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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

#331

Post by EGreg »

twirligigue wrote: post #323
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…

Sometimes people can dislike something but they are unable to articulate the reason. Yet the reason may be valid. So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one point from the downvoted, let it cost the downvoter one point also. This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express d…

Wow, I love both of these comments. I've been on the receiving end of downvotes after making helpful comments reflecting strongly-held opinions, that are the result of years of battle-testing them, and even building free software to put them into practice. Silent downvotes are maddening, and I often edit my comments to invite people to just disagree and give me their strongest arguments as to why they think my comment is bad / shouldn't have been posted / etc. I prefer they focus on substance, and I would welcome great counterpoints that I haven't thought of.

But it's worse than that. Every time I link to the actual solution that I spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building, rather than just talk about it, I get silent downvotes. Watch, I will do it here:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

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

#332

Post by aaron-santos »

twirligigue wrote: post #323
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…

Sometimes people can dislike something but they are unable to articulate the reason. Yet the reason may be valid. So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one point from the downvoted, let it cost the downvoter one point also. This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express d…

It's pretty easy to farm karma here. Would double-edged downvotes incentivize more submission karma farming in order to spend it in downvotes?

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

#333

Post by bee_rider »

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 like to summarize the thread)

5) People can go on to argue with that stub

Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting experiment.

There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for example it would probably be necessary to group posts as "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving into two sides with horns intractably locked.

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

#334

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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…

The problem with "democratic" downvotes is that the vote of an expert is equal with the vote of an ignorant who votes while browsing the internets in the evening while drunk.

Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.

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

#335

Post by sumtechguy »

brightball wrote: post #149
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset. This is different from Facebook or YouTube…

It’s probably not popular, but I always thought that Slashdot had the best voting system for comments or was at least on the right track.

SD has, for lack of a better term for it, a time problem.

If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.

Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.

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

#336

Post by dmkolobov »

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…

Something that I've learned: nobody owes you an explanation for why they disagree with you, nor are they bound to care whether you learn something.

Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

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

#337

Post by effingwewt »

greggman3 wrote: post #313
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…

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 users. Some people post on here way too often for my tastes and always with the same rhetoric. I'm sure others feel the same.

But, it is what it is. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the forced civility reminds me to be more civil IRL and I appreciate that. And it's probably good to see things I don't agree with, echo chambers are bad.

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

#339

Post by pvg »

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?

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

#340

Post by myohmy »

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 totally agree. Twitter's ratio is probably the best upvote/downvote system. At best it results in providing context for the disagreement. At worst, if the person is a complete idiot then a constant stream of people dunking on them is more entertaining than a downvote.
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