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I haven't been on HN for a long time, and I don't even have enough points to downvote comments, but as far as I can tell there's always been this uncertainty ab

by dudul 11y ago

I haven't been on HN for a long time, and I don't even have enough points to downvote comments, but as far as I can tell there's always been this uncertainty about what downvoting really means. Some think that one should only downvote poor quality comments regardless of if they agree with the point being made or not, others think that downvoting is "anti-endorsement". I don't really agree with the latter to be honest. It tends to generate this echo-chamber environment. And it makes disagreeing very "cheap": as you said, people will just downvote without bothering to explain why. Your idea of only offering upvoting seems pretty good to me.

joshschreuder 11y ago
It's not exclusive to HN, pretty much any site with a negative voting system gets used purely for disagreement rather than 'this is bad content'. It's especially prevalent on Reddit, where you will quite often see words to the effect of "downvotes are not meant for comments you disagree with" The only-allow-upvoting thing is something that Facebook has been doing forever. Now that they're added a dislike button, they will almost certainly fall into the same traps as other sites like HN and Reddit.