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Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

theapeiron.co.uk

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Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#101

Post by Karellen »

crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

> If downvotes don't matter

Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.

Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.

Downvotes are of even less consquence.

Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#103

Post by dane-pgp »

merpnderp wrote: post #42
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

A while back I posted that according to my local state utility, installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year, both for the newest installations. And from that I concluded nuclear power was the only viable alternative to CO2 producing energy. Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback…

> installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year

I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#104

Post by ttctciyf »

crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

> I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological,

As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.

Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.

Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#105

Post by spywaregorilla »

crazy_horse wrote: post #86
spywaregorilla wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means…

Hey, wanted to respond to your comment because mine could come off as unhealthy. I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt. But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.

Respectfully I don't really agree that this is a thing. There is an element of discerning that a person is just a jerk, misguided, dumb, or just shitposting without consequence due to anonymity or whatever and learning to disregard their opinions as irrelevant. That is, a lot of internet randos fall into this category.

But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#106

Post by kome »

enriquto wrote: post #69
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

> 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.

I like the spirit :)

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#107

Post by spywaregorilla »

talentedcoin wrote: post #100
spywaregorilla wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means…

Experiencing a negative emotion is not always, or even most of the time, the same thing as being hurt.

I think that's going to fall into an argument of semantics.

Can you give an example?

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#108

Post by brightball »

dahart wrote: post #89
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you? Are you sure you weren’t just wrong and didn’t know it? I’ve been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly downvoted for it far, far more often than I’ve been unf…

Agreed. It’s very out of the norm on HN.

On Reddit though, it’s the standard.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#109

Post by city41 »

crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Disagreeing does not mean it is irrelevant, especially if it is well written and in good faith. We should allow all viewpoints that are put forward with proper intentions.

Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#110

Post by tjpnz »

okareaman wrote: post #78
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

I don't mind downvotes on my comments, I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it. Even a short comment "I don't like this" would be telling because it would indicate they don't have a reason other than emotion. Often I initially get a bunch of downvotes and then later enough upvotes to even it out.

>I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it.

Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a sustained period of time for instance.

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