As far as I can tell, there are no guidelines or FAQs about what downvoting should be "used for" on HN. On Reddit, the Reddiquette [1] standard is that you sho

As far as I can tell, there are no guidelines or FAQs about what downvoting should be "used for" on HN. On Reddit, the Reddiquette [1] standard is that you should only downvote if a comment doesn't contribute to the conversation. I think is is an excellent standard. It's been suggested in the past that a similar standard should be present on HN. [2] Considering that flagging is a privilege that can be lost if someone decides that you're abusing it, ideally it should be reserved for the egregious cases that are unquestionably bad. Downvoting on HN should be for comments that truly don't contribute to the conversation, though the comments in question may not rise to the level of flagging. As an example: Say you have a comment expressing an opinion with no support, no references, and factual errors. Is it "inappropriate"? Arguable. Does it contribute to the conversation? Not in any positive way. I would suggest downvoting that comment would be the right answer, even if you agree with the sentiment, because it doesn't positively contribute to the conversation. But flagging wouldn't be appropriate considering the comment is on topic and not spam (which are given as criteria in the HN Guidelines). If you encourage downvoting because you disagree with an opinion, then minority opinions get buried. And sometimes it's useful to see that an opinion isn't unanimous, and that there's another side to an argument, even if you disagree. [1] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721314