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Comment by joepie91_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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".

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

I disagree.

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