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There are many comments claiming that it's somehow bad, rude, or inconsiderate to downvote comments you disagree with. I totally disagree. There is nothing unci
by gruseom 17y ago
There are many comments claiming that it's somehow bad, rude, or inconsiderate to downvote comments you disagree with. I totally disagree. There is nothing uncivil about downvoting. It simply means that someone took issue with something about your comment: its tone, its logic, whatever. There's no reason to take offense at this; you could just as easily find it intriguing.
Voting up or down is a nice, efficient mechanism for participating in a discussion when you do have a response, but it falls below the threshold of having enough time, enough interest, and enough worth saying to justify an explicit post. There's nothing illegitimate about responses that happen to fall below that threshold. In aggregate, they add great value to the site. To try to force people to make explicit comments that aren't naturally above the threshold would spread tedium, not civility.
People sometimes allege that opinions are being downvoted to oblivion on HN merely because they're unpopular. In my observation, this is rare. There's almost always some obvious reason (rudeness, irrelevance, etc.). But it's more self-flattering to think that your brave independent thinking was run over by a mob.
Egregious arbitrary downvoting does occur, of course, but it tends to get corrected. When I run across a comment at 0 or -1 that I see nothing objectionable about, I upvote it. Lots of other users do that too, so controversial comments tend to stay roughly at par. Lightweight self-correcting systems are hard to come by, so I think it's worth recognizing when you have one. That doesn't mean that experimentation is a bad idea, of course, but it will be hard IMO to come up with a better voting system. (The flagging system is a different matter.)
- elblanco 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021116 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021116 was immediately downvoted to oblivion (it's hit -6 I believe at one point), not a single comment as to why. While this one, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021119 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021119 while practically of the same content (though a hair less snarky) generated screens full of comments and is sitting at +10 as of this writing. I think it has to do with the fact that people were scared off of the other post because it went straight into the vote incinerator and thus they didn't want to get downvoted themselves. A downvote without a comment is just as rude online as a terse "no" is in real life.
- gruseom 17y agoA downvote without a comment is just as rude online as a terse "no" is in real life. It's you who are choosing to interpret it that way.
- elblanco 17y agoIf I hypothetically told you to take that opinion and shove it where the sun don't shine, it's obviously you who would interpret that as being rude as well. In manners, the interpreter of the action is usually the one to be concerned about. Come-on, this is basic manners we learn as children.
- tokenadult 17y ago(it's hit -6 I believe at one point) That can't be an actual observation, because the system-imposed limit on negative karma scores for one comment has been -4 for a while. A comment with that recent of an item number would have been posted with that limit in place. I can remember the days when negative karma per comment was apparently unlimited (although such comments would gray out to invisibility at about -25, if I remember correctly) and a longer period when the limit was -8. That hasn't been a problem for most of the most active participants here, even those who actively disagree with some of the consensus opinions that do trigger reflex downvotes here.
- elblanco 17y agoCheck it yourself. It's not the only post of mine in this thread that's seen a < -4 karma.
- tokenadult 17y agoI just searched your list of threads, through the first couple pages, and didn't see any such posts. While I did that, I did see a very interesting comment by btilly in a thread I hadn't visited previously, but I didn't see any comments by anyone with karma scores below -4. Does someone have a current link to anyone's recent comment with such a low score?
- loganfrederick 17y agoA decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument. PG already commented somewhere that he's experimenting with a number of solutions to this problem, and will hopefully come up with something as quick and convenient as the downvote but with the depth of requiring an added comment.
- gruseom 17y agoA decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument. Uh, yes, that's precisely the opinion my whole comment was objecting to. How can that not have been obvious? Did I edit the baby out with the bathwater? Let me try again: There are many occasions when a silent vote is the most appropriate feedback, for two reasons: (1) one doesn't always have time to type out a comment; (2) one's comment, if typed out, might not add value. There is a psychological threshold above which an explicit comment makes sense and below which it does not make sense, and trying to mandate otherwise will not work: it will only result in a lot more tedious comments. Indeed, many suggestions people are making strike me as rather schoolmarmish. There are few better ways to suck the life out of things than to make them mandatory.
- kburn 17y ago> A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument. I would absolutely agree with this statement.