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Not everyone has time to articulate their disagreement and since that is often more work than was put into the original statement, not really fair to expect. I

Not everyone has time to articulate their disagreement and since that is often more work than was put into the original statement, not really fair to expect. I would interpret it as a more general "nah". The author could then reflect and likely see reasons why someone would disagree.

jolmg 7y ago
It does have the effect of shutting them up by obscuring the comment, though. Reasons for disagreement could be many. Doesn't seem right to shut them up and leave them to guess what the problem was.
- khrbrt 7y ago
  Downvoting is for cowards.
woofie11 7y ago
I find 90% of downvotes are douchebags who disagree on HN. Maybe 99% on sites like reddit. It leads to an echo chamber effect. People with different points of view feel unwelcome. I create throw-away accounts (one per device, until I clear cookies, and then a new one). I have one where literally everything I post gets a pile of downvotes. I'm assuming someone's stalking that one and using an army of bots to downvote everything I post, presumably because I offended them at some point. I think the fix is for a downvote to require a rationale -- you need to state why you're downvoting. Poster learns what not to do. Downvoter needs to do it for a quasi-rational reason.
- thatcat 7y ago
  I mean you have to have 500 karma to down vote and they can detect bots especially if you contact admin and report it. If you require explaination it enables trolls to do the equivallent of logic bombing the discussion, requireing an asymettric amount of resources to respond and spamming the thread with meta convos.
  - woofie11 7y ago
    I don't know that's why that account always gets downvoted; that's just a hypothesis. I don't know who downvotes. And I've never bothered reporting to admin. The internet has a small set of hyperactive people. It has a larger number of people (like me) who don't bother with karma. And a huge number of people who check out and don't participate in discussions. I don't think there's much alignment between the groups, and who you want posting. The mods / downvoters / etc. are in the hyper-active group, and on most sites, overactive mods tend to lead to echo chambers, and to a lot of people checking out. I haven't left HN because of this (I think the karma minimum for downvoting helps a lot), but I've left many web sites when they became too dumb or too one-sided. HN hasn't yet gone stupid, but there is a strong correlation between downvotes and political alignment. I'm not so much talking about just left/right, but also libertarian, tech elitist, etc. I think 90% of whether my posts end up +10 or -2 depends on how well they align.

jolmg 7y ago

It does have the effect of shutting them up by obscuring the comment, though. Reasons for disagreement could be many. Doesn't seem right to shut them up and leave them to guess what the problem was.

khrbrt 7y ago
Downvoting is for cowards.

woofie11 7y ago

I find 90% of downvotes are douchebags who disagree on HN. Maybe 99% on sites like reddit. It leads to an echo chamber effect. People with different points of view feel unwelcome. I create throw-away accounts (one per device, until I clear cookies, and then a new one). I have one where literally everything I post gets a pile of downvotes. I'm assuming someone's stalking that one and using an army of bots to downvote everything I post, presumably because I offended them at some point. I think the fix is for a downvote to require a rationale -- you need to state why you're downvoting. Poster learns what not to do. Downvoter needs to do it for a quasi-rational reason.

thatcat 7y ago
I mean you have to have 500 karma to down vote and they can detect bots especially if you contact admin and report it. If you require explaination it enables trolls to do the equivallent of logic bombing the discussion, requireing an asymettric amount of resources to respond and spamming the thread with meta convos.
- woofie11 7y ago
  I don't know that's why that account always gets downvoted; that's just a hypothesis. I don't know who downvotes. And I've never bothered reporting to admin. The internet has a small set of hyperactive people. It has a larger number of people (like me) who don't bother with karma. And a huge number of people who check out and don't participate in discussions. I don't think there's much alignment between the groups, and who you want posting. The mods / downvoters / etc. are in the hyper-active group, and on most sites, overactive mods tend to lead to echo chambers, and to a lot of people checking out. I haven't left HN because of this (I think the karma minimum for downvoting helps a lot), but I've left many web sites when they became too dumb or too one-sided. HN hasn't yet gone stupid, but there is a strong correlation between downvotes and political alignment. I'm not so much talking about just left/right, but also libertarian, tech elitist, etc. I think 90% of whether my posts end up +10 or -2 depends on how well they align.