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I really like downvoting where you lose one of your past upvotes in order to downvote. It's a nice little filter that people who care about how many upvotes the

I really like downvoting where you lose one of your past upvotes in order to downvote. It's a nice little filter that people who care about how many upvotes they have won't use, and puts an end to some amount of frivolous downvoting. In a meta way, you kind of have to use a little bit of your own point capital to downvote something, so if you're highly upvoted by the community then calling BS on something is easier for you and the risk taking for doing so makes more sense, versus someone who just signed up. I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?

s1artibartfast 6y ago
I like the idea of only showing the number of up boats and when her user is negative, and possibly taking action at some point. And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly addressing the parent comment Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is hidden
kergonath 6y ago
I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you give more power to the people already playing the reputation game. You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner. My experience is that: - voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations - dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example) - greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable. > I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained? I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.

s1artibartfast 6y ago

I like the idea of only showing the number of up boats and when her user is negative, and possibly taking action at some point. And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly addressing the parent comment Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is hidden

kergonath 6y ago

I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you give more power to the people already playing the reputation game. You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner. My experience is that: - voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations - dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example) - greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable. > I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained? I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.