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I would recommend getting rid of downvoting altogether. Downvoting is overwhelmingly used as a means to express disagreement and enact censorship (by reducing

I would recommend getting rid of downvoting altogether. Downvoting is overwhelmingly used as a means to express disagreement and enact censorship (by reducing visibility), with no regards to the substance and quality of the actual post. I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked. Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it (AFAIK, with flagging, unlike with downvoting, users are held to some level of accountability and are liable to losing their flagging rights if they flag posts indiscriminately). The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort and no accountability can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.

johnmarcus 10y ago
How do you downvote? i only see an upvote button?
- detaro 10y ago
  You need a certain amount of karma points to get the downvote button (a few hundred I think).
  - echelon 10y ago
    500, IIRC.
    - chias 10y ago
      I first noticed it earlier this week when I hit 631, pretty sure they weren't there at 500 but I could be wrong.
      - type0 10y ago
        It should be 501, but as your browser caches the page maybe it doesn't appear right away
      - wruza 10y ago
        Just curious, are these buttons near to each other?
        noobermin 10y ago
        This is what it will look like. http://imgur.com/a/WPBVh http://imgur.com/a/WPBVh
echelon 10y ago
I disagree. It's very useful to remove the comments of spammers, trolls, and the like. Another common reason to downvote is to stop the tide of noisy comments, such as meme posts, which feel increasingly prevalent on HN. A more exemplary argument might be to imagine hypothetical responses to your post: "I agree." "I disagee." "Fuck you." "lol" "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" I think you'd want to downvote something like that. Nobody wants to waste their time reading it. I think the number of times I've missed a valuable comment due to downvoting is probably far less than the number of times I've seen garbage posts. We might disagree on the value and merits of each approach, but I'd prefer a high signal HN, even if it makes it a bit more of an echo chamber (hypothetically).
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  Flagging is more than enough to take care of these kinds of posts. That's exactly what the feature is meant to do. Substantial, well reasoned posts that you simply disagree with deserve an equally substantial response, not a knee-jerk click on a censor button.
  - Chronic9q 10y ago
    Agreed
KajMagnus 10y ago
Actually I currently believe that the downvote should be split into three different votes: 1) Disagree. Just shows disagreement. Doesn't affect comment sort order. 2) Bury. So one can move "Me too" and "Thanks" comments downwards. Ignored if there are any like votes (so people cannot use the Bury vote to censor others). 3) Unwanted. Only available to trusted core members & staff. The Unwanted vote reduces the post author's karma, & moves the post downwards. It is used to shape the contents & nature of the forum: via the Unwanted vote, the staff can create an echo chamber, if they want to. Or an open-ended tolerant forum, if they want to. (I wrote a bit more about that here, a few days ago: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-33/the-like-3-down-comment-rating-system https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-33/the-like-3-down-com... — I've actually implemented these 3 votes (Disagree, Bury, Unwanted) already :- P )
- alphapapa 10y ago
  That might be an improvement, but I don't think it would be better than simply removing downvotes. 1) What's the purpose of this? If it makes no difference, what is it there for? A honeypot to catch throwaway downvotes? 2) Slightly better, but if a comment is hit with some of these before any likes, it might never be seen by people who would like it, which is just as bad as the current downvote system. 3) The staff can already do this, right? Just get rid of downvotes. Let good comments be voted up, and truly bad ones (i.e. spam or rule-violating comments) be flagged. If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what? Deny them the effortless censor button. Or at least make downvoting reduce the voter's karma, so that downvoting has a cost.
  - KajMagnus 10y ago
    1) Many disagree votes (in comparison to Like votes) result in a warning text above the post: "Many people disagree with this comment". Then, if you read the comment and agree with it / like it, you'll know it's important that you also read the replies, so you'll find out why others disagree. — This is how it looks (scroll up a tiny bit to see the "Many disagree" warning): https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14 https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14 ( Another purpose with Disagree is that, well, I'm curious — I want to know how many people like or disagree with something. Imagine that a friend of yours makes a speech and you're listening. Afterwards, when you've formed your opinion about what s/he said, I imagine you'd find it interesting to know how many of those listening, agree or disagree with what s/he said in the speech. ) 2) Yes that's a problem. There can be a grace period before Bury votes take effect. E.g. 10 people must have read a comment, before Bury takes effect. 3) You mean they can downvote already? Yes, and they should still be able to do it, so this vote is (still) needed. > "If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what?" Many disagree votes tell the reader that there's likely a good rebuttal among the replies, so it's important to not just trust the comment because it sounds convincing — it's important to continue reading the replies.
woodchuck64 10y ago
Agreed, the arrows engage the moral brain and encourage rationalizing emotional gut-feelings. Up is always a metaphor for righteous and pure, heaven-like; down is contemptible, hell, punishment. No sense in fighting these deeply ingrained metaphors with rules and reminders, it doesn't work.
whybroke 10y ago
Downvoting currently sure is broken. An hour ago, when daring to suggest the Russians might actually be responsible for the DNC hacks, everything I've posted for the last week silently earned a down vote. And while I don't particularly care since this is junk account and its not my website, I imagine it could be interesting to someone.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  Seems like it would be easy enough to disable voting on comments that are a few days old, or on stories that are no longer being visited. I would suggest disabling voting from profile comment pages, to avoid voting on comments without reading their context, but this is Hacker News, and it would be trivial to script that...
  - jsnell 10y ago
    I don't think whybroke was being entirely truthful. Downvoting is already disabled for comments older than a day. Preventing upvoting of old comments would kind of suck, sometimes you only see really great comments years after they were posted.
    - whybroke 10y ago
      Perhaps so, I did not screenshot the posts of the last week. Certainly scores that were very positive yesterday are now negative. And certainly it began immediately after a post to wikipedia's marginal utility page which apparently disturbed someone's ideology. And it seems to have been aggravated further by this[1] post. But perhaps this is desired result. Either way the issue is no longer interesting to me. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664519
      - noobermin 10y ago
        Not sure about what you're saying about last week's comments but I have experienced a day or so after a less popular comment I receive downvotes on other comments after that for what I consider less controversial comments. Could be selection bias. What I usually see though is that upvotes and downvotes tend to average to where they would have been otherwise even in those cases overtime. I just miss out on extra karma I suppose :)
dang 10y ago
> I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked. Given that the downvoting system is about as old as HN itself, I'm reminded of the story where someone tried to warn Voltaire about his coffee consumption by saying that coffee was a slow poison, to which Voltaire replied "It must be very slow."

johnmarcus 10y ago

How do you downvote? i only see an upvote button?

detaro 10y ago
You need a certain amount of karma points to get the downvote button (a few hundred I think).
- echelon 10y ago
  500, IIRC.
  - chias 10y ago
    I first noticed it earlier this week when I hit 631, pretty sure they weren't there at 500 but I could be wrong.
    - type0 10y ago
      It should be 501, but as your browser caches the page maybe it doesn't appear right away
    - wruza 10y ago
      Just curious, are these buttons near to each other?
      - noobermin 10y ago
        This is what it will look like. http://imgur.com/a/WPBVh http://imgur.com/a/WPBVh

echelon 10y ago

I disagree. It's very useful to remove the comments of spammers, trolls, and the like. Another common reason to downvote is to stop the tide of noisy comments, such as meme posts, which feel increasingly prevalent on HN. A more exemplary argument might be to imagine hypothetical responses to your post: "I agree." "I disagee." "Fuck you." "lol" "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" I think you'd want to downvote something like that. Nobody wants to waste their time reading it. I think the number of times I've missed a valuable comment due to downvoting is probably far less than the number of times I've seen garbage posts. We might disagree on the value and merits of each approach, but I'd prefer a high signal HN, even if it makes it a bit more of an echo chamber (hypothetically).

lewisl9029 10y ago
Flagging is more than enough to take care of these kinds of posts. That's exactly what the feature is meant to do. Substantial, well reasoned posts that you simply disagree with deserve an equally substantial response, not a knee-jerk click on a censor button.
- Chronic9q 10y ago
  Agreed

KajMagnus 10y ago

Actually I currently believe that the downvote should be split into three different votes: 1) Disagree. Just shows disagreement. Doesn't affect comment sort order. 2) Bury. So one can move "Me too" and "Thanks" comments downwards. Ignored if there are any like votes (so people cannot use the Bury vote to censor others). 3) Unwanted. Only available to trusted core members & staff. The Unwanted vote reduces the post author's karma, & moves the post downwards. It is used to shape the contents & nature of the forum: via the Unwanted vote, the staff can create an echo chamber, if they want to. Or an open-ended tolerant forum, if they want to. (I wrote a bit more about that here, a few days ago: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-33/the-like-3-down-comment-rating-system https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-33/the-like-3-down-com... — I've actually implemented these 3 votes (Disagree, Bury, Unwanted) already :- P )

alphapapa 10y ago
That might be an improvement, but I don't think it would be better than simply removing downvotes. 1) What's the purpose of this? If it makes no difference, what is it there for? A honeypot to catch throwaway downvotes? 2) Slightly better, but if a comment is hit with some of these before any likes, it might never be seen by people who would like it, which is just as bad as the current downvote system. 3) The staff can already do this, right? Just get rid of downvotes. Let good comments be voted up, and truly bad ones (i.e. spam or rule-violating comments) be flagged. If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what? Deny them the effortless censor button. Or at least make downvoting reduce the voter's karma, so that downvoting has a cost.
- KajMagnus 10y ago
  1) Many disagree votes (in comparison to Like votes) result in a warning text above the post: "Many people disagree with this comment". Then, if you read the comment and agree with it / like it, you'll know it's important that you also read the replies, so you'll find out why others disagree. — This is how it looks (scroll up a tiny bit to see the "Many disagree" warning): https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14 https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14 ( Another purpose with Disagree is that, well, I'm curious — I want to know how many people like or disagree with something. Imagine that a friend of yours makes a speech and you're listening. Afterwards, when you've formed your opinion about what s/he said, I imagine you'd find it interesting to know how many of those listening, agree or disagree with what s/he said in the speech. ) 2) Yes that's a problem. There can be a grace period before Bury votes take effect. E.g. 10 people must have read a comment, before Bury takes effect. 3) You mean they can downvote already? Yes, and they should still be able to do it, so this vote is (still) needed. > "If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what?" Many disagree votes tell the reader that there's likely a good rebuttal among the replies, so it's important to not just trust the comment because it sounds convincing — it's important to continue reading the replies.

woodchuck64 10y ago

Agreed, the arrows engage the moral brain and encourage rationalizing emotional gut-feelings. Up is always a metaphor for righteous and pure, heaven-like; down is contemptible, hell, punishment. No sense in fighting these deeply ingrained metaphors with rules and reminders, it doesn't work.

whybroke 10y ago

Downvoting currently sure is broken. An hour ago, when daring to suggest the Russians might actually be responsible for the DNC hacks, everything I've posted for the last week silently earned a down vote. And while I don't particularly care since this is junk account and its not my website, I imagine it could be interesting to someone.

alphapapa 10y ago
Seems like it would be easy enough to disable voting on comments that are a few days old, or on stories that are no longer being visited. I would suggest disabling voting from profile comment pages, to avoid voting on comments without reading their context, but this is Hacker News, and it would be trivial to script that...
- jsnell 10y ago
  I don't think whybroke was being entirely truthful. Downvoting is already disabled for comments older than a day. Preventing upvoting of old comments would kind of suck, sometimes you only see really great comments years after they were posted.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    Perhaps so, I did not screenshot the posts of the last week. Certainly scores that were very positive yesterday are now negative. And certainly it began immediately after a post to wikipedia's marginal utility page which apparently disturbed someone's ideology. And it seems to have been aggravated further by this[1] post. But perhaps this is desired result. Either way the issue is no longer interesting to me. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664519
    - noobermin 10y ago
      Not sure about what you're saying about last week's comments but I have experienced a day or so after a less popular comment I receive downvotes on other comments after that for what I consider less controversial comments. Could be selection bias. What I usually see though is that upvotes and downvotes tend to average to where they would have been otherwise even in those cases overtime. I just miss out on extra karma I suppose :)

dang 10y ago

> I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked. Given that the downvoting system is about as old as HN itself, I'm reminded of the story where someone tried to warn Voltaire about his coffee consumption by saying that coffee was a slow poison, to which Voltaire replied "It must be very slow."