show that to not be entirely true.

ajb 17y ago

There is a generic problem with mechanisms of this nature: it is difficult for a crowd to learn. I saw an excellent example of this at the Festival of Lights in Lyon earlier this month: During one exhibit, there was a giant game of 'breakout' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29) projected onto a large ferris wheel. The crowd was supposed to play it by all waving orange lights. If you remember breakout, you know that there is a limit on the speed at which the bat is allowed to move, so if you let the bat get too far from where the ball is going to be, there will not be enough time to fix it before the ball hits the floor. It was impossible for the crowd to learn this, however, because an individual in the crowd gets no noticeable feedback from their actions once they have been averaged with those of the rest of the crowd.

tokenadult 17y ago

I thought this was on some sort of FAQ page or the guidelines but couldn't find it now. There is a previous comment by pg on this subject http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 that I have had bookmarked for a long time now that says, I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. As we can see from this thread itself, pg is currently considering a different approach to marking comments for disagreement by multidimensional flagging. I am happy to adapt to any rule that this site sets up. For the moment, there is NOT a rule here that "Downvoting is not to be used to show disapproval/disagreement, but rather to filter out messages that add nothing to the conversation by being off-topic or just devoid of content." On my part, I mostly only downvote to disagree if there are thread-contribution-dimension reasons to disfavor the comment as well, and of course I upvote a lot to show agreement to try to emphasize the positive, but there currently isn't a rule about this here from the keyboard of the site management.