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I agree with your point (we shouldn't have down votes), but not your reasons for it. As others have said, the first amendment doesn't really apply here. The re
by imgabe 18y ago
I agree with your point (we shouldn't have down votes), but not your reasons for it. As others have said, the first amendment doesn't really apply here.
The real problem with down votes, imo, is that it effectively gives everyone two votes on a story. First you get your one point for submitting it or voting it up, then you can get an additional point (relatively) by voting down everything else on the new page. Now, not everyone will do this, but some people will, which negatively affects the karma of everyone who submits stories, providing a disincentive for anything that one isn't sure is going to be immediately popular. This leads to a decline in the overall quality of stories. The sad truth is, when you take someone's name and put a number next to it, there's some people that will just lose their minds trying to get that number as high as possible. (Not to mention monetary incentives for marketing firms, as has happened on Digg and probably reddit, too. Maybe that's not as much of a concern for Hacker News, since the audience has been kept relatively small)
My solution, when I see a story I don't like on the front page, is to go to the new page and vote up every story I DO like.
- thaumaturgy 18y agoYour problem with downvotes has little to do with the idea of them, and more to do with the implementation. It's not hard to implement downvoting in a way that doesn't have the problems you described. Also, I would assume that people ordinarily do upvote the submissions they like. The only way you could be describing anything different is if you meant that you upvote everything that you don't dislike, which I think runs completely counter to the idea of upvoting.
- imgabe 18y agoSo, do you have an example of an implementation that doesn't have this problem or are you just assuming one exists? If there is one, it must be a well kept secret, because there hasn't yet been a social news site that's adopted it. One I've considered is to temporarily suspend down voting after submitting a story. But this has some unintended consequences in that it unfairly penalizes the people who submit heavily, who provide a lot of value to the site. Your assumption that people ordinarily upvote submissions they like isn't necessarily valid. I usually read the site pretty passively, and only upvote things I think are really spectacular. It doesn't mean I don't like the other things I read, just that they didn't really blow me away. "counter to the idea of upvoting" is a pretty vague phrase. Counter to your idea maybe, my criteria for upvoting fits my idea of upvoting just fine. Not everyone thinks of a vote the same way, as another story on the front page right now points out, this is one of the problems with a site like this.
- thaumaturgy 18y ago| So, do you have an example of an implementation that doesn't have this problem or are you just assuming one exists? Neither! I'm assuming one _can_ exist. I think I have an idea on how to make it work; I just don't have a forum to test it on, yet.