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Downvotes Should Require a Meaningful Comment
Simply change that would go a long way toward solving one of the most glaring issues with comment sections.
I'm sure the response to this suggestion will be predictably something along the lines of 'what is a meaningful comment'.
It's simply, anything other than just entering a string of random text to full-full the length validation. That's it. An actual sentence.
If it's rubbish, great, that's still helpful because the original poster of the downvoted comment knows the time and effort they've put into writing a thoughtful comment still stands; meaning the downvote was bullshit, petty, or just flawed reasoning.
There will always be people that are going to downvote just about anything. And of course this will limit knee-jerk downvotes, along with causing one to pause before doing it because they'll be open to a downvote if their reason for the it is flawed.
I predict if this comment gets any traction it'll quickly get flagged. That's the next most common way for people to shut-down conversations they don't agree with.
- stmw 6y agoThis is a good idea.
- tboyd47 6y agoWonderful idea. Sometimes I get hit with 4-5 downvotes in less than a minute on controversial comments. Seems improbable for these to be organic.
- jgwil2 6y agoMaybe you underestimate how unpopular your opinions are.
- sharemywin 6y agoyou have 47k upvotes. I only have 3.6k and I get a chuckle when people downvote me. figure they have a long way to down vote me to 0. not saying it's a bad idea btw.
- detaro 6y agoCounterpoint: That makes bad comments take more space in the discussion, which is the opposite of what they are intended to do. (e.g. is it really better instead of one downvoted comment to have one downvoted comment and 4 replies telling them they are an asshole/wrong/...? HN IMHO already has a problem with too repetitive commenting, that'd make it way worse)
- notahacker 6y agoIn theory these comments could be auto-collapsed or even hidden by default, but yes, this would escalate flamewars. I think it's often courteous to explain why people are being downvoted (and even more courteous to generally not downvote people simply because you disagree with their opinion), but a lot of the most downvoted comments are very obviously low effort, trolling, spamming or on divisive subjects and I'm not sure a comment from each downvoter adds value there
- non-entity 6y agoI've always thought down-votes could be removed without losing much. Rule breaking content can still be flagged and it removes one low effort kneejerk response option.
- wrycoder 6y agoLeave it alone!