Why not introduce a cost to both upvote and downvote of 1 karma point?
Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#102Downvoting has two aspects: reducing the visibility of a post and discouraging the poster from making similar posts in the future. This can be used maliciously (though to limited effect) against viewpoints you merely disagree with. But it does have a legitimate use as well, when harmful or unhelpfully disruptive information is posted.
A few examples to clarify these guidelines:
Spam and inappropriate material (this isn't 4chan).
Advice that is well known to be wrong and/or is very likely to be harmful if followed, such as advising someone to embed raw SQL query strings in web application parameters or to exclusively use javascript for client side input sanitation (both of which would open up anyone to huge security vulnerabilities).
Unnecessary or unfunny jokes (live by the sword, die by the sword, jokes rarely improve discussion).
Completely off-topic material.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#103I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste. This is, granted, a pretty wide area, but when somebody writes something egregiously distasteful—whether it's a terrible sense of humor, or a misinformed righteousness, or craven pandering to the self-important 'social media' upper crust, or indeed the myopic, worthless blather…
> I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste.
> I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.
Are you for real? I guess I should downvote you for deeply offending me by needing to get over yourself.
But I won't, because I agree with the OP.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#104Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion. If they do, they're doing it wrong. Downvote someone for not contributing to the discussion.
From the keyboard of pg:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Both can be threatening." I submit that if one is threatened by others disagreeing with or not appreciating one's contribution to a discussion, one needs to find a more harmonious discussion.
When I say threatening I mean with the intent to discourage . so when you down vote someone you disagree with you essentially discourage them from voicing their opinion. Why? Because when I'm downvoted I'm being punished. I don't want to be punished, so I either leave the community and decrease the variation in opinions or refrain from voicing it again. Is that what we want to allow here, or anywhere? We ignore the k…
We ignore the kkk.
No, I decry the KKK. And the FBI infiltrated the KKK, and private lawsuits have largely bankrupted the KKK. The KKK gets plenty of push-back, and deserves every bit of the push-back it gets.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#106It might be interesting to keep every vote for each comment and use something like the Netflix prize algorithm to calculate whether you'd like the comment. Hiding comments would then be based on personal preferences, rather than the community at large. If nobody at all likes the comment, (i.e., it's spam or something), then it can get removed automatically. Of course, this takes a lot of work to implement, and it might require HN to have a longer privacy policy...
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#107I vote (up|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed.
More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system. It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback is a useful tool for molding the output of a system.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
There must be a better way to asses the "value" of content. I agree that the down vote is arguably a good gauge for how the community at large "feels" about the content but not a good indicator for "value". There are two metrics here that I do not believe can be extracted from a voting system. I rarely comment, one of the few time I did I got down voted. I returned 3 days later and tried to defend my position, but it…
Not seeing the original comment to which you're referring, I can't offer any opinion on it in particular. However, I generally disagree with the statement "if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value." Trolling is, at its heart, the creation of discussion by posts of negative value, usually by eliciting a strong emotional response from readers. Most troll-posts don't have value to…
That is a valid point. The minority view however does have value, and at times adds the most value to the discussion. When the minority view is treated in the same way the troll-post is then I believe the community suffers.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#109I downvote the following kinds of comments: - comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in the tree. - most comments made in reply to an article that definitel…
And yet, my only comments that actually get upvoted are garbage one-liner humor comments. EDIT: I believe this is what we call irony: http://i588.photobucket.com/albums/ss323/araneae/hn.png
I upvoted you for the rather ironic screenshot. As for the best way to get upvoted: "Agree with the rest of the crowd." HN is a very "Go with the flow" crowd. In my observation it doesn't usually pay to have a difference of opinion, which is slightly ironic since this site is aimed at hackers, who, you would hope, should have unique viewpoints.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#110Ask the submitter: Why don't you get a blog? Edit: OK, I will answer the question. People downmod to get people to convince themselves to go away. Imagine I don't like your viewpoint, and you place value on imaginary points I can take from you. I take those points, you get upset, and you stop posting stuff I disagree with. That's all there is to it; reinforcing groupthink. Similarly upmods encourage people to keep su…
Anyone who has read "The Wisdom of Crowds" or has studied the Bay of Pigs disaster knows that groupthink is a terrible idea. I can only hope that your apparent approval of reinforcing groupthink was intended as wry sarcasm.