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Have you ever considered giving people the option to register their abstinence from voting on a comment? Right now we have up and down, but a lot of the time I

Have you ever considered giving people the option to register their abstinence from voting on a comment? Right now we have up and down, but a lot of the time I feel like I wish I had an "abstain" button. This would be reserved for the comments that aren't mean-spirited, but don't add much to the conversation. Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral. The idea being that, all things being equal for two comments, the one with more indifferent voters is considered less valuable, and is thus ranked lower. Maybe a neutral vote simply works by increasing n when judging the size-weighted score that HN uses to calculate rankings now. I'm sure there are flaws in this line of reasoning..perhaps someone would be so kind as to point them out?

swolchok 16y ago
A flaw: I might vote neutral as "I agree with this comment's current point value." In that light, 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral is a fairly confidently ranked 16-point comment, but 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral is not. However, the less confident one should be "floated" to a small portion of users to get more votes.
- davidw 16y ago
  > I agree with this comment's current point value. That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.
  - treeface 16y ago
    I like this idea as well. It also would be easier to implement than my idea :-]
mahmud 16y ago
I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)
- treeface 16y ago
  Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else. Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).
  - mahmud 16y ago
    I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations. With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.

swolchok 16y ago

A flaw: I might vote neutral as "I agree with this comment's current point value." In that light, 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral is a fairly confidently ranked 16-point comment, but 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral is not. However, the less confident one should be "floated" to a small portion of users to get more votes.

davidw 16y ago
> I agree with this comment's current point value. That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.
- treeface 16y ago
  I like this idea as well. It also would be easier to implement than my idea :-]

mahmud 16y ago

I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)

treeface 16y ago
Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else. Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).
- mahmud 16y ago
  I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations. With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.