6 ms·

There's a lot in what you say. In the next couple months I'm going to be experimenting with solutions to this and related problems. The general plan will be t

by pg 17y ago

There's a lot in what you say. In the next couple months I'm going to be experimenting with solutions to this and related problems. The general plan will be to de-emphasize points and to add more types of flags. For comments, there will be at least flags for incivility, fluff, and spam. Spammers, as now, will get banned instantly. People who accumulate a lot of flags for incivility may also get banned for some set period.

bugs 17y ago
I think points do a good job of positioning comments in a thread as you can easily pick out the common consensus, one thing that would be nice if it was encouraged is leaving comments when you downvote so that maybe a discussion can occur. (Obviously however there are some comments that do not warrant discussion but this probably would end up fitting into the types of flags.)
- chrischen 17y ago
  On the downside exposing points can lead to bias. You could easily make up your mind based on the points. It discourages individual thinking, and frankly if someone is too lazy to analyze and filter out the good comments for him/herself do we really want his/her opinion? It can result in less accurate filtering. Popular comments may be voted up simply because someone sees the amount of points, skims the comment with perhaps a bare understanding, and thinks "hey, this guy's probably right." And then, ding, a possibly unwarranted upvote. The same effect can apply to an unpopular comment, but the effect is probably stronger for unpopular comments, which is why I think it is so dangerous. An unpopular comment would suffer more of this effect because people who disagree may build up more negative emotions, and this emotion may lead to more impulsive, irrational behavior making them more susceptible to the bias. Seeing a comment he/she disagree with, and seeing that a bunch of people agree with him/her about disagreeing gives that person a sense of approval which erodes his/her ability to truly evaluate a dissenting comment objectively.
ghshephard 17y ago
Flags would be wonderful. There are many times where I've seen a wonderfully reasoned argument that I _completely_ disagree with (usually because of the premises of the argument). I am always conflicted - do I A) Downvote the comment because the I think the conclusions are grossly wrong. B) Upvote the comment because I'm so enamored of the elegance of the argument, it's contribution to the conversation, and how it made me think more carefully about my own argument. C) Ignore it - and unjustly not provide my reasoned critique on what clearly took a great deal of effort by the author. If I could only Flag it as "DISAGREE WITH CONCLUSION" and "ADDS TO CONVERSATION" then everything would be good. The four flags that I think would be useful would be: FLUFF vs CONTRIBUTES AGREE vs DISAGREE SPAM INCIVIL That way, I can now simultaneously rank an article as both contributing, as well as disagreeing with the conclusion. An author may then write an unpopular, but carefully reasoned discourse, and still enjoy the positive feedback of his peers on his contribution, even if he is challenging their perspectives.
- berntb 17y ago
  Personally, I'd prefer if you'd write a comment and explain why the argument is totally wrong. (And preferably starting with praising what you approve of; that would give the right tone to any answers you get.) Edit: On consideration, I should have followed my own advice and started this with: "A well reasoned, well written and interesting argument. But why aren't you adding the alternative of ANSWERING the argument instead of just moderating?!"
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Personally, I'd prefer if you'd write a comment and explain why the argument is totally wrong. I sometimes invite people to write such comments if they disagree with me. Often, when a comment makes a factual assertion for which I know of no evidence, I will reply to ask for the evidence. I will say things such as "Citations, please?" or "What are some examples of this?" or in some other way ask for the participant to back up the statement to which I reply. But there are cases when a comment is totally wrong, and not a good contribution to the thread besides (which has always been a generally supported basis for downvoting), and it's just too much bother to post a countering reply or to ask follow-up questions. In such cases, I don't feel embarrassed at all in downvoting the wrong comment. The site founder pg, who announced news of changes he is considering in flagging options on HN in this thread, wrote 681 days ago, 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. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 Voting and flagging options today are still much as they were then, and so for the moment I don't think it's a bad idea to downvote for disagreement, particularly if a comment has other undesirable characteristics. I will happily adapt to a new system if the site management implements a new system. And I invite participants who disagree with this reply of mine to write a comment and explain why my argument is totally wrong, if that is not too much trouble to you.
chrischen 17y ago
I'd like to suggest another experiment for a feature. If the comment author's name is hidden unless you click on the link to the comment, so that by default it isn't shown, it might be able to reduce bias on the initial read or comment. It would reduce the tendencies of people to, at the very least, unwillingly be affected by the commenter's name. Personally I never even notice the person's name unless I'm going back and forth, so I'm not even sure how much effect this has.
- mixmax 17y ago
  This has been discussed before, and if my memory serves me correctly it wasn't that well received.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    What was the problem?
    - ghshephard 17y ago
      Well, for one, seeing an comment on cryptography by cperciva already communicates a great deal before you've even read the first word. Not to say he's never wrong, but I'm inclined to believe that his largest mistakes on the topic are still more accurate than my most carefully reasoned treatises on the subject. You can find many, many such Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on HN who likewise carry weight on a topic (PG on Startups?) by their very identity.
      - gruseom 17y ago
        Absolutely. When Peter Norvig drops by to make a comment or two, I want to know. Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who". Any system that tries to override human nature has its work cut out for it.
        Locke1689 17y ago
        Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who". Not just nature, but efficiency. The statement, "In argument subject, not author, holds interest" may be true in theory but in practice this breaks down. People without established expertise may have worthwhile contributions but it's easier for people to receive contributions from people with known expertise. For example, I would just as wholeheartedly receive a comment from cperciva as one from "A well-known cryptographer and talented mathematician with a relevant and competitive PhD." This is mostly notably seen in the physical sciences wherein most theoretical physics treatises are given little attention from the mainstream physics community unless there is a credible and relevant PhD backing it. Physicists simply don't have the time to pick through all of the papers from amateur hour and point out where they messed up the calculation that they should have learned in Quantum Optics 332. This expedience is partially reflected in HN comments. While ideally everyone would have a chance to respond to every comment to point out where it is factually incorrect, few have the time. It is also disconcerting to see a factually incorrect comment with more points than the factually correct reply. In each of these cases, one could comment to express agreement with the reply and reinforce the incorrectness of the original comment, but a combination of vote up/vote down fulfills a similar function in a fraction of the time. Perfect? No. Expedient? Yes.
GoboGobo 17y ago
I hope that you'll be cautious with the amounts of possible flags? More choices makes the decision to vote harder, possibly reducing the number of votes, which is not what you want.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Perhaps fewer votes is exactly what you want. I can imagine that lots of people read things and go "Oh - yeah - (click)" without thinking too hard. Perhaps requiring mental investment on the part of the voter is a good thing.
rbanffy 17y ago
Just flagging adds meaning to downvotes, but can still be used to suppress opinions and people. Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions. Likewise, upvotes give back the karma you lost modding some comment. A different cost for up/down seems also a good idea. This, simply, could create an incentive to post even when one has nothing to say and prevent constructive modding by people who post little. Hmm.... Perhaps an agreeing vote would redeem part of the karma paid to up/down vote. This balancing act is a very hard problem.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions. I asked last week http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006946 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006946 whether attempts to make the site better, which is what many downvotes and flags currently are, ought not to be rewarded with MORE karma rather than less. I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    "I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work." I think a bigger danger is the suppression of dissent. Rewarding it with more karma would be a huge mistake.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      Dissenting from your opinion in what I hope will be a civil, constructive manner, I agree with you that once in a while I get downvotes solely because I am expressing an unpopular opinion. But that is rare. And I don't shy from expressing minority opinions here on several issues. I don't get a large number of downvotes at all. My two comments with the largest net number of downvotes were (to me, in hindsight) comments that I could have written more clearly with more effort at relating them to the main concern of the thread and adding new information to the thread. On the whole, I think most downvotes are adding quality of expression to the site rather than subtracting opinions from the site. There are a lot of strong opinions here, not all of them in unison, and a lot of those opinions get expressed here. By the way, it's an EMPIRICAL question whether downvotes or posting disagreeing replies does more to discourage expressions of certain opinions. It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him. If a person has courage of his convictions because his opinions are based on evidence and careful thought, there is little reason not to come back here and express the opinions, even if his comments don't get a huge number of net upvotes.
Pistos2 17y ago
I think a good system would be to have just two voting axes: 1) "worth reading" / "not worth reading" 2) agree / disagree Then add a system of whatever flags you think are necessary, like "spam". I treat the current voting arrows as if they meant (1). I vote up things that I think are worth other people's time to read; vote down things that are a waste of time to read. I very rarely downvote. In some cases where others might more liberally downvote, I simply don't vote.
- mtts 17y ago
  I treat the voting arrows as if they meant (1) as well, and in addition to that, if something is at 0 or worse and isn't in fact a waste of time, I'll vote it back up. Downvoting something you disagree with kills a discussion, IMHO.
- kburn 17y ago
  Even then, I think the scores for each should be bifurcated so that people can see the number of "worth reading" vs. "not worth reading" votes, and the same for agree/disagree. I think the practice should at least be modeled liked a number-line. The default is 0, neither an upmod or downmod. Just as it is, an upmod (or +1) should be given if the post was particularly interesting (not agreeable, interesting), and a downmod (or -1) should be given if the post was particularly non-interesting (not disagreeable, non-interesting). I think too many people only see the world as either +1/-1 with no option to just leave a comment alone.
  - Pistos2 17y ago
    To be clear, I thought it went without saying that marking agreement or disagreement would not count towards the worth-reading score, and that the two arrow pairs would not be accumulated into a single score. Two scores would have to be displayed, perhaps giving users the option of seeing only the worth-reading score.
jacoblyles 17y ago
I like this idea alot. It gives community values explicitness, visibility, and teeth. If people have no incentive to refrain from bad behavior except the occasional posting of the commenting guidelines to the front page, then they will engage in bad behavior. People respond to incentives.
revorad 17y ago
I have a suggestion: Make it compulsory to leave a comment explaining a downvote i.e. when a user clicks on the downvote button, he is asked to comment. You can't downvote unless you provide a reason. Flags can play the role of downvotes for controlling spam and totally rubbish comments.
- charliepark 17y ago
  It would be interesting, too, if the downvotes could, themselves, be downvoted by others, rendering them valueless. That is, if my explanation for my initial downvote doesn't pass muster, others could downvote-the-downvote, and the initial comment (which I had downvoted) would be left with its full complement of points, as though I hadn't downvoted it to begin with.
  - revorad 17y ago
    That would only be fair because the downvote to your downvote comment would also have to provide a reason. So, it would encourage a real discussion.
    - revorad 17y ago
      Unlike this one where comments are apparently getting downvoted for no obvious reason. Another interesting experiment would be to display the top downvoters from time to time. We'll at least be able to weed out some of these invisible trolls.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - elblanco 17y ago
        As this thread and numerous others are demonstrating, there is a group of people that lurk and troll through the consequence-free mechanism of the downvote. I don't really care who the top downvoters are (though the metrics would be interesting, I'd like to see different mixes and matches of the various statistics that HN could generate, upvoters, downvoters, karma, number of posts, average comment scores etc), but I think there should be some limit per unit time they can downvote. Like say 5/every 30 days or some such. Given how many perfectly reasonable comments in this topic have been downvoted, I would suspect it's the same lurker-trolls every time, they would have just blown their quota for the month under this kind of system. And if you notice, it's like pulling teeth from an angry lion to even get any of these guys to bother posting a reason. The answers so far seem to amount to either 1) My time is too important, I'm too important. 2) The downvote is enough reason, it should be obvious to the recipient that they weren't contributing anything. I'm sorry, but I don't find either of those reasons even remotely satisfying.
jazzdev 17y ago
* The general plan will be to de-emphasize points and to add more types of flags.* I'm anxious to see this experiment. If flags are not binary, I'm curious how the number of different types of flags will be used to bubble up articles and comments. I like the idea of separating "worth reading" from "agree". If only "worth reading" makes things bubble up then people that strongly agree might mark things as "worth reading" because they want them to bubble up. An interesting problem.

by pg 17y ago

bugs 17y ago

I think points do a good job of positioning comments in a thread as you can easily pick out the common consensus, one thing that would be nice if it was encouraged is leaving comments when you downvote so that maybe a discussion can occur. (Obviously however there are some comments that do not warrant discussion but this probably would end up fitting into the types of flags.)

chrischen 17y ago
On the downside exposing points can lead to bias. You could easily make up your mind based on the points. It discourages individual thinking, and frankly if someone is too lazy to analyze and filter out the good comments for him/herself do we really want his/her opinion? It can result in less accurate filtering. Popular comments may be voted up simply because someone sees the amount of points, skims the comment with perhaps a bare understanding, and thinks "hey, this guy's probably right." And then, ding, a possibly unwarranted upvote. The same effect can apply to an unpopular comment, but the effect is probably stronger for unpopular comments, which is why I think it is so dangerous. An unpopular comment would suffer more of this effect because people who disagree may build up more negative emotions, and this emotion may lead to more impulsive, irrational behavior making them more susceptible to the bias. Seeing a comment he/she disagree with, and seeing that a bunch of people agree with him/her about disagreeing gives that person a sense of approval which erodes his/her ability to truly evaluate a dissenting comment objectively.

ghshephard 17y ago

Flags would be wonderful. There are many times where I've seen a wonderfully reasoned argument that I _completely_ disagree with (usually because of the premises of the argument). I am always conflicted - do I A) Downvote the comment because the I think the conclusions are grossly wrong. B) Upvote the comment because I'm so enamored of the elegance of the argument, it's contribution to the conversation, and how it made me think more carefully about my own argument. C) Ignore it - and unjustly not provide my reasoned critique on what clearly took a great deal of effort by the author. If I could only Flag it as "DISAGREE WITH CONCLUSION" and "ADDS TO CONVERSATION" then everything would be good. The four flags that I think would be useful would be: FLUFF vs CONTRIBUTES AGREE vs DISAGREE SPAM INCIVIL That way, I can now simultaneously rank an article as both contributing, as well as disagreeing with the conclusion. An author may then write an unpopular, but carefully reasoned discourse, and still enjoy the positive feedback of his peers on his contribution, even if he is challenging their perspectives.

berntb 17y ago
Personally, I'd prefer if you'd write a comment and explain why the argument is totally wrong. (And preferably starting with praising what you approve of; that would give the right tone to any answers you get.) Edit: On consideration, I should have followed my own advice and started this with: "A well reasoned, well written and interesting argument. But why aren't you adding the alternative of ANSWERING the argument instead of just moderating?!"
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Personally, I'd prefer if you'd write a comment and explain why the argument is totally wrong. I sometimes invite people to write such comments if they disagree with me. Often, when a comment makes a factual assertion for which I know of no evidence, I will reply to ask for the evidence. I will say things such as "Citations, please?" or "What are some examples of this?" or in some other way ask for the participant to back up the statement to which I reply. But there are cases when a comment is totally wrong, and not a good contribution to the thread besides (which has always been a generally supported basis for downvoting), and it's just too much bother to post a countering reply or to ask follow-up questions. In such cases, I don't feel embarrassed at all in downvoting the wrong comment. The site founder pg, who announced news of changes he is considering in flagging options on HN in this thread, wrote 681 days ago, 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. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 Voting and flagging options today are still much as they were then, and so for the moment I don't think it's a bad idea to downvote for disagreement, particularly if a comment has other undesirable characteristics. I will happily adapt to a new system if the site management implements a new system. And I invite participants who disagree with this reply of mine to write a comment and explain why my argument is totally wrong, if that is not too much trouble to you.

chrischen 17y ago

I'd like to suggest another experiment for a feature. If the comment author's name is hidden unless you click on the link to the comment, so that by default it isn't shown, it might be able to reduce bias on the initial read or comment. It would reduce the tendencies of people to, at the very least, unwillingly be affected by the commenter's name. Personally I never even notice the person's name unless I'm going back and forth, so I'm not even sure how much effect this has.

mixmax 17y ago
This has been discussed before, and if my memory serves me correctly it wasn't that well received.
- chrischen 17y ago
  What was the problem?
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    Well, for one, seeing an comment on cryptography by cperciva already communicates a great deal before you've even read the first word. Not to say he's never wrong, but I'm inclined to believe that his largest mistakes on the topic are still more accurate than my most carefully reasoned treatises on the subject. You can find many, many such Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on HN who likewise carry weight on a topic (PG on Startups?) by their very identity.
    - gruseom 17y ago
      Absolutely. When Peter Norvig drops by to make a comment or two, I want to know. Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who". Any system that tries to override human nature has its work cut out for it.
      - Locke1689 17y ago
        Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who". Not just nature, but efficiency. The statement, "In argument subject, not author, holds interest" may be true in theory but in practice this breaks down. People without established expertise may have worthwhile contributions but it's easier for people to receive contributions from people with known expertise. For example, I would just as wholeheartedly receive a comment from cperciva as one from "A well-known cryptographer and talented mathematician with a relevant and competitive PhD." This is mostly notably seen in the physical sciences wherein most theoretical physics treatises are given little attention from the mainstream physics community unless there is a credible and relevant PhD backing it. Physicists simply don't have the time to pick through all of the papers from amateur hour and point out where they messed up the calculation that they should have learned in Quantum Optics 332. This expedience is partially reflected in HN comments. While ideally everyone would have a chance to respond to every comment to point out where it is factually incorrect, few have the time. It is also disconcerting to see a factually incorrect comment with more points than the factually correct reply. In each of these cases, one could comment to express agreement with the reply and reinforce the incorrectness of the original comment, but a combination of vote up/vote down fulfills a similar function in a fraction of the time. Perfect? No. Expedient? Yes.

GoboGobo 17y ago

I hope that you'll be cautious with the amounts of possible flags? More choices makes the decision to vote harder, possibly reducing the number of votes, which is not what you want.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Perhaps fewer votes is exactly what you want. I can imagine that lots of people read things and go "Oh - yeah - (click)" without thinking too hard. Perhaps requiring mental investment on the part of the voter is a good thing.

rbanffy 17y ago

Just flagging adds meaning to downvotes, but can still be used to suppress opinions and people. Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions. Likewise, upvotes give back the karma you lost modding some comment. A different cost for up/down seems also a good idea. This, simply, could create an incentive to post even when one has nothing to say and prevent constructive modding by people who post little. Hmm.... Perhaps an agreeing vote would redeem part of the karma paid to up/down vote. This balancing act is a very hard problem.

tokenadult 17y ago
Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions. I asked last week http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006946 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006946 whether attempts to make the site better, which is what many downvotes and flags currently are, ought not to be rewarded with MORE karma rather than less. I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  "I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work." I think a bigger danger is the suppression of dissent. Rewarding it with more karma would be a huge mistake.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Dissenting from your opinion in what I hope will be a civil, constructive manner, I agree with you that once in a while I get downvotes solely because I am expressing an unpopular opinion. But that is rare. And I don't shy from expressing minority opinions here on several issues. I don't get a large number of downvotes at all. My two comments with the largest net number of downvotes were (to me, in hindsight) comments that I could have written more clearly with more effort at relating them to the main concern of the thread and adding new information to the thread. On the whole, I think most downvotes are adding quality of expression to the site rather than subtracting opinions from the site. There are a lot of strong opinions here, not all of them in unison, and a lot of those opinions get expressed here. By the way, it's an EMPIRICAL question whether downvotes or posting disagreeing replies does more to discourage expressions of certain opinions. It seems to me that someone thin-skinned enough to cease posting his opinions because his comments get downvoted (rather than reconsidering how he comments and seeing if he can improve how he comments) might be just as discouraged from posting minority opinions if he sees a lot of replies that disagree with him. If a person has courage of his convictions because his opinions are based on evidence and careful thought, there is little reason not to come back here and express the opinions, even if his comments don't get a huge number of net upvotes.

Pistos2 17y ago

I think a good system would be to have just two voting axes: 1) "worth reading" / "not worth reading" 2) agree / disagree Then add a system of whatever flags you think are necessary, like "spam". I treat the current voting arrows as if they meant (1). I vote up things that I think are worth other people's time to read; vote down things that are a waste of time to read. I very rarely downvote. In some cases where others might more liberally downvote, I simply don't vote.

mtts 17y ago
I treat the voting arrows as if they meant (1) as well, and in addition to that, if something is at 0 or worse and isn't in fact a waste of time, I'll vote it back up. Downvoting something you disagree with kills a discussion, IMHO.
kburn 17y ago
Even then, I think the scores for each should be bifurcated so that people can see the number of "worth reading" vs. "not worth reading" votes, and the same for agree/disagree. I think the practice should at least be modeled liked a number-line. The default is 0, neither an upmod or downmod. Just as it is, an upmod (or +1) should be given if the post was particularly interesting (not agreeable, interesting), and a downmod (or -1) should be given if the post was particularly non-interesting (not disagreeable, non-interesting). I think too many people only see the world as either +1/-1 with no option to just leave a comment alone.
- Pistos2 17y ago
  To be clear, I thought it went without saying that marking agreement or disagreement would not count towards the worth-reading score, and that the two arrow pairs would not be accumulated into a single score. Two scores would have to be displayed, perhaps giving users the option of seeing only the worth-reading score.

jacoblyles 17y ago

I like this idea alot. It gives community values explicitness, visibility, and teeth. If people have no incentive to refrain from bad behavior except the occasional posting of the commenting guidelines to the front page, then they will engage in bad behavior. People respond to incentives.

revorad 17y ago

I have a suggestion: Make it compulsory to leave a comment explaining a downvote i.e. when a user clicks on the downvote button, he is asked to comment. You can't downvote unless you provide a reason. Flags can play the role of downvotes for controlling spam and totally rubbish comments.

charliepark 17y ago
It would be interesting, too, if the downvotes could, themselves, be downvoted by others, rendering them valueless. That is, if my explanation for my initial downvote doesn't pass muster, others could downvote-the-downvote, and the initial comment (which I had downvoted) would be left with its full complement of points, as though I hadn't downvoted it to begin with.
- revorad 17y ago
  That would only be fair because the downvote to your downvote comment would also have to provide a reason. So, it would encourage a real discussion.
  - revorad 17y ago
    Unlike this one where comments are apparently getting downvoted for no obvious reason. Another interesting experiment would be to display the top downvoters from time to time. We'll at least be able to weed out some of these invisible trolls.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - elblanco 17y ago
      As this thread and numerous others are demonstrating, there is a group of people that lurk and troll through the consequence-free mechanism of the downvote. I don't really care who the top downvoters are (though the metrics would be interesting, I'd like to see different mixes and matches of the various statistics that HN could generate, upvoters, downvoters, karma, number of posts, average comment scores etc), but I think there should be some limit per unit time they can downvote. Like say 5/every 30 days or some such. Given how many perfectly reasonable comments in this topic have been downvoted, I would suspect it's the same lurker-trolls every time, they would have just blown their quota for the month under this kind of system. And if you notice, it's like pulling teeth from an angry lion to even get any of these guys to bother posting a reason. The answers so far seem to amount to either 1) My time is too important, I'm too important. 2) The downvote is enough reason, it should be obvious to the recipient that they weren't contributing anything. I'm sorry, but I don't find either of those reasons even remotely satisfying.

jazzdev 17y ago

* The general plan will be to de-emphasize points and to add more types of flags.* I'm anxious to see this experiment. If flags are not binary, I'm curious how the number of different types of flags will be used to bubble up articles and comments. I like the idea of separating "worth reading" from "agree". If only "worth reading" makes things bubble up then people that strongly agree might mark things as "worth reading" because they want them to bubble up. An interesting problem.