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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

#341

Post by corobo »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #291

I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk the…

The reality of this of course would be a bunch of meta comments "." or "dumbass" or just general low-effort insults

> I have no problems with people disagreeing with me

Anonymous downvotes exist in the first place because this isn't a common character trait. If everyone was like that then we'd all be giving each other feedback

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

#342

Post by tonyedgecombe »

effingwewt wrote: post #337
greggman3 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

downvoting to disagree is totally acceptable on HN I complained once and dang corrected me.

It's how I use it in reverse. I see my number tank and know people on HN don't agree. What I would like is the ability to hide my score. If I notice the drop I may check a comment to see what the disagreement was, but I stopped after several times of seeing nothing just the downvotes. Anyway, I don't need my number on every page I visit on HN, and would prefer the ability to hide it. I'd also love the ability to mute…

It can be somewhat arbitrary.

I remember posting a link to a BBC article which got downvoted and eventually flagged. Two weeks later I posted a link to the original research the article referred to and that time it was heavily upvoted.

I think unless your posts are getting repeatedly downvoted its not worth worrying about.

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

#343

Post by effingwewt »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311
squeaky-clean wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the GP commenter. It's not about everyone being against you. All it takes is just a couple people, or even one. I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating o…

I feel you on this. I rarely post online because there's about a 50% chance I'll run into hostile replies written in bad faith. Also, as I've gotten older, I've gradually grown into the realization that I don't need to justify my opinions to Internet randos. :) (Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)

32 minutes in and this has enough downvotes to be greyed out.

Way to prove his point internet rando's.

I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.

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

#344

Post by sixstringtheory »

pvg wrote: post #339
tasty_freeze wrote: post #291

I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk the…

This doesn't really work because every bad comment would have to generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations of its badness. It's also worth thinking about why this logic is so readily applied to downvotes but not upvotes. Presumably you learn nothing from a plain upvote so upvotes should come with a note as well, right?

> generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations

I just recently heard about a system where upvotes/downvotes themselves could be upvoted/downvoted. I could see a system like that to avoid the duplication, and if every original vote came with explanation, it would be nearly indistinguishable from regular conversation.

Plus, something getting downvoted would presumably get less traction over time since it’d get pushed down.

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

#345

Post by woxko »

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…

Getting downvoted to me is an honour because most people on the internet are dunces. If you get downvoted you know you struck a nerve or at least the other person wasted a few seconds of his life reading your retarded opinion. Happiness is in the little things.

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

#346

Post by aqsalose »

kbelder wrote: post #231
crb3 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons, with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-as-QC?

That would be an interesting experiment. Make it a 2D axis... Agree Disagree, and Low Quality High Quality. Only allow voting on one of the options.

... left and right vote in addition to up and downvote?

Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.

If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself.

edit.

I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).

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

#347

Post by nindalf »

milesvp wrote: post #254
nindalf wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine thinking your comments are so influential that a mere mention from you will cause a massive influx of crass HN-ers into your beloved subreddits.

Please be generous with your comments. You don’t have to be crass to ‘ruin a place’. I’ve seen it happen just from sheer numbers. Even if the influx measurably improves the signal to noise ratio, just having more signal can make a place exhausting to participate in. Not wanting to risk any advertisement can be a very prudent thing to do.

I was being exactly as generous as I needed to be. This was a person who went out of their way to tell this thread "I belong to bunch of lovely subreddits and I'm deliberately not mentioning them so 'the average HNer' doesn't join". It wasn't even related to their point. They went out of their way in a footnote (!) to rub in the fact that we're so terrible.

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

#349

Post by ohyeshedid »

bee_rider wrote: post #333
tasty_freeze wrote: post #291

I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk the…

I've always thought an evolution on the threaded messageboard system where 1) Votes are tied to comments inherently 2) People can argue with those comments 3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to oblivion I guess) 4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd…

Have you ever thought about becoming a Wikipedia contributor?

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

#350

Post by avel »

mindcrime wrote: post #277
avel wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you? Again -- votes don't matter . I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain. Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)

Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain. The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in s…

I appreciate your response, even if my question was perhaps 50% rhetorical.

Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here.

You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.

So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.

I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.

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