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Comment by mrharrison | Hacker News Reader

-1 or the thumbs down reaction, I think is a mistake. They aren't usually that constructive, because most of the time they are used as retaliation against a specific user, instead of constructive criticism. If someone downvotes you, you tend to downvote them. At the least, it should be a privilege to down vote, like SO and HN do. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down

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Agreed 100% for Facebook or even Hacker News, however on GitHub it would be really useful for voting.

If you ask "Should we add this feature?", it's hard to understand what favorites mean if you don't have an anchor. Does 10 thumbs-up mean unanimous support, or is it just a small minority? It'd be nice to say "Oh, 10 upvotes... but there's 90 downvotes, so we won't do it."

FB and Hacker News are a marketplace of relatively-inconsequential ideas and thoughts. However, changes discussed on GitHub Issues can potentially have an impact on your company and livelihood.

on facebook they say "like if you want A and share if you want B" obviously this is a 'viral marketing' ploy, but something similar would be simple for github

just write:

thumbs up if you want A smile if you want B

problem solved

Or they could just have a thumbs-down button, and expect a higher level of discourse than Facebook.

Or they could have trigger warnings for thumbs downs like tumblr. Best of all worlds.

Internally when voting (informally) on things we do +1, +0, -0, and -1. Super helpful to be able to ask for everyone's opinion while they can also express the strength of their opinion.

Feel like that would be very useful

For what it's worth, the "thumbs down" emoji is named ":-1:".

+0 and -0 are equal..

I believe the implied meaning is:

+0 -> support from the sidelines (like for a change that doesn't directly affect you)/something that's not urgent but would be nice

-0 -> disagree from the sidelines/disagree with the solution but can't think of a better one

I would enjoy it if they used +ε and -ε for that, although +0 and -0 is probably clearer.

like that idea! Dunno how many people have epsilon easily accessible on their keyboards though.

Arithmetically true, but they have different IEEE 754 floating point representations.

Also, my inner mathematician understands that function limits can tend towards zero from above, or from below.

Zero ain't always just a big fat zero.

Those terms for code-review voting are (almost certainly) from Apache, which treats them differently. From http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html :

+0: 'I don't feel strongly about it, but I'm okay with this.'

-0: 'I won't get in the way, but I'd rather we didn't do this.'

(These votes are strings, not numbers, though they closely resemble numbers. See also the existence of a "++1" vote.)

C++ standardization votes on a 5-point scale: Strong For, For, Neutral, Against, Strong Against. I think it's important to be able to express the lack of an opinion, although I guess you could do that on a 4-point scale by abstaining.

I've often wondered why the "two thumbs up" isn't really used anywhere that I've seen. It is a logical progression that gives more precision to the reaction.

Commenting should be how people down vote. You should have to explain why it's not a good idea. Then if others agree with you, your comment will get up voted. Just as my comment is a downvote of github's downvote.

I agree with how you want to conduct the PR or RFC process, where it's annoying if people are being negative without providing an alternative. I do however agree with the parent where there are plenty of times when a simple yes/no vote is what you really want. The comments are there for people to provide alternatives still, removing the -1 would just be removing flexibility for a very common case.

Then such a vote should be opt-in - that is, it should only be possible on posts where the writer has explicitly chosen to make this a possibility. That would solve the issue.

While adding another piece of state and another UI control to an interface that, AIUI, did not require any changes to support this feature, which would have delayed shipping and getting this functionality into the hands of their end-users.

But making an opt-in, allow-negative-feedback control is not feedback I think they'd be wise to listen to. Users can edit issues. I'm finding it exhausting just to think through the implications of either allowing editing of the flag, or deciding that users have to get it right the first time. I can't imagine I'd find it easier to use - in fact I am sure I would be intimidated, plain and simple, by the fear of who-knows-what happening if I did the wrong thing.

(...but then, that's the most git-like thing I can imagine doing! something-like-a-VCS that you can build entire new companies' worth of brand-new development practices around and still be utterly impenetrable without first unlearning 30 years of perfectly functional version-control experience and collective wisdom. I can't express how glad I am that I don't make things for developers. Truth is, most user bases are a joy to work with. Developers... insist on dysfunction, it's non-negotiable. I think it's part of the whole, "we still don't know how to do good software engineering" schtick. It wouldn't matter if it were a solved problem to the point of a mathematical proof, nobody would allow it anywhere near their mysterious uncharted edge-blurring code artisanship. We really, really suck, both professionally, and at being adults. For the most part, anyway.)

Perhaps it's because developers always look for edge cases, whereas "normal users" look for comfort -- or ease-of-use.

The context of this feature is that users were using comments to react without providing substance. The primary motivation is to reduce the visual clutter of non-substantive comments.

While we can agree about what users should do, users not behaving as we think they should is the whole point here. Removing the -1 reaction won't encourage people to articulate their concerns. Nor will it discourage people from writing comments that explain why something is not a good idea. It simply provides a mechanism for people to register disagreement that is less obtrusive than the mechanism they would otherwise use. A cavalcade of -1's as comments obscures and thereby prevents substantive discussion.

It's naive to think that users will prefer the discreet way of expressing disapproval. They want to be loud.

Users are also lazy (I know I am). Give them a two-click way to do something, and they'll use it over a click, emoji-hunt-and-type, and click.

Facebook and Twitter provide strong evidence that people will use reactions. I see no reason to expect that user behavior will differ when they want to express negativity. Facebook's decision to not provide this feature has long been rooted on the pretense that people will use it. That is the basis of this thread: that people will use it instead of commenting.

Also, it's really easy to disagree with what I wrote without suggesting I am naive.

> Also, it's really easy to disagree with what I wrote without suggesting I am naive.

Hence proving the commenters point about negative comments :-/

What users wanted was a way to gauge what features are more important, so maintainers could prioritize the important issues to the community. All asked for was to be able to up vote _issues_, and be able to sort. [1]

Instead we got reactions, and it completely missed the mark. They've made it easier to be passive aggressive. Also it lingers on your post, instead of having the unconstructive comment stand on it's own. How does one respond to a down vote, make another comment saying "... hmm?"? It's weird.

[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/9

Sounds like a pre-optimization. You can get the same level of information with two comments and vote exclusively with +1's, but without the general negative aspects of what's mentioned above.

Right, if you're asking every single issue poster ever to remember to post two comments specifically for voting, versus just posting their issue itself.

Not every issue needs an up/down vote. But with the addition of -1, all issues and _all comments_ on those feature requests now have one. Which takes us back to the negative consequences outlined in this thread.

But the reality is, on larger projects voting doesn't help, won't work, etc.

I guess for the 90% it's ok. It'd be nice to be able to turn off.

Also, it helps in taking the community point of view. Right now, if a newbie submits a PR, one of the project maintainer might just diss him and claim his PR to be irrelevant. But if there are already some 10 likes, the latter might give a second thought and might look at it from a different perspective.

Maybe it would be better to make real user polls then? Or how about just making the downvote optional when creating the issue/PR? I think in general, down voting serves more bad than good on nearly any medium.

I think that the -1 button definitely has a place on Github.

I use Github a lot for discussing future feature development, and in that context it is really valuable to see how many people think a feature is useful or not.

Github isn't primarily a social network. In a professional context it is essential that you can also express disagreement, or that you think something is a bad idea.

In a professional context it is essential that people can express disagreement provided they write exact reasons why they disagree.

You know, "+1" usually has only one meaning:

   - "I agree with whatever you're saying".

"-1" has however two separate meanings:

   - "I disagree with whatever you're saying because I believe that blah-blah-blah (reasons here)"

   - "I disagree with whatever you're saying because fuck you that's why"

And "-1" button doesn't distinguish between those two cases.

If somebody gives your comment a -1 without a reason, and you are of the opinion that disagreement is only valid given a precise argument - can't you just ignore the -1's?

I'm not sure why this is such an emotional topic. Maybe I just have thick skin, but some random stranger on the internet giving me a down vote is not really even going to give me a moment of pause. Let alone so much that I feel that I have to demand rationalization from every person that cares to disagree with me.

You know, "+1" usually has only one meaning:

Nonsense.

    - Agreement: "I agree with whatever you're saying" 
    - Contributory : "I don't agree with what you're saying, but you elaborated your point *very* well and contributed to the discussion"
    - Mercy: "I don't agree with what you're saying, but the hivemind punished you for no good reason, have an upvote"
    - Popularity: "I like you and will +1 anything you write"
    - Thanks: "I like what you did even if this post isn't relevant"

The second and third one are very common on sites like HN, certain places on Reddit, and Stack*

Downvotes have:

    - Disagreement: "I disagree with what you're saying"
    - Anger: "Fuck you, have a downvote"
    - Doesn't contribute: "I might agree, but you're not helping the discussion"
    - Incorrect: "This isn't about agreement, your advice is wrong and/or harmful"

So, how about tagging individual comments and then voting for the tags?

I like this idea, even having preset tags ala slashdot.

Always maintained that this would make Reddit a much nicer place. Implement the vote tags, and then give people the ability to sort by votes, filtering out votes for disagreement.

"Popularity" and "Thanks" happen, those aren't very strong emotions. Sure people +1 post or two, but it wears off quickly.

"Mercy" is a very popular way to counteract -1's, but it disappears if we get rid of the ability to minus a post.

I believe "Contributory" is very rare as is. Hard to distinguish it from "Agreement" though.

This comment is basically a down vote of github's down vote. Comments should be the down vote, because someone needs to explain why a suggestion, answer, code change, submission, etc... is not a good option. If that comment (down vote) is a good idea, it will then be up voted.

Why should you never have to explain why you're in agreement with something? What kind of culture do we have if you only have to explain why you disagree with something?

The "positive" things about the issue/pull request etc. is presumably already explained by the author.

"Issue 1234: We need this feature because reasons A, B and C."

If you don't think that A, B and C justifies the change, send a downvote and/or explain why A, B and C aren't good enough reasons.

An upvote is sufficient to say that "Yes, I agree with A, B and C. Do it."

Of course, if you agree with the change but for reasons other than A, B or C, you can leave a comment to start a discussion. It has nothing to do with culture. It's just a way to minimize the redundant "Yes, I agree with what you just said".

But there could already be a reasonable explanation for -1 vote in the thread. Are you suggesting to repeat it or write "agree with @foobar on his comment"? That's more noise.

You upvote the negative comment.

I'm not sure this is a downvote. It's a vote in favour of a negative and unlike HN-style downvoting, is tallied separately. You can even react with both thumbs-up and thumbs-down to the same issue.

With a tallied up/downvote system a la HN you can't tell, numerically, if a score of 1 meant "only one person cared" or "hundreds cared and there was furious disagreement".

Actually I'd be interested in a "top 100 most polarising comments" feed :-)

There has to be some way to register negative feedback so that you can find out what is widely unpopular. The key is to lower the power of individual down-votes so that an idea can’t be easily trashed to the point where most visitors won’t even consider reading it. (I find myself doing this sub-consciously in review sites and app stores for instance, where once something falls to about 3 stars I don’t even want to see what the fuss is about, I just skip it.)

One thing I’ve never seen is a vote that accounts for the number of unique visitors, or the total time that visitors spend on a page, or even contributor status, before weighing feedback. An issue that isn’t immediately important to a lot of people should require some time to decide popular/unpopular status.

A page shouldn’t show up/down status to anybody* until a significant amount of feedback has been collected, either. This would prevent knee-jerk down-votes of ideas that seem unpopular to everyone based on a few early down-voters. A proposal should stand on its own, at first. After a certain time period, the page could reveal whether or not an idea has really turned out to be popular, and at that point the cost of up-vote/down-vote could change (e.g. maybe only comments are allowed at that point, and no simple clicks).

It depends on how the PR, project or comment thread interprets the -1s. If a vote has been specifically requested then the +1/-1s are super useful. Otherwise they could be safely ignored by maintainers as at most low value ambient info ... well worded constructive criticism will always carry more weight that a -1. Also, this is fundamentally different to SO/HN ... there is no ranking, the up-vote/down-vote ratio has zero effect aside from incrementing a counter - any meaning applied is subjective.

I do find that non-anonymous downvotes go better than anonymous ones, particularly w small communities.

Downvotes are particularly relevant for feature requests that may have substantial negative impact.

I'd actually implement downvotes/upvotes as zero-length comments so that they can be moderated and replied to.

I shall respectfully disagree. Not wanting down votes is just a way of saying "I'm offended please don't offend me I can't handle down it's it makes me sad"

It's 2016, can we stop worrying about if someone disagrees with you and just accept the fact they wanted to down vote on an issue rather than say nothing or leave a comment.

It's usually the case that it's cheap to disagree. It would be more beneficial to the review process to have those with dissenting opinions lay out a logical case presenting their concerns rather than enable them to do quicker, drive-by review.

Haven't you had feedback along the lines of, "but did you take into consideration what impact the heat death of the universe will have on your design?" ?

No, it's because downvotes actively censor unpopular opinions based on the fact that they're unpopular rather than their merit. Check out reddit some time and you'll see this happen a lot.

Combining +1 and -1 is a mistake. It would be useful to see thumbs-up separate from thumbs-down to get a gut feel for contention.

Yeah, that's definitely the best way of handling a rating system. The one I use on my sites (the XenForo mod one) counts likes, dislikes, agrees, disagrees and all the other ratings individually and displays that count under every post.

GitHub should have done the same here.

I think thoughtful comments with advice on how to refactor is a way better indicator than giving my PRs over to the mob. Ya thumbs down or any reaction with code is a mistake.

It's also lame that you can thumbs up and thumbs down the same comment.

Still not a fan of how it's done on SO. To me the best solution is not to include it at all. If you have something negative to say about a PR or Issue, it makes more sense to explain why you feel that way instead of outright saying no. The +1 makes it very clear that you're saying "this covers my use-case." What does -1 mean here, other than "I don't want this"? Because not wanting something is not a reason not to include it when everybody is using a project for a different use-case.

Disagreement should not be restricted to only those who are willing to stick their neck out and publicly disagree and state their reasons.

Imagine this scenario. Linus Torvalds posts an utterly inane pull request. Who is willing to deal with the backlash of "disagreeing with Linus". Sure, many are, but many are not.

I just want to elaborate on this a bit more: Implementing a downvote button is inviting baseless disagreement. It makes it socially acceptable to say that you disagree, without ever providing an argument or being expected to do so - this is precisely what you don't want, on what is supposed to be a constructive platform.

This will (indirectly and directly) lead to populism, where unpopular opinions get dismissed out of hand without even considering them.

Seriously, GitHub, this is rule one of designing constructive social platforms: you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.

> Seriously, GitHub, this is rule one of designing constructive social platforms: you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.

It seems ironic you'd post this on a platform that has a downvote button.

Says the guy commenting on HackerNews, which also offers a downvote button. :)

There is nothing irony, you are saying people living in totalitarianism country can't fight for democracy.

We are not just using the system, we use the system here to improve the system itself that's why people call it constructive community.

Where's the irony?

It's not ironic. Votes here are used to push the best content to the top. On Github you're not looking for the best content you're collaboratively building software so the tools should be designed to foster collaboration.

> On Github you're not looking for the best content

That seems like an odd assertion. Are you looking for the worst content then, or...? I can see an argument that voting would not highlight the best content, at least in some cases; I don't understand an argument that we aren't looking for the best content.

Conversely, HNews is intended as a constructive platform. Should the tools we use here not be designed to foster collaboration and constructive debate?

Disclaimer: I'm skeptical of voting both here and on Github. But I feel like the argument that the differences between the platforms are major and fundamental needs a lot more fleshing out.

Without agreeing or disagreeing, StackExchange/Reddit are hugely popular and both have downvotes.

Down voting on Stackexchange is a privelege as well as losing a reputation point when you downvote. Down voting on Reddit is controversial and alienates a lot of people from using Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/36rb4r/if_n...

Popularity and constructivity are two entirely different things. As mentioned by another post, StackExchange introduces a 'counter-weight' - Reddit is widely perceived as "not constructive at all", and is thus not relevant to my argument.

StackExchange it costs you to downvote someone.

On Reddit, downvoting just encourages group-think as you will get downvoted for voicing an unpopular opinion.

And yet, you’re making this point on a platform that has down-votes. And where I have made very unpopular statements around social issues that have been down-voted for being unpopular, so I appreciate how points that I know to be reasonable can be downvoted for being unpopular.

Nevertheless, some people find them useful.

I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes. I’d say that downvotes need to be implemented in conjunction with a bunch of other features and active moderation policies to work well. I don’t know if HN has done so, or if GitHub has done so. But... I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.

(FWIW, I follow this policy: I either downvote, or reply, but never both. In this case, I disagree with you, but think the conversation is useful, so I reply. Other comments might be wildly off-topic or deeply non-constructive, and those I down-vote. But to each their own.)

> And yet, you’re making this point on a platform that has down-votes.

Yes. And if I was a HN developer, which I am not, I would immediately remove that functionality - but even then, my argument doesn't really apply here, because HN isn't really meant to be a constructive platform to begin with.

> I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes.

For constructive platforms: absolutely, 100%. It's well understood what kind of behaviour is driven by the availability of a semi-anonymous "disagree" button. There's not really any gray area here.

> Other comments might be wildly off-topic or deeply non-constructive, and those I down-vote. But to each their own.

On a constructive platform, that is a matter for moderation, not opinion. The problem of downvotes is that it combines the two, even though they are fundamentally different concepts.

What do you mean by constructive platform? In the general sense, HN is absolutely meant to be a constructive platform.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW unlike HN, downvoting has no negative consequences to the comment on GitHub. It's useful on HN to effectively remove the off-topic and deeply non-constructive comments. But on GitHub, it serves no such function. We're going to end up with the many abuses of -1's and none of the benefits.

As for "I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes," perhaps. There's still probably better ways to flag inappropriate comments though. Like a flag button. Downvotes are far too general and ambiguous in comparison.

> (FWIW, I follow this policy: I either downvote, or reply, but never both. In this case, I disagree with you, but think the conversation is useful, so I reply. Other comments might be wildly off-topic or deeply non-constructive, and those I down-vote. But to each their own.)

Thank you for that insight, never thought about it that way (alas, I'm not allowed to downvote). That approach seems very reasonable.

Reminds me of the rule in programming with exceptions, either handle and log or rethrow.

I disagree with the last one. As someone who's been involved with quite a few forums and social sites, the down button tends to get abused a lot less than you'd think. Heck, the most popular plugin for XenForo ratings goes further and lets people mark replies as dumb, old or 'drama queen'. Those don't seem to get abused too much either, surprisingly enough.

But I guess it's a size and topic thing. If your site has a mature userbase, a limited topic or is mostly a pretty tight knit community, adding a downvote button tends to be a decent enough thing to do. Same if you have to acquire the privilege to use it.

>you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.

People who don't agree with something should have a way of expressing their views. Why is it acceptable to have a +1 button but not a -1 button? Why can people agree without giving any reason for their agreement but they can't disagree without giving any reason for their agreement? It's crazy that society works in this way and that people have such an irrational response to disagreement.

> People who don't agree with something should have a way of expressing their views. Why is it acceptable to have a +1 button but not a -1 button? Why can people agree without giving any reason for their agreement but they can't disagree without giving any reason for their agreement?

Because when you agree, that means the argument has already been presented - specifically, it's the argument that you are agreeing with. That is not the case for disagreement, where a counter-argument must exist, but has not been voiced yet.

Agreement and disagreement aren't superficial opposites like you're presenting them to be.

>That is not the case for disagreement

The reason why Github added these votes in the first place is so that people can give a signal of how welcome or not a certain change is to the project. If you only provide the signal for agreement but remove the signaling for disagreement and make it costly, then you'll get more people voting one way than the other. If it costs more to disagree then you're already rigging the game towards agreement.

Sure, but that is already the case - posting a :+1: costs much less effort than writing a counter-argument (and is already widely socially accepted, spammy-ness aside). The addition of an upvote button doesn't change this.

That's not to say that I wouldn't like that bias resolved, but it's a bias that exists precisely because of the difference between 'agreement' and 'disagreement' that I described, and I'm not sure it can be solved in a technical manner.

How does enhancing the bias solve the issue? By not adding the downvote button this bias is enhanced. By adding the downvote button this bias is diminished. It's not a perfect solution but it's better than doing nothing.

How do you see adding a button enhancing this bias? People already barely leave -1 replies without arguments.

If there is such a strong counter argument, someone will make it (see XKCD 386) and it will be possible to upvote the dissenting opinion.

-1

...

If I left the above with no further explanation, it doesn't give you any signal as to why I disagreed with you. One the other hand, if we were having this conversation on GitHub, people who agreed with my counter-point could react with a +1, giving you a much stronger signal about what exactly the disagreement is about.

And once someone provides a valuable counter-argument, it's no longer "rigged toward agreement."

Compared to an explanation with several +1's, a drive-by -1 adds virtually nothing to the discussion because they carry so little information.

Not everyone has to give a signal on why they disagreed with you as much as people don't have to give you a signal on why they agree with you. I don't get this argument. People may agree with 2 out of 5 things in a list and vote +1 because they don't care about the 3 other things. You still don't get that feedback from a +1, just like you won't get from a -1. There shouldn't be higher standards for disagreement based on reasons because the same doesn't exist for agreement.

> Not everyone has to give a signal on why they disagreed with you

On GitHub? They absolutely do. It's a platform for collaboration, not idle chatter. If you do not wish to support your disagreement, you probably shouldn't be posting anything there to begin with.

EDIT: I've also already explained to you why 'agreement' and 'disagreement' are held to different standards. I'm not sure why you keep repeating this point.

> I'm not sure why you keep repeating this point.

Because your distinction is wrong.

A drive-by -1 is in no way different from a drive-by +1.

Both are equally useful. Both indicate how many people agree or disagree. Neither explains why someone agrees or disagrees.

They are very different. The explanation for +1 is in the post you are upvoting. Thats why nobody ever has to ask "why the upvotes?'.

Sorry but you make no sense.

If the explanation for +1 is in the post you are upvoting, then the explanation for -1 is just as well in the post you are downvoting.

moe is right. And what is strange is that you keep repeating yourself.

    They absolutely do.

No, they absolutely don't--GitHub says so. You think they absolutely should have to, but they do not.

Here's an example: Alice posts a feature request on the issue tracker for Project Awesome saying that the project's mascot should be changed to a unicorn. Bob downvotes it. Neither person has provided an argument for their position.

According to you, Bob is required to explain why he doesn't want a unicorn mascot, but Alice doesn't have to explain why she wants one.

You are assuming that a positive argument will always be made in support of an assertion, and that therefore a negative argument must be made against it rather than merely a contrary assertion.

But it often happens that the pro side of an issue makes unsupported assertions and unreasonable claims, then the con side makes reasoned arguments, and the pro side proceeds to ignore the points raised by their opponents.

The real problem is anonymous voting. Anonymous votes are not very useful, because for all you know, the person voting doesn't even use the software in question. Voting within a team of collaborators could certainly be useful, even without substantiation, but "drive-by" votes by random Internet people are the problem.

EDIT: Ironically, this downvoting of moe's and my comments proves our points and demonstrates why anonymous downvoting is a problem. "We should only have reasoned arguments!" they say. But when reasoned arguments are presented in opposition to their claims, they merely downvote rather than making a reasoned counterargument. They do not do as they say.

And since the cost (in time and effort) of their anonymous downvote is far less than the cost of writing a rational counterargument, the level of discourse is driven further and further down as those who are willing and able to argue their positions rationally are discouraged from doing so. Why waste your time arguing with people who do so in bad faith?

If you look at product reviews, people are more likely to write a comment if they have an issue with the product than if they don't. I'm not sure how much this applies to github topics but it could possibly provide it's own bias towards negative comments.

Also, as others have mentioned, it only takes one person to write a negative comment, then others could +1 that.

That is not the case for disagreement, where a counter-argument must exist, but has not been voiced yet.

Someone shouldn't have to expect to come up with an alternative just to voice the idea that something sucks.

This idea leaves you vulnerable to the "something must be done, this is something, therefore we do it" problem by unfairly biasing positive votes rather than negative ones. Yes, I read your rationale. I don't agree with it.

Prior to reading these arguments I would have agreed. But I suppose I have to admit that I would prefer that someone said "This feature isn't necessary - feature Y is a perfectly good substitute" or even "this feature is inappropriate according to the goals of this project" and upvote those comments, rather than downvoting the original feature/pull request without giving a reason.

I'm not nearly as adamantly opposed to a downvote button, but I can understand the argument.

The problem here is the presupposition that a positive argument has been made. People often make claims without any supporting argument. If only counterclaims were required to have supporting argument, it would be unbalanced in favor of bald assertions.

Sometimes people make silly claims or requests or demands. In such cases, one shouldn't be required to write a reasoned counterargument. A simple "nope" should suffice.

"This is why we can't have nice things." People assume the status quo is bad or wrong and that change is necessarily progress. It begins to take more effort to keep the good things that have been achieved than it does to break them and replace them with regressions. It requires more time and effort to defend them against the onslaught of unreasoned demands because of irrational bias against the status quo.

This is true not only in software but in politics and society. But for a simple example in the software world, just look at the Metro UI: it's awful for a million reasons, a regression even from Windows 95's UI--but to some people, it's change, therefore it must be progress, therefore it must be done.

> People who don't agree with something should have a way of expressing their views

What about a comment? Once someone elaborates why they disagree, others can trivially +1 it to show support of a specific disagreement.

On the other hand, you can disagree with both the original comment and someone's disagreement, prompting an additional "disagreement" reply.

Note that -1's don't carry as much information as you'd think. It could mean any one of these:

- Someone disagrees with you

- Someone doesn't like you

- Someone is angry or having a bad day

- Someone is retaliating or holding a grudge

Without any rationale, there's absolutely no way to tell the difference between a useful disagreement and juvenile aggression.

If you get a -1 from somebody whose opinion you value, you can always ask what's up.

+1s could mean

-Someone agrees with you

-Someone likes you

-Someone is happy or having a good day

-Someone is repaying a favor or maintaining a friendship.

The difference is when you +1, you're publically expressing agreement with what they wrote. If someone you like writes something you don't agree with, you wouldn't +1 them. If you're having a good day, you still wouldn't blindly dish out +1's because if you +1 a controversial comment, it could hurt your reputation.

Negation is different because it's entirely ambiguous. You can dish them out freely and retroactively rationalize your intention. -1's are way more susceptible to knee-jerk emotional reactions than +1's.

A relevant example. Think of the political candidate you like the most. If someone you really like asks you to +1 a persuasive argument about their competitor, would you? On the other hand, if they asked you to -1 someone, you probably would. Even if you knew very little about them.

My experience of open source projects is that people dish out +1's freely and are reluctant to -1 as it signifies conflict. +1 is arguably the more ambiguous for that reason as it can mean "I didn't read the issue but I like you and what you're saying at a glance looks non-insane" or "meh" or "I love it". You're really underestimating the ammount of politics that can factor into these things, people will +1 something that they 90% disagree with because of who's saying it, don't kid yourself otherwise.

Nobody really cares if you +1 something crazy, maybe you were just feeling agreeable that day, or you misunderstood the comment. But if you -1 sensible things you're going to get a bad reputation pretty quickly.

> are reluctant to -1 as it signifies conflict

That's because people don't tend to write "-1", but rather disagree with a comment explaining why. GitHub is full of disagreement. We'd be in a much worse place if that was all expressed through downvotes instead of comments (unless of course, an issue is explicitly opting in to a vote).

> people will +1 something that they 90% disagree with because of who's saying it, don't kid yourself otherwise.

Ok yeah, you're right about the politics. Bad example. But in open source, I've seen much more comment-based pushback regardless of author.

> what you're saying at a glance looks non-insane

That's like 90% of the PR's I look at.

Instead of "disagree with A", you should "agree with alternative B".

Very many HN threads would be improved if people would just downvote for disagreement and shut the fuck up.

Those downvotes would soon be corrected by other people reading the thread, and we wouldn't have to read bad tempered bickering.

If that was the case, then this would be accomplished constructively by people upvoting a strong argument rather than downvoting an argument they have a disagreement with but either a lack of will or ability to articulate the reason they disagree.

That idea works in theory, but in practice it makes comments a popularity contest. Eventually, people with minority opinions figure out that their ideas are unpopular and leave or stop commenting. The end result is monoculture. A great illustration of this phenomenon is Reddit's politics subreddit. In theory, it is a place to discuss American politics. In practice, its discussion is almost entirely centered around a single candidate from one party. The downvote button windowed the community and then winnowed it again until a political atom remained.

I don't think HN is monocultural, at least to a pathological extent. There's quite a bit of debate here. The overwhelming majority of grayed out comments are baseless, off-topic, or unnecessarily inflammatory, from my perspective. I think that's because there's a norm to agree with an upvote, disagree with a non-vote, and reserve downvotes for unproductive commentary. People seem to upvote unfairly gray comments regardless of their personal agreement.

I don't think it is either, but if we began downvoting for mere disagreement as the person that I responded to advocated, then I think it would.

>if we began downvoting for mere disagreement as the person that I responded to advocated

Downvote for disagreement has been on HN for longer than you've had your account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683

Pretty much any subreddit reaches this state with sufficient time.

Well, politics is a popularity contest.

If you actually wanted a discussion of political philosophy or to discuss other less popular candidates, there's other places for that.

I disagree.

How would privilege to down vote help?

Coincidentally you're being downvoted for stating this.

Yeah, I thought that was funny. Guess I wrote a horrible comment.

This comment is now getting downvoted. To be clear, so people stop downvoting this comment, this parent comment was initially downvoted to -1, it obviously isn't anymore.

You just contradicted yourself. You're giving a -1 on giving -1s.

No they don't, because they're giving an actual argument. They're probably not again disagreement, but against mass disagreement without requiring to substantiate that disagreement.

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