Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?

Has the use of the downvote increased since hacker news made it to techcrunch? How about in the last 30 days?

Obviously, the most interesting, useful comments are often going to be controversial. In cases where people downvote stuff they don't like (which is a proxy for, does not fit my worldview), these comments will not get the most points. This means you shouldn't care too much about points except that they tell you where the conventional wisdom lies.

Personally I downvote something if I think it's dumb. Since there is more stupidity here now, it seems, there are more downvotes. That's good.

I haven't been here very long but I've thought that expressing disagreement isn't the purpose of a downvote at all. Instead, it's meant to indicate that a post detracts from the discussion and probably shouldn't have been posted to begin with. Using downvotes to express disagreement would only result in discussions becoming more intellectually homogeneous, which would make the site much less valuable.

I'm not sure how the site can encourage people to use downvotes more appropriately, but I think that there is a higher risk of having trolls pollute the site than of downvotes deterring legitimate discussion (has anyone felt like leaving the site or not posting a comment because you feared that your perspective would get you down-modded? I'm not aware of such an instance but if it has happened to someone than that is a big problem that should be talked about).

I thought up-votes for something special, to be given out once in a while as a way of saying "your comment affected me in a deep way, thank you". If you give out up-vote willy-nilly then no one really cares about writing a thoughtful comment.

Here's an example of bad up-voting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213070 What the fuck's the point of the up-vote there? Does dangoldin really need to be up-voted 6 times to indicate that his comment was useful? Wouldn't 1 up-vote be enough?

Anyway, I need a coffee and it's just a number.

Most of us make it a habit to abide by the news.YC "guidelines," such as not changing the text of submitted headlines unless it's needed for clarification, and not adding comment signatures. And it's an easy thing to police because there's accountability. Case in point, I've only seen a signature once, and another user had pointed to the users' misstep by the time I noticed it.

But there's no accountability for downmodding. There really can't be, else you injure the chance for honest opinions from people afraid of the kickback. But what if there was a single line of text you needed to include with a downmod? Something short, like 25-40 characters, that explained your reason. The community would recognize anonymous feedback like "Trolling" and "Unnecessary personal attack" as reasonable motives for downmodding, and "Bad point" or "Stupid idea" as unreasonable.

It wouldn't eliminate the problem -- I don't think anything anonymous could -- but it might create some mechanism for policing indiscriminate downmods and encouraging fair use.

Of course where you'd display that information is another issue entirely...