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

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 position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.

Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?

I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.

In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.

- 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 definitely should be flagged.

- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand, saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard English in a non-bad direction.

- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.

- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes comments because they want to share their opinion, but some are indulging the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.

- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self-indulgent comments.

Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.

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 of general-interest sites on the Internet with a huge amount of discussion which is on par with "That's fucking stupid," but only a handful with discussion that is consistently free of such comments and the associated derailing of the conversation that they frequently bring. (Historically, it seems like the only realistic way to weed them out is by keeping a community small or having heavy active moderation.) I'd like to encourage more of the latter.

I don't really like your analogies between physical intimidation and violence and downvoting, because the consequences of physical threats are so much more serious. I can't understand how it's a serious harm to anyone to tell them "you can't express viewpoints X, Y, or Z on Hacker News." It's a shame, but it's one of the very smallest shames that can possibly be inflicted upon a person.

I understand that you're concerned in an idealistic sense about the ethics of using simple majority rule to tell someone "you can't say that," but I just don't think it's a big concern in this context, when the whole Internet is an ultimate egalitarian arena full of people saying anything and everything. The much bigger problem, to me, is having so much content that you can't read the really high-quality things because they are swamped with noise that adds nothing, or almost nothing. (By high-quality things I mean ideas and arguments that are novel, useful, and well-informed.)

I rarely comment, one of the few time I did I got down voted. I returned 3 days later and tried to defend my position, but it was too late and the community had move on. Oddly enough my comment did start a thread of discussion.

As I mentioned in my followup comment assessing the value of user contributed content is an area that we are trying to solve in a web application solution soon to be deployed.

Below is an excerpt from my comment.

"Using my initial comment as an example had I not posted that comment "value adding" content would never have been created. If my contributed content resulted in "value adding" content, is it not then "value adding" content? Is a good proxy of "value adding" content, content which produces or causes other content creation?"

So if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value.