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There are a lot of downvoted posts in this thread that make reasonable arguments and that are promoting discussion. I disagree with a lot of them, but it’s awkw

There are a lot of downvoted posts in this thread that make reasonable arguments and that are promoting discussion. I disagree with a lot of them, but it’s awkward for this to be a story where people are heavily downvoting people they disagree with

cheschire 6y ago
It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help. However, in opposition to my own idea, I consider that simply requiring a more effort wouldn't necessarily change the groupthink problem, but would just stifle low effort downvotes. Let's consider then the whole idea of votes in the first place. Are downvotes considered "speech" in an abstract sense? Should they be protected in the same way disagreeable opinions are? Is the level of effort necessary to express the speech relevant to the level of protection it deserves? Would restricting downvotes in any way be considered a speech restriction? So these are all interesting aspects to the problem that cause me a lot of internal debate.
- yodelshady 6y ago
  >but would just stifle low effort downvotes With the exception of spam, that's a feature. If something offends you, you should consider why. Upvotes are useful in reducing spam, as without them, I'd have to repeat a sentiment to show agreement. In my experience (anecdata warning!) that nicely leads to both the best post for an argument, and the best rebuttal, sharing visibility. Neither combat the problem of "fake news", because frauds don't have to be well done if the local community agrees with the sentiment.
- mettamage 6y ago
  To reply to a part of your comment: I've come to realize that most downvotes can be mitigated by simply adding in disclaimers, explicit assumptions, general kindness and general positivity [1]. In that sense HN really made me a more civil person to discuss with, while I am still able to write controversial opinions when I happen to have them. So on balance, in my experience, the downvoting has been a good development for me. [1] There was a year where I was arguably mildly depressed about my job situation. I graduated had all the bells and whistles, and worked amazingly hard for it (I almost burned out twice). Yet, I couldn't get a prestigious job. And for me, that was the whole point. Why work hard if it doesn't get you anywhere? I gave up on a lot of things. The tone in my comments during that year was more negative than usual despite my opinions being similar. I experimented with being more positive than I actually felt, while still expressing the same opinions, and noticed I'd be downvoted less and upvoted more.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- prox 6y ago
  One of the problems with upvote/downvote is that it is binary, while topics of discussion in the social rarely aren’t. In the social space of forming opinions, many things happen in a grey spectrum, and need not be polarized all the time (upvote / downvote)
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    Sam Harris once proposed a “this changed my mind” button as a way to encourage discourse.
    - coffeeling 6y ago
      Having multiple different reaction buttons would legit be nice: I agree I disagree Thoughtful Contentless I learned something I changed my mind This way we could eg. express that we disagree with the post, which was thoughtful and a good effort, and didn't change our minds but still learned something. One huge poison in a lot of modern discourse is that accepting your interlocutor has a point should mean you start to agree with them. Why? Some of the best things I've ever read in my life didn't change my overall stance on a subject, but gave it a lot of new nuance and depth, and appreciation for the person talking.
  - Mangalor 6y ago
    Simple up/down voting is probably a relic of the simple concepts and simplified programming needed for early development of social media (web 1.0). An overhaul of these networks to adapt more to human-like discourse is much-needed and welcome imo. Kialo for example has a more complex voting system that works better.
    - prox 6y ago
      Yes, I absolutely agree, I hope to see more resources and work done in that area.
- cousin_it 6y ago
  We could remove downvotes. They had three purposes: 1) Crowdsourced moderation. Well, everyone is using manual moderation anyway. 2) Silencing others. This is a misfeature. 3) Finding the best content. Upvotes are enough for that. That said, I'm not sure this will reduce groupthink. Twitter has no downvotes and plenty of groupthink.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    There could be two kinds of downvotes: * "I disagree" downvote * "This comment has no value" downvote First downvote can be used for arguments like "let's increase taxes to the rich because, this way we can build more fair society, European countries have shown that high taxes..." Second downvote can be used for comments like "Let's tax these rich bastards". I want to also mention reddit voting system which I kinda like: they have downvoting, but they also have a sorting by "controvervial": top comments are the comments with high number of both upvotes and downvotes, such comments really help to see the full spectre of opinions in discussions, while the universally true and not interesting comments everyone agrees with like "we should not kill people", are below controversial comments.
    - CM30 6y ago
      The ideal solution is definitely to split ratings, both for upvotes and downvotes. Slashdot did this, and quite a few forum scripts have plugins for it, where you can rate posts based on things like whether you agree/disagree with them, if they're funny or informative, if they're spam/low quality etc. Having it work that way would significantly discourage using upvotes and downvotes as agree/disagree buttons, and make it much clearer what the community thinks of any particular post or piece of content.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h, so people eventually saved them for really bad / offensive / spam comments instead of punishing people for their opinions (except a few who even wrote scripts to downvote certain people systematically...). The problem is in my opinion that once people begin to act like this, their victims behave like this also. If you get punished for arguing against somebody, you learn to stop arguing and just downvote that person instead. It's a chain reaction.
- flukus 6y ago
  >I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help I think old school sequential forums were actually much better, outside specific niches they're harder to find these days though. Having the things everyone strongly agrees with at the top where they're the first to be read just encourages flamewars straight out of the gate and a lot of stuff just got lost in the middle to never be looked at again. But when casually reading you see replies from everyone, there's no distinction between controversial opinions and group think approved ones. One of the few I frequent regularly is actually a political and has posters with the full spectrum of beliefs, but the lack voting makes things much more pleasant than a similar topic on here or reddit would be. There were a couple of other advantages too, bumping threads meant the conversation was over when it stopped being discussed, not when an algorithm decided it was no longer interesting.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    Sequential forums can be good for discussions. It was definitely nice to be able to bump a discussion that was older than 16 hours to unbury it. I like ranked forums for Q and A content though, Eg, like stack overflow or even reddit when I’m trying to answer a technical question. Mostly though, nothing can replace a good forum culture. I just meant to encourage that with my remark, the downvote button itself is only bad if people use it recklessly
- scarmig 6y ago
  I'm a fan of easy ability to downvote and upvote. What I would be interested in is a more sophisticated ordering than by net number of votes. For example, I'm sure some people's upvotes correlate well with my own (and probably some people's downvotes correlate with my upvotes!) If comments could somehow be ordered by how likely I am to upvote them, based on historical correlations between my and others' votes, that seems like an interesting approach.
  - unlaxedneurotic 6y ago
    But don't you think that if you are exposed more to comments that correlate with your own preference, it would lead to creation of an echo chamber?
  - rini17 6y ago
    If we must have the one-click convenience (I'm not convinced it's necessary) I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting" etc. instead of downvote button, perhaps also similar for upvote.
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      Or may be both up- and downvoted messages should make it to the top, while ignored messages should slowly sink?
      - zzo38computer 6y ago
        I would rather view in chronological order. I think that it should be an option. Sorting by "controversial" as suggested in another comment should be another option.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting" Slashdot used to have that, it didn’t save it.
    - 6y ago
- favokus 6y ago
  > It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help. I actually don't see any value in downvotes. It's usually used when people disagree, which obviously leads to silos of thought and suppressing ideas. If somebody is being particularly disruptive and unproductive, then they should be flagged, but otherwise I wish downvotes would be removed from HN. It has no place here. Especially on HN, where I thought the idea was for people to have reasonable discussions about things, downvotes are frustratingly counter to that. If you disagree with something, it's too easy to just downvote and move on. And people pile on without saying anything. And in the end, nobody learns anything because nobody's actually talking about what's wrong with the comment. Then again, I get the feeling nobody here actually wants to learn anything from fellow users if they happen to represent different ideas. I guess that's by design?
- BlackFly 6y ago
  One of the common threads on some limits to free speech is the notion that lies are not protected. Libel, perjury, false advertisement, slander. I treat downvoting similarly: I only downvote things I know to be false and figure the speaker either knows it to be false or reasonably should know. Since I only downvote in the rare cases where I believe a person is being dangerously disingenuous or unreasonable, I often don't feel there would be any value in replying. If they are misrepresenting facts or I believe they are not reasonable, why would I attempt to reason with them? Instead if I think the person is just confused or hasn't considered a different perspective, I won't downvote and might reply. Often I will just ignore it anyways, since I am ambivalent about the possibility of reasoning with people over the internet.
yspeak 6y ago
Welcome to HN.
axegon_ 6y ago
This is the problem. The upvoting-downvoting is a good idea in principle but it does not (and cannot) take human subjectivity into account, which is what makes it fundamentally flawed. By the way this is an extension of the same problem as with silencing opinions or comments online or in real life.
arethuza 6y ago
As far as I know the convention of HN has always been that downvotes can be used to express strong disagreement and that discussion of downvoting is regarded as unproductive and a bit boring.
Seb-C 6y ago
I just spent 5 minutes upvoting every grayed-out comment that had at least substantial content in this page. Even the ones I disagree with. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it
dependenttypes 6y ago
Down-vote does not mean censor. It is just a community-oriented way to sort comments.
nonsince 6y ago
What do you think the down- and upvote buttons are for if not signalling that you think that a comment is good or not.
- detaro 6y ago
  This doesn't really address the parent comment, which pretty much discusses the differing definitions of "good".
yeetawayhn 6y ago
I don't think downvoting them is going to change their mind by making them reassess their convictions after being subjected to the same treatment they support.

cheschire 6y ago

It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help. However, in opposition to my own idea, I consider that simply requiring a more effort wouldn't necessarily change the groupthink problem, but would just stifle low effort downvotes. Let's consider then the whole idea of votes in the first place. Are downvotes considered "speech" in an abstract sense? Should they be protected in the same way disagreeable opinions are? Is the level of effort necessary to express the speech relevant to the level of protection it deserves? Would restricting downvotes in any way be considered a speech restriction? So these are all interesting aspects to the problem that cause me a lot of internal debate.

yodelshady 6y ago
>but would just stifle low effort downvotes With the exception of spam, that's a feature. If something offends you, you should consider why. Upvotes are useful in reducing spam, as without them, I'd have to repeat a sentiment to show agreement. In my experience (anecdata warning!) that nicely leads to both the best post for an argument, and the best rebuttal, sharing visibility. Neither combat the problem of "fake news", because frauds don't have to be well done if the local community agrees with the sentiment.
mettamage 6y ago
To reply to a part of your comment: I've come to realize that most downvotes can be mitigated by simply adding in disclaimers, explicit assumptions, general kindness and general positivity [1]. In that sense HN really made me a more civil person to discuss with, while I am still able to write controversial opinions when I happen to have them. So on balance, in my experience, the downvoting has been a good development for me. [1] There was a year where I was arguably mildly depressed about my job situation. I graduated had all the bells and whistles, and worked amazingly hard for it (I almost burned out twice). Yet, I couldn't get a prestigious job. And for me, that was the whole point. Why work hard if it doesn't get you anywhere? I gave up on a lot of things. The tone in my comments during that year was more negative than usual despite my opinions being similar. I experimented with being more positive than I actually felt, while still expressing the same opinions, and noticed I'd be downvoted less and upvoted more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
prox 6y ago
One of the problems with upvote/downvote is that it is binary, while topics of discussion in the social rarely aren’t. In the social space of forming opinions, many things happen in a grey spectrum, and need not be polarized all the time (upvote / downvote)
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Sam Harris once proposed a “this changed my mind” button as a way to encourage discourse.
  - coffeeling 6y ago
    Having multiple different reaction buttons would legit be nice: I agree I disagree Thoughtful Contentless I learned something I changed my mind This way we could eg. express that we disagree with the post, which was thoughtful and a good effort, and didn't change our minds but still learned something. One huge poison in a lot of modern discourse is that accepting your interlocutor has a point should mean you start to agree with them. Why? Some of the best things I've ever read in my life didn't change my overall stance on a subject, but gave it a lot of new nuance and depth, and appreciation for the person talking.
- Mangalor 6y ago
  Simple up/down voting is probably a relic of the simple concepts and simplified programming needed for early development of social media (web 1.0). An overhaul of these networks to adapt more to human-like discourse is much-needed and welcome imo. Kialo for example has a more complex voting system that works better.
  - prox 6y ago
    Yes, I absolutely agree, I hope to see more resources and work done in that area.
cousin_it 6y ago
We could remove downvotes. They had three purposes: 1) Crowdsourced moderation. Well, everyone is using manual moderation anyway. 2) Silencing others. This is a misfeature. 3) Finding the best content. Upvotes are enough for that. That said, I'm not sure this will reduce groupthink. Twitter has no downvotes and plenty of groupthink.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  There could be two kinds of downvotes: * "I disagree" downvote * "This comment has no value" downvote First downvote can be used for arguments like "let's increase taxes to the rich because, this way we can build more fair society, European countries have shown that high taxes..." Second downvote can be used for comments like "Let's tax these rich bastards". I want to also mention reddit voting system which I kinda like: they have downvoting, but they also have a sorting by "controvervial": top comments are the comments with high number of both upvotes and downvotes, such comments really help to see the full spectre of opinions in discussions, while the universally true and not interesting comments everyone agrees with like "we should not kill people", are below controversial comments.
  - CM30 6y ago
    The ideal solution is definitely to split ratings, both for upvotes and downvotes. Slashdot did this, and quite a few forum scripts have plugins for it, where you can rate posts based on things like whether you agree/disagree with them, if they're funny or informative, if they're spam/low quality etc. Having it work that way would significantly discourage using upvotes and downvotes as agree/disagree buttons, and make it much clearer what the community thinks of any particular post or piece of content.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h, so people eventually saved them for really bad / offensive / spam comments instead of punishing people for their opinions (except a few who even wrote scripts to downvote certain people systematically...). The problem is in my opinion that once people begin to act like this, their victims behave like this also. If you get punished for arguing against somebody, you learn to stop arguing and just downvote that person instead. It's a chain reaction.
flukus 6y ago
>I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help I think old school sequential forums were actually much better, outside specific niches they're harder to find these days though. Having the things everyone strongly agrees with at the top where they're the first to be read just encourages flamewars straight out of the gate and a lot of stuff just got lost in the middle to never be looked at again. But when casually reading you see replies from everyone, there's no distinction between controversial opinions and group think approved ones. One of the few I frequent regularly is actually a political and has posters with the full spectrum of beliefs, but the lack voting makes things much more pleasant than a similar topic on here or reddit would be. There were a couple of other advantages too, bumping threads meant the conversation was over when it stopped being discussed, not when an algorithm decided it was no longer interesting.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Sequential forums can be good for discussions. It was definitely nice to be able to bump a discussion that was older than 16 hours to unbury it. I like ranked forums for Q and A content though, Eg, like stack overflow or even reddit when I’m trying to answer a technical question. Mostly though, nothing can replace a good forum culture. I just meant to encourage that with my remark, the downvote button itself is only bad if people use it recklessly
scarmig 6y ago
I'm a fan of easy ability to downvote and upvote. What I would be interested in is a more sophisticated ordering than by net number of votes. For example, I'm sure some people's upvotes correlate well with my own (and probably some people's downvotes correlate with my upvotes!) If comments could somehow be ordered by how likely I am to upvote them, based on historical correlations between my and others' votes, that seems like an interesting approach.
- unlaxedneurotic 6y ago
  But don't you think that if you are exposed more to comments that correlate with your own preference, it would lead to creation of an echo chamber?
- rini17 6y ago
  If we must have the one-click convenience (I'm not convinced it's necessary) I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting" etc. instead of downvote button, perhaps also similar for upvote.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    Or may be both up- and downvoted messages should make it to the top, while ignored messages should slowly sink?
    - zzo38computer 6y ago
      I would rather view in chronological order. I think that it should be an option. Sorting by "controversial" as suggested in another comment should be another option.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting" Slashdot used to have that, it didn’t save it.
  - 6y ago
favokus 6y ago
> It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help. I actually don't see any value in downvotes. It's usually used when people disagree, which obviously leads to silos of thought and suppressing ideas. If somebody is being particularly disruptive and unproductive, then they should be flagged, but otherwise I wish downvotes would be removed from HN. It has no place here. Especially on HN, where I thought the idea was for people to have reasonable discussions about things, downvotes are frustratingly counter to that. If you disagree with something, it's too easy to just downvote and move on. And people pile on without saying anything. And in the end, nobody learns anything because nobody's actually talking about what's wrong with the comment. Then again, I get the feeling nobody here actually wants to learn anything from fellow users if they happen to represent different ideas. I guess that's by design?
BlackFly 6y ago
One of the common threads on some limits to free speech is the notion that lies are not protected. Libel, perjury, false advertisement, slander. I treat downvoting similarly: I only downvote things I know to be false and figure the speaker either knows it to be false or reasonably should know. Since I only downvote in the rare cases where I believe a person is being dangerously disingenuous or unreasonable, I often don't feel there would be any value in replying. If they are misrepresenting facts or I believe they are not reasonable, why would I attempt to reason with them? Instead if I think the person is just confused or hasn't considered a different perspective, I won't downvote and might reply. Often I will just ignore it anyways, since I am ambivalent about the possibility of reasoning with people over the internet.

yspeak 6y ago

Welcome to HN.

axegon_ 6y ago

This is the problem. The upvoting-downvoting is a good idea in principle but it does not (and cannot) take human subjectivity into account, which is what makes it fundamentally flawed. By the way this is an extension of the same problem as with silencing opinions or comments online or in real life.

arethuza 6y ago

As far as I know the convention of HN has always been that downvotes can be used to express strong disagreement and that discussion of downvoting is regarded as unproductive and a bit boring.

Seb-C 6y ago

I just spent 5 minutes upvoting every grayed-out comment that had at least substantial content in this page. Even the ones I disagree with. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it

dependenttypes 6y ago

Down-vote does not mean censor. It is just a community-oriented way to sort comments.

nonsince 6y ago

What do you think the down- and upvote buttons are for if not signalling that you think that a comment is good or not.

detaro 6y ago
This doesn't really address the parent comment, which pretty much discusses the differing definitions of "good".

yeetawayhn 6y ago

I don't think downvoting them is going to change their mind by making them reassess their convictions after being subjected to the same treatment they support.