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> I'm actually surprised to see people here complaining about downvotes being used to disagree with comments. It is quite common and gets really annoying after

> I'm actually surprised to see people here complaining about downvotes being used to disagree with comments. It is quite common and gets really annoying after a while. Some of my comments in the past have broken the rules. Fine - downvote those. But quite a lot of them have most certainly not, and were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue. And too many of those were still downvoted to a very light shade of grey within 30 minutes of being posted - without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be, and therefore no hope of improvement (or even any real indication that improvement is needed in the first place). When I read through threads, I see that I'm not the only one this happens to. And for the record (since this always comes up), no I don't care if they usually get voted back up eventually anyway. I think it's the greying-out that's the worst. As though the rest of this community needs to be protected from the substance of your post, because a few randoms downvoted your post after they concluded you weren't capitalist enough, or were too capitalist, or think hip new framework X is rubbish, or that a blog post really was just poorly written and not worth reading, etc. It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here, and it contributes more to negativity than any single post ever could. And, it's something that the mods here take special pains to totally ignore even when you bring it up in a direct reply to them discussing meta issues on the forum, multiple times over several months.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue. That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution. Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution. > It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here, Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. The only way it can be seen as an aggression by the software (or, more accurately, the forum operator) is if you think you have a right to be protected from seeing (or perhaps having others see) an indication of whether other members of the community think your comment is worthwhile. But that opinion is directly opposed to the entire idea of participating in a public discussion forum.
- deciplex 12y ago
  > That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution. > Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution. Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be". I do realize that people might not be downvoting for mere disagreement but because they think my post did not contribute to the discussion, however without a reply to elaborate on that, it isn't very helpful. The downvote alone will not usually lead to a correction in behavior, since there is no way for the receiver of the downvote to even know that the downvote was given for that reason as opposed to disagreement, much less what the reason might even be. Instead, he'll conclude that this forum is full of negative people who downvote for specious reasons, or for no reason, and perhaps begin to become a negative HN member himself. That's a loss. And since your next objection might be that I feel entitled to a reply from everyone who downvotes a post - I don't. But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low. > Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. Well, I don't believe the forum software is actually capable of aggression, heh. What I was getting at, is that it is an act of aggression by the site operators against community members here. And no, I don't have a problem in general with an indication of whether the community thinks a post is worthwhile or not - I do strongly disagree with this particular implementation of it. I would have no problem with, for example, just displaying the raw upvotes and downvotes next to a post. Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read), which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post, considering all it takes is for one random to downvote your post to make it happen. If a post truly is so offensive that people probably shouldn't be made to read it (racial epithets, bullying, etc), we have flag-killing to take care of that. Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low.
skwirl 12y ago
Since you're using yourself as a data point, I paged through your comment history looking for your grayed out comments. I have to say that your grayed out comments were all well deserved. They are a very small minority of your comments, but they are comments that generally involved ad hominem attacks and/or gratuitous negativity that did not add to the discussion. I would say the downvote system has worked well in these cases.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> were written in all earnestness with intention of productive dialogue. That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution. Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution. > It is a subtle aggression perpetrated by the forum software against every user here, Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. The only way it can be seen as an aggression by the software (or, more accurately, the forum operator) is if you think you have a right to be protected from seeing (or perhaps having others see) an indication of whether other members of the community think your comment is worthwhile. But that opinion is directly opposed to the entire idea of participating in a public discussion forum.

deciplex 12y ago
> That doesn't mean downvotes were for disagreement. Just because you intended it to contribute to productive dialogue doesn't mean that downvoters didn't think that it failed to provide a substantive contribution. > Your argument seems to recognize that people can disagree with you on your message, but seems equally to fail to recognize that people can disagree with you over whether the message was, independent of agreement or disagreement with your point, a substantive contribution. Perhaps you started writing your reply before I amended my post to add "without a single reply to indicate exactly what anyone's problem with such a post could possibly be". I do realize that people might not be downvoting for mere disagreement but because they think my post did not contribute to the discussion, however without a reply to elaborate on that, it isn't very helpful. The downvote alone will not usually lead to a correction in behavior, since there is no way for the receiver of the downvote to even know that the downvote was given for that reason as opposed to disagreement, much less what the reason might even be. Instead, he'll conclude that this forum is full of negative people who downvote for specious reasons, or for no reason, and perhaps begin to become a negative HN member himself. That's a loss. And since your next objection might be that I feel entitled to a reply from everyone who downvotes a post - I don't. But less than one in ten heavily-downvoted posts that I read, has a reply to indicate why that post was downvoted. I feel that number is low. > Its not an aggression at all, and, if it was, it would be perpetrated by the downvoters, not the forum software. Well, I don't believe the forum software is actually capable of aggression, heh. What I was getting at, is that it is an act of aggression by the site operators against community members here. And no, I don't have a problem in general with an indication of whether the community thinks a post is worthwhile or not - I do strongly disagree with this particular implementation of it. I would have no problem with, for example, just displaying the raw upvotes and downvotes next to a post. Like I said, it's as though readers need to be "protected" from reading your post (by making it harder to read), which is patronizing to readers and a bit harsh to the author of the post, considering all it takes is for one random to downvote your post to make it happen. If a post truly is so offensive that people probably shouldn't be made to read it (racial epithets, bullying, etc), we have flag-killing to take care of that. Greying-out earnest comments merely because they are useless (and remember that's in the best case) is over the line because the consequence of a false positive is too high and the threshold for it to happen (again - one downvote) is too low.

skwirl 12y ago

Since you're using yourself as a data point, I paged through your comment history looking for your grayed out comments. I have to say that your grayed out comments were all well deserved. They are a very small minority of your comments, but they are comments that generally involved ad hominem attacks and/or gratuitous negativity that did not add to the discussion. I would say the downvote system has worked well in these cases.