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Negative votes (or down votes) are the worst thing ever invented. Their purpose is punishing comments (or news, or whatever) which are bad: spam, rude, unrelate
by gjulianm 15y ago
Negative votes (or down votes) are the worst thing ever invented. Their purpose is punishing comments (or news, or whatever) which are bad: spam, rude, unrelated... But, instead, people use them for punishing ideas they don't agree with.
I write in somewhat big blog with a considerable number of comments, and I see this everyday. A pretty good comment gets downvoted (and, in the end, hidden) only for not agreeing with some idea. Comments also get downvoted because some people don't like the commenter.
I think negative votes should be removed. You only have a "vote" button: you like the comment, you vote it. Don't like the comment? Ignore it. Of course, I would add instead a "report" button, so you can still manage spam and rude comments.
- swah 15y agoThat's the Like button.
- gjulianm 15y agoMaybe that's the solution. Negative votes do not promote healthy conversation if they're used like sirwitti explains. Here in HN they are more or less working, but HN is a very special place.
- kls 15y agoI personally would rather see a three control system, upvote = i like this; disagree = I disagree; and downvote = person is being a jerk. I think that is the issue people upvote to say I like this so it is easy to see the downvote as the opposite as opposed to a tangential, this is abusive. I think a three control system would clarify it. Unlike the upvotes and the downvotes I think the karma of I disagree should be displayed and people should be able to set personal thresholds on disagrees before they are greyed out.