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The argument over the purpose of downvotes usually devolves into "it's OK to downvote to express disagreement" vs. "downvotes should only be used for bad (dumb,

The argument over the purpose of downvotes usually devolves into "it's OK to downvote to express disagreement" vs. "downvotes should only be used for bad (dumb, abusive, or inciteful) content". But I think there's a third option, and it's the way that HN actually behaves: Voting is used to bubble good content up and bad content down. That is to say, your comments don't fall under the umbrellas of "dumb", "abusive", or "inciteful", but they might be a distraction from the main thread, or they might not be carefully enough considered -- it's not just that voters disagree, but also that they don't think the comments belong near the top of the threads. It doesn't look like the score went below maybe -2 ... that's really not that severe, and usually indicates a gentle "this isn't a good quality comment" signal.

bargl 11y ago
Wouldn't it be more useful for someone to come along and say, "Hey this comment seems to be fairly low quality, do you mind editing it to clarify your opinion so it's easier to understand?" I've actually had this happen to me on HN before and I was able to take a breath, take some time and improve the content of my comment, which helped improve HN as a whole on a very small level. If we use gentle downvoting to indicate bad quality comments it's much harder to separate that from disagreement / negative comments. It might be time for HN to adopt a technical solution to keep the quality it has always had present. (I.E. private messages, or comments that aren't about content but directly to OP, or flags to indicate that a comment could use editing/rephrasing/deletion sent to the OP (along with a count of these flags)) This would everyone know what is wrong with their comment rather then having to speculate on what they did wrong, so they can learn and improve in the future.
- thaumaturgy 11y ago
  Maybe, but HN suffers quite as a bit as a forum. It's not really productive to go back and edit a comment to improve its quality. The half-life of even a popular thread on the front page is only a few hours, with a very long tail, so you might spend ten minutes editing a comment you made an hour ago all so that only three people will ever read it. For better or worse, downvote-to-sort-by-quality is a lot more efficient, and a lot less noisy. Read this as less of a disagreement with you and more of a criticism of HN as a place for high-quality discussions.

bargl 11y ago

Wouldn't it be more useful for someone to come along and say, "Hey this comment seems to be fairly low quality, do you mind editing it to clarify your opinion so it's easier to understand?" I've actually had this happen to me on HN before and I was able to take a breath, take some time and improve the content of my comment, which helped improve HN as a whole on a very small level. If we use gentle downvoting to indicate bad quality comments it's much harder to separate that from disagreement / negative comments. It might be time for HN to adopt a technical solution to keep the quality it has always had present. (I.E. private messages, or comments that aren't about content but directly to OP, or flags to indicate that a comment could use editing/rephrasing/deletion sent to the OP (along with a count of these flags)) This would everyone know what is wrong with their comment rather then having to speculate on what they did wrong, so they can learn and improve in the future.

thaumaturgy 11y ago
Maybe, but HN suffers quite as a bit as a forum. It's not really productive to go back and edit a comment to improve its quality. The half-life of even a popular thread on the front page is only a few hours, with a very long tail, so you might spend ten minutes editing a comment you made an hour ago all so that only three people will ever read it. For better or worse, downvote-to-sort-by-quality is a lot more efficient, and a lot less noisy. Read this as less of a disagreement with you and more of a criticism of HN as a place for high-quality discussions.