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I've always felt that as a general rule across all platforms, downvotes should be required to come with a hand typed, not selected from a drop-down, comment of
by jimktrains2 7y ago
I've always felt that as a general rule across all platforms, downvotes should be required to come with a hand typed, not selected from a drop-down, comment of at least 50 characters. Sure, I could just hold down 'r' and be done with it, but I feel like the mods could easily clean that up.
- dang 7y agoComments about downvotes are among the lowest-quality comments that get posted here. Requiring more of them would be a big mistake. If a user has something meaningful to say about how they disagree with another comment, they already can—and do—reply. If they don't have anything substantial to say, and downvoting prevents them from saying it, that's a feature not a bug. It's tempting to imagine that placing hurdles in front of users could solve the quality problem, but IMO that's a fantasy. There are no easy ways to do that and no technical fixes for it.
- at_a_remove 7y agoI am reading the comment as more of a "reasons must be explained to the moderators for a downvote," without those reasons being posted to the thread proper.
- dang 7y agoHN users would not welcome having to explain themselves to moderators in that way, and we have no spare capacity to read them anyhow.
- jimktrains2 7y agoI meant for the comments to be public. If someone is wrong, misguided, or simply thinks differently than you do, it's better for the group as a whole to have a discussion about that than it is to censor someone.
- jimktrains2 7y ago> If they don't have anything substantial to say, and downvoting prevents them from saying it, that's a feature not a bug. See, this is the problem. I'd many of the downvoted posts I see are simply contrarian, not something insubstantial.