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Also, I think that replies accompanying down-votes should be displayed directly next to the comment as a sort of tag (i.e. you can’t click a down-arrow alone, you have to type out something like “not accurate” or “flame” or “I don’t like his hair” or whatever the reason is) and then the comment appears as: foobar_user 1 hour ago | -1:“not accurate” -1:“flame” -1:“I don’t like his hair”.
I really love your idea
This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm conce…
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> disagree without teaching That is the single most compelling reason, why I find most people (on|off)line disturbing. They just want to drown out dissent without helping other people argumentatively to understand the opposing view. OK, that is probably, because they oftentimes do not have real arguments and haven't rationalized their position at all. Maybe the past paragraph is just me being a misanthrope. Or maybe…
Fixing "disagree without teaching" is tough when you have to do the teaching to thousands of people across as many or more places. I bet people just get burnt out after awhile.
Even for the one in a million chance of a person reading my stuff, I have to at least try to convey my POV with arguments.
And I am far from achieving this every time. Very far, actually.
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I think providing short reasons isn't enough. If you wrote a long post and I downvoted it with "not accurate" it doesn't help much, does it?
"Not accurate" may be useful feedback even if it's false. For example, perhaps several such responses in a row would prompt the author to link to supporting data, or reword their comment to be clearer. The real question though isn't whether it's always helpful, but whether on average it's more useful than just a bare downvote. While some of the responses will be "not accurate", others will be an extremely actionable…
On HN, unpopular comments are, often, still voted down despite the facts and despite the presentation.
I usually reserve these instances for when I know more than a little on the topic, generally professionally speaking, and often first hand. But, if it is unpopular, it doesn't matter. It's predictable.
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A hypothetical social-discussion model I've been meaning to build an MVP of: 1. there are replies and up-voting, but no down-voting; 2. you can classify a comment reply, at time of posting, as a "rebuttal"; 3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent; 4. the aggregate score of a subthread is calculated as a Euclidean distance, with all the positively-scored comments as dimensions…
Why remove downvoting directly? I'm not against the idea, I just want to understand the thinking. I wonder if the problem is the binary nature of so many things. 5 star/1 star reviews are the most common, we have up and down votes, but no real context for that. I wonder if the problem that needs to be solved isn't context, rather than directional. This is me spitballing, so feel free to IGNORE everything below. I was…
I am wary of this, especially when it comes to the web. I can see this system being "controlled" by early and/or very active users.
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> e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be…
A hypothetical social-discussion model I've been meaning to build an MVP of: 1. there are replies and up-voting, but no down-voting; 2. you can classify a comment reply, at time of posting, as a "rebuttal"; 3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent; 4. the aggregate score of a subthread is calculated as a Euclidean distance, with all the positively-scored comments as dimensions…
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I've noticed flagging being used similarly, too. The argument that downvoting should be used to register disagreement falls apart when you consider that only users with enough (>= 500, I think?) karma have disagreement privileges.
Flagging is extremely effective in taking content off the front page. I understand the intention, to quickly kill spam and avoid flame war topics, but it's extremely powerful in even preventing discussion on issues and it is probably a greater contribution to groupthink than downvoting comments is. Agenda setting, controlling which topics are discussed at all, is way more powerful than controlling the range of views…
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Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.
Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?
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> e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be…
The problem with HN is that 90% of the downvote justifications would be "this differs from my worldview".