Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

> Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.

I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.

Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen.

Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading.

I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community.

In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't.

From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.

Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.

Downvoting here on HN does seem pretty arbitrary. (Either that, or I just don't post quality comments/posts :D)

I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.

I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.

As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.

I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have nothing else to say. It's weird to me when I get a large burst of 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting rights be taken away for any thread you're participating in. Reddit seems worse at this. It feels strongly like if you're in a 1:1 debate with someone they will downvote each response you make and that feels... stupid.

Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility system. Not the mean or total votes, because they're skewed by a small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism I think to not be a little shit.

I don't mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted. Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept that you're dealing with a particularly moronic group of individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting their head against -5's. That is useful information. These people are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic obsessed ranters, or, and I'll happily tank downvotes here, aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and definitely don't have massive negative externalities for everything.

People decry "Echo chamber!" but in reality most people consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative downvotes don't actually have anything valuable to add to most conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.

> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them

You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that finished at -4.