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We could remove downvotes. They had three purposes: 1) Crowdsourced moderation. Well, everyone is using manual moderation anyway. 2) Silencing others. This is

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.
- ratww 6y ago
  > In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h I believe this is also true for Hacker News.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    If so, it must be a sort of "hell" downvote, which has no effect even though the UI seems to indicate that it does... I don't think this would change behavior as described above.

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.

ratww 6y ago
> In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h I believe this is also true for Hacker News.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  If so, it must be a sort of "hell" downvote, which has no effect even though the UI seems to indicate that it does... I don't think this would change behavior as described above.