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Ask HN/PG: Down votes with a cost or public
It's becoming common to see well written comments in the negative. This breaks the rules but it seems new users don't bother respecting the current etiquette. Anonymous down-voting makes it trivial to hide, unlike the poster being open and public about his opinion. This situation is very unfair because writing involves some dedication and courage while some random troll can just click and go on.
A possible and easy solution to this could be to make down-votes cost in karma. Not just in a 1-to-1 relation because that would add bias, favoring higher ranked users. Perhaps 1% of current karma rounded up to 1?
Another alternative could be to make down-voting public in some form.
I think this is a very important problem as there are active groups gaming social news websites like HN. In particular Digg's case last week.
Edit: minor style.
- mooism2 16y agoWhat's wrong with favouring higher ranked users? Don't they have more karma because they exhibit behaviour we'd like to encourage? I like the Stack Overflow approach, where downvoting costs the downvoter karma, but less than being upvoted gifts them.
- alecco 16y agoThere are hundreds of accounts with over a thousand votes. It wouldn't be meaningful for us to lose a few points per day if we wanted to censor. In particular early down-voting can affect what comment gets to be the top on a discussion. Also, comments with negative points are grayed out.
- kls 16y agoThe problem with making it cost is no one would down vote the obvious spam and one liners. I think making it public or having meta-moderation where users are asked to review down-votes, where if you do to many down votes that meta-moderators flag as incorrect, then you get down-vote privileges removed for x amount of time with 3 strikes and your out and you then have down-vote privileges permanently removed.
- alecco 16y agoFor spam you have the flag option. Down voting should be rare.
- pwim 16y agoThis has been brought up before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214398 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214398
- alecco 16y agoI know, but this post proposes 2 solutions to the problem. I haven't seen this before. Also that thread talks about the correct use of down-voting while I address the issue of anonymity and the asymmetric costs to the writer vs. the down voter.
- gyardley 16y agoI don't think there is any current rule or dominant etiquette around down-voting, only people that follow different rules or etiquettes, all of them self-imposed. Since Paul Graham is fine with down-voting for disagreement (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171), you can't really object if others do the same. I recommend just taking karma points less seriously.
- alecco 16y agoI'm perfectly fine with that. What I don't like is the anonymity and 0 cost of down-voting and the gate it opens to groups gaming the system like it was found on Digg.