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Downvoted comments are bad for the community. They are literally negative. Remove downvotes. Anything that truly deserves downvotes probably deserves flagging/d

Downvoted comments are bad for the community. They are literally negative. Remove downvotes. Anything that truly deserves downvotes probably deserves flagging/deading, too. Downvotes change how you think about reading comments. Instead of "was this helpful?" you're thinking "do i love this or hate this?". It's polarizing, and as the number of users increases, it's easy for a comment to hit -4 in a couple minutes. People feel bad when they get downvoted (often because they feel the downvotes are unjust), and some of them turn to trolling or flaming as a defense mechanism. This spreads across threads and infects the whole community. Emotions are contagious. Also, add the ability to undo your upvote.

JeremyChase 16y ago
I'm embarrassed to say that I have accidentally upvoted many times. This always happen on a particularly egregious comment that caused you to be distracted while clicking. We should not remove down votes outright. I've seen a comment get downvoted to -4 because people didn't like the commentary, but then shoot back up to +10 when it was shown that they were correct after all.
- po 16y ago
  …but if we remove downvotes, they will just stay at 1 instead of getting downvoted. Later they will still be able to shoot up. They will only get flagged if they are actively in the wrong spirit of the community. (spam, abuse, etc..) The concept of "down" is conflated in people's minds in a way "up" isn't. It is used by people to mean either "I disagree" or "totally inappropriate". The first is not supposed to affect karma but the second is. If you simply replace "down" with "flag" it changes how people think about it. As for accidental up-voting, moving the links so that there is separation would fix that.
  - JeremyChase 16y ago
    Ah, ok, that makes a lot more sense. I was imagining removing comments that had been downvoted; not removing the link to downvote. I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.
    - po 16y ago
      ah.. Progressive taxation. You're a commie liberal aren't you. ;-) (don't worry, I am too) Inflation may be a problem some day, but for now I think it's under control. The leader board is still at a human understandable scale: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
araneae 16y ago
Agreed. I think downvoting starts a revenge cycle, and the methods that are in place to prevent revenge only make the revenge less direct. For instance, you can't downvote replies to your comment, but you can go into their user history and downvote their other comments. This is worse, because their other comments quite literally have nothing to do with what would have been downvoted had that measure not been in place. If someone views downvotes as punishment, then this engenders retaliation, and retaliation doesn't engender civil discussion.
- csomar 16y ago
  You can't down vote old comments, so there history is safe.
- pg 16y ago
  Actually downvoting a bunch of someone's comments doesn't work. There has long been protection against that.
hsuresh 16y ago
I agree with you. The only times i have wanted to downvote was to mark some comment as spam and/or troll. Given that we have a 'flag' link on comments, i don't see a need for downvote, except to undo a upvote.
pg 16y ago
I've often thought of it. The reason I had downvotes originally was to deter people from saying things that were mean or stupid. But maybe the right way to deal with that is a separate mechanism from voting, as it is with stories. Maybe the right combo for comments is an uparrow, plus a flag link, and encourage users to flag comments that are mean or stupid. I'll think about the real solution more after I'm done reading applications, but I'll increase the downvote threshold to 500 now.
- mmaunder 16y ago
  I've had my comments republished in your monthly but I rarely comment on HN anymore due to the negativity. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566 We've gained a few trolls but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet so it's not too late. I support removing down voting and switching to flagging specific offenses e.g. spam|offensive|troll to start. Alternatively [just a crazy thought] how about we open up and show what each user has down voted. Perhaps as a courtesy we could only show down-votes starting Halloween 2010.
  - pg 16y ago
    It looks like that was a case of piling on. There may be stuff I can do to mitigate that specifically. BTW, it's not our monthly; Hacker Monthly is someone else's project.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    > ...but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet... If we assume that a user's total score is a good indicator of their value to the community, then the HN leaderboard would agree with you. I'm not so sure, though. IIRC, pg has mentioned in the past that he spends less time here now, and I rarely see anything from Reddit's founding user group. Another HN user that I've been following for a while -- DaniFong -- who's doing some pretty interesting stuff and has a tendency to post fairly intelligent comments, has had a really obvious decline in activity here. Although I've been a part of this problem as often as not, I've also found that the discourse here isn't worth participating in any more. But, maybe there are alternative explanations for all of that.
aturek 16y ago
Downvotes can be used to stifle dissent, but are generally valuable. I feel like 60-70% of the heavily downvoted comments I see are already trolling or flaming (or in some cases something dumb, like a 3-word reference to an internet meme). With the grayed out text, I think this is a fantastic visual cue about how not to act on HN. (I could have just written this comment as "/disagree", and then watched it get appropriately downvoted, and learned my lesson) Edit: I should also add that as a barely-contributing user, I don't have the ability to downvote. But I'd still like other people to be able to do it, to enforce the community's standards.

JeremyChase 16y ago

I'm embarrassed to say that I have accidentally upvoted many times. This always happen on a particularly egregious comment that caused you to be distracted while clicking. We should not remove down votes outright. I've seen a comment get downvoted to -4 because people didn't like the commentary, but then shoot back up to +10 when it was shown that they were correct after all.

po 16y ago
…but if we remove downvotes, they will just stay at 1 instead of getting downvoted. Later they will still be able to shoot up. They will only get flagged if they are actively in the wrong spirit of the community. (spam, abuse, etc..) The concept of "down" is conflated in people's minds in a way "up" isn't. It is used by people to mean either "I disagree" or "totally inappropriate". The first is not supposed to affect karma but the second is. If you simply replace "down" with "flag" it changes how people think about it. As for accidental up-voting, moving the links so that there is separation would fix that.
- JeremyChase 16y ago
  Ah, ok, that makes a lot more sense. I was imagining removing comments that had been downvoted; not removing the link to downvote. I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.
  - po 16y ago
    ah.. Progressive taxation. You're a commie liberal aren't you. ;-) (don't worry, I am too) Inflation may be a problem some day, but for now I think it's under control. The leader board is still at a human understandable scale: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

araneae 16y ago

Agreed. I think downvoting starts a revenge cycle, and the methods that are in place to prevent revenge only make the revenge less direct. For instance, you can't downvote replies to your comment, but you can go into their user history and downvote their other comments. This is worse, because their other comments quite literally have nothing to do with what would have been downvoted had that measure not been in place. If someone views downvotes as punishment, then this engenders retaliation, and retaliation doesn't engender civil discussion.

csomar 16y ago
You can't down vote old comments, so there history is safe.
pg 16y ago
Actually downvoting a bunch of someone's comments doesn't work. There has long been protection against that.

hsuresh 16y ago

I agree with you. The only times i have wanted to downvote was to mark some comment as spam and/or troll. Given that we have a 'flag' link on comments, i don't see a need for downvote, except to undo a upvote.

pg 16y ago

I've often thought of it. The reason I had downvotes originally was to deter people from saying things that were mean or stupid. But maybe the right way to deal with that is a separate mechanism from voting, as it is with stories. Maybe the right combo for comments is an uparrow, plus a flag link, and encourage users to flag comments that are mean or stupid. I'll think about the real solution more after I'm done reading applications, but I'll increase the downvote threshold to 500 now.

mmaunder 16y ago
I've had my comments republished in your monthly but I rarely comment on HN anymore due to the negativity. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566 We've gained a few trolls but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet so it's not too late. I support removing down voting and switching to flagging specific offenses e.g. spam|offensive|troll to start. Alternatively [just a crazy thought] how about we open up and show what each user has down voted. Perhaps as a courtesy we could only show down-votes starting Halloween 2010.
- pg 16y ago
  It looks like that was a case of piling on. There may be stuff I can do to mitigate that specifically. BTW, it's not our monthly; Hacker Monthly is someone else's project.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  > ...but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet... If we assume that a user's total score is a good indicator of their value to the community, then the HN leaderboard would agree with you. I'm not so sure, though. IIRC, pg has mentioned in the past that he spends less time here now, and I rarely see anything from Reddit's founding user group. Another HN user that I've been following for a while -- DaniFong -- who's doing some pretty interesting stuff and has a tendency to post fairly intelligent comments, has had a really obvious decline in activity here. Although I've been a part of this problem as often as not, I've also found that the discourse here isn't worth participating in any more. But, maybe there are alternative explanations for all of that.

aturek 16y ago

Downvotes can be used to stifle dissent, but are generally valuable. I feel like 60-70% of the heavily downvoted comments I see are already trolling or flaming (or in some cases something dumb, like a 3-word reference to an internet meme). With the grayed out text, I think this is a fantastic visual cue about how not to act on HN. (I could have just written this comment as "/disagree", and then watched it get appropriately downvoted, and learned my lesson) Edit: I should also add that as a barely-contributing user, I don't have the ability to downvote. But I'd still like other people to be able to do it, to enforce the community's standards.