There's an interesting argument in favor of downvoting here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
For context, the author is someone who posts on HN and was (at the time) trying to launch a new community.
Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#32"What if we knew who downvoted whom, what would be the result?" I love that idea, but extend it also to upvoting, and use it to create a killer social network and/or dating site. If you and I love the same ideas and hate the same ideas, than we should meet. We may not enrich each others worldview, but that's what HN is for. You and I, in such a scenario would probably get along really well and be great friends. A gre…
Then we would care [a little?] more about the person commenting and less about the content of the comments. Perhaps content would still win but people would be influenced with decisions like "he downvoted me" or "she believes Y" (where Y is orthogonal to the issue) or dimiss salient point based on past arguments. Which is fine if that's what you're after.
The data would be pretty confusing, without analysis. I'm also assuming people with enough of a life that they wouldn't try.
Instead of (or in addition to) raw upvote/downvote data, you get a "compatibility score", where 100 means you're soul mates, and -100 means you're mortal enemies!
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed. The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button. I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and…
So what action do you propose for a situation where some person writes an incorrect post and is then corrected, but the whole thread doesn't deserve to be upvoted? If you just upvote the correction, you mark it as significant in some way. But if it's only correcting a flamebait, why would you? It seems to be better to leave the correction there (so that people who read it get more information), but force the whole th…
> The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.
Exactly. So rather than try to determine "correctness" because sometimes it is subjective, just try to determine what's clearly "better."
Up voting better comments will have the side effect of pushing down comments that are not as deserving.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#34Your assumption that downvotes occur mostly as a result of disagreement may be flawed. (I don't know myself, obviously, but it's not how I personally tend to use the feature.)
The rest of your question/opinion is based on your perceived truth of your initial assumption. I think we cannot proceed with any of that until we know the first answer.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed. The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button. I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and…
If people only down-vote fairly (ie. to suppress a comment that contains a factual error that has been explained by another comment) then the net effect of allowing down-votes is to give users relatively more influence over the ranking of posts. The issue of whether to allow down-votes ultimately is a trade-off between stronger and faster filtering of comments, and fewer opportunities for abuse.
I think the problem is that down votes have more potential for abuse than to increase the efficiency of sorting. A factual error, corrected is just as valuable as any other average comment in my opinion. Perhaps they should be pushed down, but then you have people who will down vote to suppress opposing ideas and unpopular ones.
By only allowing up votes, it becomes much harder for people to manipulate any single comment, as it would require up voting everything else. So the filtering of better comments would end up being delegated to the majority consensus of up votes, and less possible manipulation by a minority of down votes.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#36On a similar topic, the primary use of "ignore lists" on forums appears to be the opportunity to smugly announce that someone has been added to yours.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
People downmod swearing? That's fucking stupid.
Here I agree with the sentiment (swearing is OK and not what the downvote button should be used for) but dislike the comment (a one line personal attack). Which is why there should be "agree/disagree" and "good/bad contribution" buttons.
What's the utility of an agree/disagree button? I don't think I would want to see that even if it was available to me.
I downvoted the parent comment because it's a crappy one-liner. It adds nothing except to express that some people are cool with swearing, which is not a very novel sentiment, and it does so in a way intended as flamebait.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#38The worst part is downvoting someone without expressing why you did it. For example :
This is spam. Downvoted.
Most of the time people seem to just don't care about how someone else feels when gets downvoted. In the case of an article this gets more frustrating because there was effort to do it, document it and other things too. Even if the article is not what you think of "cool" it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve an explanation on why it was downvoted. Some might say: This is the internet, democracy etc... Democracy is also getting annoyed when someone thinks of you like a "nothing". Other times, someone might post something that he doesn't like, only to see if others feel the same too.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#39I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough "points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be because I haven't been around long enough. Once, I did try to downvote something by kludging the "dir" variable. I was told I couldn't make that vote. What parameters must be met for a person to get downvoting ability?
Enough with the goofy meta-talk, though. Since I don't have downvoting ability, I didn't even know it existed until I saw comments with zero or negative scores. Coming at it from my neophytic perspective, I am torn. At first blush, "not upvoting" and "downvoting" seem like they would serve similar functions: floating better content to the top. My only guess is that downvoting is a catalyst that makes it happen faster.
The only things I've wanted to downvote if I could were trolling, spam, and tangents. To that end, I think "not relevant or contributing to the discussion" is probably the most popular reason.
Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here I agree with the sentiment (swearing is OK and not what the downvote button should be used for) but dislike the comment (a one line personal attack). Which is why there should be "agree/disagree" and "good/bad contribution" buttons.
What's the utility of an agree/disagree button? I don't think I would want to see that even if it was available to me. I downvoted the parent comment because it's a crappy one-liner. It adds nothing except to express that some people are cool with swearing, which is not a very novel sentiment, and it does so in a way intended as flamebait.
That's your opinion. To me, I thought it was a good one liner. See our differing opinions? Down voting/flagging should be reserved for those comments people mutually agree on as bad.
What's the difference between discouraging by threat of jail time and discouraging vs social disapproval? Both are threats against you for certain behaviors. While these threats may be justified for stuff people all agree on are bad like racism, I do not think it's a good idea for subjective opinions. It will lead to socially induced censorship and society as a whole will become single-minded, afraid of thinking against the crowd.
I think HN should foster the environment for unique thinking and controversial comments. Sure there isn't official discouragement of certain opinions, but if we allow the mob to do it it's practically the same thing.