Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it. • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#51

Post by chrischen » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 9:30 PM UTC

mquander wrote: post #45

chrischen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess it boils down to this: I have absolutely no interest in reading a website with comments like that. If a large proportion of comments were one-line opinions and purely argumentative back-and-forths, I would just not bother reading the HN comment sections. So I downvote it. Now, I understand that you feel the opposite way. The only objective argument I can make for my position is that there are a great number o…

That's essentially what up voting is for. It is a one way distillation that would also avoid any possible majority silencing of unpopular views.

We don't punish people for being dumb, we reward people who are smart.

Jail time is physical intimidation, but it is just one example of intimidation. My point is that such physical intimidation is no different from social intimidation upheld by the majority view in society. And such social intimidation is no different from down voting. Just as you were probably taught by someone at some point in your life to respect other's viewpoints, we should foster that here too. Down voting because of differences in viewpoint is not a sign of respect.

And you can fully respect someone while still getting your share of the "better" comments because there is still an up vote mechanism. Without down vote simply means you can't disrespect comments that while are not overly additive to the conversation, are also not overly disruptive either.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#52

Post by marze » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 9:49 PM UTC

This all brings to mind Churchill's quote (paraphrased):

"Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all other forms of government."

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#53

Post by araneae » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 9:49 PM UTC

shrughes wrote: post #43

I 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

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#54

Post by araneae » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 9:51 PM UTC

I downvote people who downvoted me before I could downvote. Karma's a bitch.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#55

Post by warp » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 9:52 PM UTC

mquander wrote: post #37

jodrellblank wrote: post #20

Earlier 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.

The utility of an agree/disagree button would be to prevent the up/down vote arrows to be used for that purpose, which a few in this thread claim is what is happening.

(I doubt that would work though, but am curious to know if that has been implemented anywhere)

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#56

Post by 10ren » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 9:56 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #41

I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth commenting on. Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit. The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his posi…

BTW on just the beginning of your comment: This might explain why I sometimes get "correct" replies that totally miss the point: they've seen it in the newcomments page.

It's really baked my noodle a few times, that a seemingly intelligent person could be so self-confidently blind. Now it seems likely that it simply was because they were blind.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#57

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 10:04 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #33

viraptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#58

Post by Semiapies » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 10:12 PM UTC

warp wrote: post #4

Most 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.

People keep saying that, and people keep linking to pg saying that's part of the intended use. Shall we avoid the pointlessness of this argument?

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#59

Post by viraptor » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 10:14 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #35

wtallis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

While upvoting better comments is a really good thing, I don't think it's enough. Let's say that instead of trying to give a counter example for your idea, I simply write something like:

"No - that's lame and you should be downvoted, because you're wrong right now."

If that was the last response - everything's fine - the thread gets lost. But if someone tries to explain that I'm not correct, we get a standard war that doesn't really prove anything. If people wanted to upvote "better" comments, then anything after my post could be considered "better" and I can keep the thread afloat by just contradicting everyone (if I don't simply abuse them). I'm still at ~1 vote with every post, but with others being upvoted, we would just grab attention and pull more people into the "conversation"... and that's what I think happens in forums that simply move the updated threads up.

The only way to break that cycle would be to start upvoting most of the other threads... But then what to do if some of them are actually worth upvoting and some aren't?

Now the question is: did I, or did I not try to start a noisy attention grabbing thread just now by saying you're wrong but not in a trollish way (and was it really not a troll post or did I just try to assure you it wasn't by my definition (how meta! ;) ))

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#60

Post by jrockway » Sat, Oct 31, 2009, 10:22 PM UTC

mquander wrote: post #37

jodrellblank wrote: post #20

Earlier 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.

I downvoted your comment because I am arbitrary and fickle.