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Upvoting and downvoting are a form of group communication, and I use them both with that intent. Just like you structure an individual post to have coordination
by bhaney 3y ago
Upvoting and downvoting are a form of group communication, and I use them both with that intent. Just like you structure an individual post to have coordination and logical flow, a community structures a thread using voting to push relevant comments worth reading to the top and keep comments that are less worth reading towards the bottom. Flagging says "this comment/post should not exist," while downvoting here only says "the value of reading this comment is comparatively low." It's pretty straightforwardly the opposite of upvoting ("the value of reading this comment is comparatively high").
This usage is subtly different from the more common meaning of upvoting/downvoting elsewhere, which is "I like/dislike this," and the HN community goes to great lengths to try and remind people of that difference (with obviously less than perfect success - it's very ingrained!)
Personally I try to only downvote when I think a comment is of low conversational quality, not just because I disagree with it. That usually involves me believing that the poster is posting in bad faith, is being too emotional to convincingly convey a point (when relevant), is flat out factually incorrect, etc. I will also usually throw in a downvote on things I've flagged (spam) just to get the comment a little more out of the way before it gets completely killed by flags.
As to a deeper "why," I think the reason is the same as participating in any other form of communal conversation. We're all just trying to convey valuable information to each other, whether that's by authoring text or influencing rankings of existing texts. Whatever drives you to write and comment is also what should drive you to vote.
- _akhe 3y agoYour understanding of it seems far less stressful than mine! I like the idea of voting on conversational quality rather than agree/disagree. Sometimes disagreement really just means surprised or offended, and sometimes those are conversations worth having. I also hadn't thought of the fact that it moves them up/down - that part I actually love. I wish it only did that, and didn't make the downvoted ones literally fade away lol kinda ridiculous. I get hiding flagged or inappropriate of course. Thanks for your answer!
- bhaney 3y ago> I wish it only did that, and didn't make the downvoted ones literally fade away Oh I disagree. I think fading downvoted comments is a great idea, though I prefer them to be less intensely faded out than HN defaults to (I use a custom stylesheet and tune them to be more readable but still clearly faded). While I'm sure I have the capacity to manually evaluate a numeric score and internalize it as context, I'd much rather have the same information conveyed visually in a way that encourages the action that I'm likely to choose to perform (ie, skipping the comment). Reducing the contrast of a comment makes it take more effort to read, which makes me instinctively not want to read it, so I can skip all the cognitive load of "how much is this downvoted? oh, to -3? it's probably not worth reading then, maybe I'll continue on with the rest of the thread and come back to this if I see a reason to." I'm a big proponent of visual design that offloads cognitive load to existing fixed-function chunks of the brain so I can focus more of my attention on the things I actually care about.
- _akhe 3y ago> I use a custom stylesheet and tune them to be more readable See this is what I'm missing! To me it invokes laughter for some reason - like the message is sailing off into the fog, bye! I'm like "what's that message way off in the distance? Well it's too far gone now" They should make the font size shrink too as it slowly fades away. Lol don't know why it makes me laugh. Like those air-powered guy dancer things at car dealerships it's funny for no reason other than form.