Downvotes | Hacker News Reader

Downvotes

91 pointscookiecaper94 comments

I've noticed quite a trend of downvotes on well-composed comments over the last two months or so. It's disappointing.

I'm concerned that as it gains users, HN is acquiring an attribute common to other social news sites where users simply downvote a comment because they don't agree with it, or because it criticizes something that they favor or like. I believe that downvotes should only be used on content that does not generate interesting discussion, is spammy, or patently and generally offensive.

I've noticed that there is not much language addressing general appropriate voting behavior in the Guidelines (at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). Is this something we want to address, or not?

I think a good way to help curb inappropriate downmodding is to invoke a small cost for each downvote. StackOverflow does this and it seems to work pretty well.

Has anyone else noticed this trend recently? If so, what are your feelings regarding it?

View on HN

I think the simplest thing to do about it is to not give a hoot. The karma point system is so obviously broken that hand-wringing about its deficiencies is largely a waste of time. Case in point - the person who was lucky enough to post the google announcement regarding China got 1000+ points. Let's say a particularly insightful comment is worth 40 points. That means being first on something everyone is likely to know about within half an hour is worth 25 (count em) very insightful comments. If you take the hit of posting an unpopular opinion, you can make it up in spades by posting an old pg essay.

While I agree that the per-user karma is worthless, comparing the rating of comments with the rating of stories is a bit like apples and oranges: multiple users can submit the same story, and when one submission "wins" over the other, little harm is done to the whole of HN. But when a comment is downvoted solely because people disagree with it, it hurts the discussion because the well constructed comment is less likely to be seen. Furthermore, this works both ways: snarky comments with little added value suddenly get a lot of appearance.

It's a very difficult problem to solve, but to just "not give a hoot" is hard, given the fact that the order of appearance for comments on HN depends so much on karma.

Actually it's a surprisingly simple problem to solve. Split comment and submission karma. Reddit, which HN was inspired by does that already.

but to just "not give a hoot" is hard

try it! at 1k or so karma you have more or less nothing to lose.

I don't think you understand my point: I agree that per-user karma records are worthless. However, I am not convinced that there is little to lose with bad comment ratings, since HN bases the appearance of comments on these ratings.

I am also interested only in the ordering of comments within a given discussion thread. The number of points that my user account gets does not matter to me.

Same with my submissions - I only care about up-votes there because I want more people to see what I have posted and benefit from it.

How about the following: whenever a user down votes a comment, a popup comes up describing the community rules for downvotes (e.g. "don't down vote just because you disagree", etc). After having been shown this box a couple of times it could be disabled for that user so that is isn't too annoying. New users would thus "learn" the rules as they use the site.

A pop-up is not going to fix the tremendous discrepancy between submission votes and comment votes. It's mostly a matter of 'how about acknowledging this was a poor idea'

Do you really think the problem is lack of understanding? I mean, a reputation system is a pretty easy concept and I can't imagine there are people out there who just don't know what a Karma system is.

Which is the problem. If you understand what a karma system is than you understand you're doing damage to a person's actual reputation by down voting them. So the obvious conclusion for anyone who understands the concept of karma points is that down voting is an act designed to cause harm to the person not to express disagreement with the idea.

I can't imagine a person who doesn't have at least a subconscious understanding of such an obvious result so I don't think a notice when someone down votes would change anything

There should be two sets of karma, one for comments and one for submissions

It's easy to get comment karma, as well. You just have to be the first person to post the generally prevailing opinion on whatever the current topic is. Then everyone who was coming to post the same thing will just upvote you instead.

There should be third karma for indicating obviousness which also deletes some of your comment karma

Yeah, let's just have an infinite number of separate karmas to measure every attribute of each comment.

It's not that quantifying all of these things wouldn't be great, just that you very quickly will end up with a system way too complex to be reasonable.

I think users of this forums, the majority of them programmers, can handle a few different karma arrows

But there's all kinds of issues. How do you display them all (especially if you exceed 2 sets of arrows)? How do you remember which one is which (again, not a huge issue if you just add one more karma type)? How much will having to sort by several karmas slow down the site?

Not to mention the obvious question... is there really a point to breaking everything down seven ways from Sunday?

At that point it becomes a video game, and loses any semblance of meaning anything whatsoever.

There should be no submission karma only comment karma, or submission karma should max out at a low figure like 10 (stories can have higher points but the user will only gain a maximum of 10 karma from a submission) .

I don't really disagree with the point system being unfair but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say "broken" either.

I think the karma system could work a lot better but it does do what it's intended which is to separate those who are dedicated to the community from those who are just fly-by trolls. I think that was all it was ever intended to do and in that sense it works well enough.

I think it's an important distinction because it reflects on what would happen when it gets "fixed". For example comments by those who just submit stories would be treated no differently than someone who just came on the site today. But I'd argue that someone who has a couple thousand submit points behind them cares quite a bit about the community and if they felt inspired to comment on something after never having commented before I'd consider that comment of the utmost importance.

So while the karma system is flawed it's not broken. It's just the most basic implementation of it's intent which is to reward people who have contributed to the community with status for having done so.

For me, it doesn't have anything to do with karma. Maximum when people disagree with me I get a little peeved that I spent time on what I thought was a thoughtful comment only to be down voted but it happens.

I think the problem arises when thoughtful comments, maybe from people playing devil's advocate, are buried at the bottom on the thread or even worse highlighted in light gray. To be honest it probably is the exceptional case, but it's disappointing the times it does happen that those comments miss their opportunity to generate interesting discussion especially when the rest of the thread is, no offense intended, the usual hacker news echo chamber.

Economic contrarians like me quite often experience a resurgence in karma points after a user point out how unfair the downvotes is.

My opinions may be unpopular but it is respected.

Obviously broken? Aren't you demanding too much of it?

Also your math doesn't demonstrate that much: the incentive for trying to be the first is big (25x an insightfull comment) but there aren't that many opportunities, and it establishes competition for a good thing, having fresh news on HN.

You also tell that the referred mechanism would be gamed by people who would post old pg essays. Then again your scenario is wrong. The mechanism can be implemented to work so that the PG essays as not enough for the demand of points. And if you tell me that people would post other things just for points, isn't that the whole point of the voting/karma system?

There are problems, but I think the karma system is not obviously broken. It's true it's hard to create the right incentives to fight those problems. But HN has done it so better than everyone that I'm confident it will get better soon.

On a side note, has anyone ever tought of dynamic partitions of the community to address the problems of exponential grow and dissolution of identity?

This is an often-discussed issue. I see your join date is not quite from long enough ago that you may have seen this comment from pg

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

in which he said, "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."

But I have a still more recent join date, and I have seen links back to that comment on the MANY previous occasions when downvotes have been discussed, so I have become aware of this point of view.

Of course, more recent discussions of the issue of voting behavior on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103339

(this set of links is far from exhaustive) show that there is thought on the part of site management about how to improve current incentives.

I try to learn from the downvotes I receive. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I expect myself to analyze my own behavior to figure out what really contributes to the community. The site management, of course, has to figure out how to set up incentives for altruistic rather than mob behavior.

I always wonder, when I see a post about the evils of downvotes, why I don't see more replies about what is good to upvote. I tried opening a separate thread about that issue recently

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084

but you can see for yourself it didn't get upvoted much at the time. I will ask again here: what ought to be upvoted? I would like advice from the community about how to use my upvotes to build up the community.

>I try to learn from the downvotes I receive. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I expect myself to analyze my own behavior to figure out what really contributes to the community.

As downvotes don't differentiate between agreement and poor construction of argument how can you tell what contributes. I find that those who disagree with me in a well thought out way are instructive. I don't wish to homogenise with the community but want to know if I'm not expressing myself well.

For example, this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1135803, I can't work out why it's downvoted. Thus I can't see what I could have done to improve the comment or why I should perhaps of not made it.

IMO we should have an agreement vote as well as a quality vote.

An agreement vote as well as a quality vote makes no sense to me. Trying to micromanage people's behavior doesn't usually turn out the way you intend. And besides, most people will just use both votes to express whatever general feeling they have about a post.

I can't work out why it's downvoted

Probably because you wrote "Next they'll be telling us they don't proofread their title submissions, un-freaking-believable ;0)" as the opening sentence. The rest of the comment looks fine, but it leads off with language that sounds like LOL-speak. Too bad you got downvoted. But the downvotes give you something to learn from about how to express yourself when you are making a serious comment, as that comment mostly was.

I'll quote another reply to me elsewhere in this thread.

It is annoying to see a reasonable comment downvoted to 0, or less. I feel like I'm missing something and what I'm missing is an explanation. Why was the comment voted down?

Now what happened in the grandparent of this comment here is that another HN participant asked why a particular comment of his in another thread was downvoted. I kindly followed the link he provided, to see his comment for the first time. After reading that comment, I pondered his informational question in this thread about why that comment was downvoted. I don't know FOR SURE, because I had no role in downvoting that comment, and indeed wouldn't downvote that comment if I came upon it in a thread I was following actively. But I suggest to him one reason why somebody--unknown to me--might have thought to downvote that comment. Then I see that my own informational answer to his question was downvoted--for reasons not stated in this thread. There is some kind of signal here, but I sure hope that the signal is not "Don't answer informational questions posted by other participants."

The answer I gave above was a hypothesis based on previous comments I have seen with downvotes. But the hypothesis doesn't fit the answer itself being downvoted, which for all I know was simply drive-by downvoting.

>Too bad you got downvoted. But the downvotes give you something to learn from about how to express yourself when you are making a serious comment, as that comment mostly was.

Comes across as condescending and mildly offensive because of that. Probably why you got downvoted.

FWIW I think that the use of humour in identifying errors, particularly when coupled with information as in my representative comment, does not detract from the comment's worth. Indeed I find it hard not to find funny the errors in a piece which is all about pointing out a common error...

So people don't appreciate my sense of humour - was it really that terrible compared to the information that I forwarded?

The point still stands - you can assert that the reason is my terrible sense of humour (!) but I can't tell if that's true or not.

Thanks very much for the links, I haven't seen most of them.

In my opinion, upvotes should be used to promote any comment that provides a unique or underconsidered point-of-view on the topic at hand, to indicate enthusiastic agreement, or to encourage users. For instance, if someone posts a comment that says what I would have said if they had not said it, I upvote it, because I enthusiastically agree and that user has saved me the time I would have spent typing it out, and usually introduced an element I hadn't considered. Or, if a user has posted a thoughtful comment with a divergent take from the rest of the group, even if I don't agree or don't care, I will often upvote that because it will get people thinking and hopefully generate good discussion. I will also upvote comments that have caused me to reconsider an opinion, or that make a point I hadn't yet considered. Those comments expand my mind and experience, and are good.

I find myself upvoting a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't upvote recently, primarily because I don't think the comment is worthy of downvotes it has received. For instance, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188846 is the comment that pushed me over on posting this, and it had a score of zero when I found it. I didn't find it particularly useful or insightful, and I didn't really have much opinion on its content, but I didn't think it deserved a downvote, and I upvoted it to get it back up to 1.

I try to reserve my downvotes for lines of thought or discussion that are either useless or actively damaging to the community. I don't think a comment deserves to be buried and its user penalized by karma removal merely because I disagree or don't find their comment interesting. I think of the vote buttons as a tool for communal cropping, I suppose, not a personal comment rating system.

There's a difference between downvoting a +10 comment down to +9 out of disagreement and downvoting a +! comment down to 0 out of disagreement.

Also, "disagreement" isn't always the best characterization. If someone makes factual errors in their post downvoting is a perfectly valid signal, for instance.

" If someone makes factual errors in their post downvoting is a perfectly valid signal, for instance."

Reply with the facts as you understand them.

I usually do. But the downvotes work as a signal to the people reading the thread, just as they're meant to.

I think that's interesting but sad when a person makes a good-faith effort to help out, because it deducts from that person's karma even though they don't really deserve a punishment for trying to help.

> There's a difference between downvoting a +10 comment down to +9 out of disagreement and downvoting a +! comment down to 0 out of disagreement.

I suspect that most people read once or twice a day so the difference between voting when something is +10 and +1 is when they see an article relative to its posting time.

In other words, most folks aren't looking for "close" votes to affect.

Besides, who's to say that +10 to +9 is actually different from +1 to 0? The score just tells you the difference between up and down votes. It doesn't tell you that the +10 was 10-0 while the +1 was 100-99. Do you really want to argue that a downvote is inappropriate in the latter case?

I think that public scores are arguably a mistake because folks read far too much into them. Someone didn't like something - get over it.

That said, I think that scores should be hidden except when they get "close". Or, maybe they should disappear if you vote "too much".

Personally, I'm far more cavalier about downvoting +10 comments than I am about downvoting +1 comments.

An up-vote is a bit different from a down-vote. It's a way of saying "I agree. Were I to post a comment, it would be similar to yours. In fact, you said it better". See, there isn't much to add to an up-vote, because it is agreement.

However, a down-vote is rebuttal. However, when no actual rebuttal is given, there is no meaningful conversation happening. It's just an anonymous rejection. I think that to be meaningful, a down-vote should _require_ some explanation as to why. And, the 'rule' should be that simply disagreeing is insufficient rationale to down-vote. You must state why.

Absent this kind of 'rule', I worry that HN encourages group-think. It's already a kind of psychological school yard, I fear. One gains "cred" by earning points. Ideally, these are earned by meaningful contributions and commentary. To avoid these anonymous down-votes, however, posters might very well be adding comments that seem consistent with the rest of the group, instead of what might be regarding as opposed to that of the majority.

The idea of charging would not be a good solution, at all. That would have a worse kind of school yard effect -- a nursery school effect, in fact. That would say "it's free to agree, but to if you disagree with somebody, you have to pay to express your disagreement."

If this is to be a forum of ideas, then make it so. Anonymous/un-qualified nay-saying does not contribute that.

The problem with your suggestion is that it would actively encourage fighting and discourage more agreeable discourse: Upvote all you like without comment but you must comment when downvoting.

Yes, a forum of ideas needs to have a certain tolerance for different points of view and opinions and for the friction involved in expressing those differences. But it's really quite a tricky thing to foster an environment where sharing different points of view is constructive and additive rather than merely socially destructive and a promotion of in-fighting, promotion of polarized "camps" within the community, etc. I am someone who has, at times, asked why I got downvoted because I wanted to understand what the problem was with my remark. Sometimes, that turned out to be a constructive exercise. But requiring people to state their criticism/reasons for nay-saying is highly unlikely to be constructive or improve the atmosphere here. It will most likely just promote hurt feelings, feuds and so on.

The infighting you fear is more a problem when most users are teenagers or just unthoughtful

My experience has been that the majority of human communication is about pecking order, saving face, protecting one's ego and other types of "social" motivations. (There is likely data out there which backs up my view, but I wouldn't have a citation off the top of my head.) If that weren't true, I doubt you would see so much discussion and criticism on HN about the voting system, how things get on the front page, etc. So call me cynical if you want, but if your observation is true, than the vast majority of people are simply "unthoughtful" the vast majority of the time. (Which probably is true in some sense, unfortunately.)

(Ironically, I accidentally upvoted your comment and can't undo it. Perhaps bad form to mention it, but it seems funny somehow, given the context of the discussion.)

I sometimes click on the wrong arrow accidentally, and on HN there is no way to repair the damage.

Especially using a (touchscreen) phone.

I've done that twice today. It's driving me nuts actually. When I downvote an idea which I think is "useless" and a waste of time to read- I don't want to accidentally upvote the person instead.

My opinion/experience:

Karma and other systems may have their social uses, but the single most effective means to improve a social setting is to set a better example. Resist the temptation to snipe at people. Give the benefit of the doubt and first assume misunderstanding rather than malice and, if possible, attempt to clarify rather than attack or defend. Don't take things too personally. If I am in a personal space (not feeling well, recently had something negative happen to me, etc) where I am feeling particularly prickly and thin-skinned, just walk away and come back another time when I am less likely to make a mole-hill into a mountain. And so on.

My experience over the years is that if I engage in more socially effective behavior and do so consistently, eventually, other people will begin to mimic some of those behaviors. Not because they think highly of me, but just because it works. If people don't know a better way, they fiddle around and do whatever it is they do know and then vent about their frustrations. Show them a better way and many people will eventually happily and voluntarily adopt those methodologies because it makes their own lives better. If you want to live in a better social "ecosystem", look to "the man in the mirror" (though, technically, in my case it is "the woman in the mirror") and work on their behavior. Then have a little patience. Sow the seeds. It will bear fruit (as long as you don't then pull it up by the roots to check if it's growing :-D ).

I think that really hits the nail on the head.

I don't know if people will ever stumble upon a set of interaction constraints that will make people civil if they're not already committed to civility. In that regard HN has always been good (but not perfect, as evidenced by some of the episodes mentioned in this comment section).

If someone lashes out and gets a calm response instead of being downvoted to oblivion or without being baited, the whole atmosphere becomes much less toxic (even if the original commenter insists on trolling).

The other thing a calm (compassionate, tolerant) response does is it tends to prevent "train wrecks". One of the biggest problems with many online forums is the tendency for everyone to try to jump into the fray to "defend" righteousness and goodness and what not, thus keeping the fighting alive. Many of them are attempting to put a stop to the fighting but they miss the fact that fighting against the fighting is still fighting. Many people seem to just not know how to effectively defuse a negative situation and put a stop to it, which is a very different skill set than "arguing"/fighting. Fighting against it is the typical knee-jerk response of the vast majority of people, even for most very well educated and intelligent people. "Train wrecks" are best diverted by redirecting the flow of conversation in a constructive fashion rather than attacking the person who has said something that sounds asinine (but maybe wasn't really intended to be, they could be having a bad day or it's a pet peeve they aren't wholly rational about, etc).

That works as long as your example is visible. However, with voting the problem is that bad examples are much more visible than good ones.

I would like to see two-axis voting. Up/down would mean, "valuable/non-valuable". Right/left would mean "agree/disagree" -- the easiest possible way to register opinion without the effort of composing a reply.

Up/down would show a net score, like now. Right/left would show both totals -- perhaps even a little inline sparkline bargraph (perhaps initially hidden).

It's reasonable that people want a lazy, one-click way to show disagreement. It's problematic that impulse gets channeled into the same downvote-gesture-tally that also means "this is spam; this is rude; this should be sunk and faded out of existence". Those meanings are scolding; the effect of a downvote is censorius (by the ranking/fading). It's coarsening for conversation to cross the signals for "I respectfully disagree" and "your comment should be penalized".

I don't think that an "agree/disagree"-axis would be very useful. If you disagree, just reply and explain your disagreement. That adds more value to the discussion.

I'm not interested at all in the number of agreements or disagreements to my statements. I'm only interested in those who agree/disagree and care to elaborate on their point.

If it were as simple as asking people to only disagree with a thoughtful response comment, it would have already been solved.

The participants we actually have often can't be bothered to do more than a grunt's worth of disagreement. This gets channeled into downvotes, which carry a slight 'sting' of moral judgment, and spawn big threads like this one every so often.

An outlet for one-click-disagreement separate from one-click-censure could help remedy the actual problem without requiring an unlikely change in the behavior of the mostly-anonymous, distracted downvoting hordes.

I've seen perfectly intelligent responses downmodded for an opposing view. This wouldn't sadden me as much if some of the threads were not echo-chambered group think. I know I just thew out two very over used buzz words, but in this case there are some pockets of conversation that lend itself to this on HN (and anywhere else on the internet). There have been times I've decided against posting my two cents because its obvious other views (that aren't necessarily opposing) aren't welcomed.

The voting system encourages groupthink. The Mahalo/Calacanis issue is a perfect example. No matter what Calacanis says in the comments he gets massively downvoted, that certainly sends a message to anyone who might dare to agree with him.

Jason Calacanis does not get "massively downvoted" no matter what he says. He has a reputation of 247, 32 points coming from four submissions.

Well, when I comment on anything to do with Mahalo the group of SEOs who are leading this campaign against me just attack en masse and overpower the native HN group.

I'm a polarizing guy who shoots from the hip, so I expect detractors or people who disagree with me to vote me down.

In fact, I think it's kind of funny that sometimes within 30 seconds of posting I'll have a ton of down votes.

It would be great if HN SHOWED the down votes and who votes each person down the most. If there was a leaderboard of who is voting me down it would be VERY telling. You would see ten folks voting me down all at the same time.

That's the thing about social news systems... they are easy to game. If control as not put in place the dialogue simply goes to shit.... which is starting to happen.

What normally happens is that intelligent folks leave the discussion and go somewhere else. I'm sure many folks here are refugees from digg or reddit or /. in fact.

At this point I don't bother commenting on threads about me or Mahalo... and I'm skipping the comment section on HN and going to the links themselves for dialogue.

The only way to correct the issue is really to expose the down votes.... folks need to take ownership of their voting.

we did this on Mahalo Answers and we don't have the problem of folks using voting down as a way to attack someone. we did have this problem in the early days and when we exposed it it was VERY telling. you had really good users who would have it in for just one person and they would follow them around the site voting everything they did down.

so, we did amnesty for past votes and turned on down votes from X day forward. That is what i would do here.... you should turn on link for every post from April 1st on that shows a list of who voted and how--as well as a leaderboard.

anyway.... hack on.

This used to upset me, I have simply stopped caring and feel much better for it.

That said, I've had some fairly drastic changes in my private situation so I'm not nearly as active on HN as I have been in the past.

The best way to deal with an unjustly downvoted comment is to simply vote it up if you come across it (this you can do pretty much forever), and to ignore the issue if it happens to you on the assumption that on balance HN contains more nice people that griefers.

IMHE, there's a paradox similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect on up-down voting. The loud strongly opinionated newbies (or even plain idiots) downvote anything that challenges their point of view or their latest fad, while many of the more educated, experienced, or rational users become apathetic.

My HN account is 521 days old and I can't downvote. Granted, I don't comment or submit very much, but I would assume that getting to 200? karma is something of a brake on opinionated newbies downvoting anything. Of course, this is less of a brake on idiots.

Getting to 201 karma is the threshold for downvoting I believe. It may have been moved to 251.

As of this post I have 228 karma. I got the privilege to downvote at 201 (which I got to about a week ago).

Higher karma doesn't certify knowledgeable or interesting people at all. Others answered plenty of times how easy is increasing karma.

I have noticed some more downvoting than is usual - and, yes, sometimes on well worded and apparently good comments. I've never seen much problem with downvoting for disagreement myself - but I do dislike this idea of downvoting instead of commenting your disagreement/counter view etc. (I personally don't think a downvote is worth much if you can't support it)

I think it would be nice to see a social pressure to add a reply if one doesn't already exist explaining disagreement etc.

Both for the benefit of the commenter and other readers.

I haven't really noticed this trend. But keep in mind, I'm just one data point. To give a rough estimate, I'd say that for every 20 or so down-voted comments I come across, there is one whose lack of points is actually confusing to me.

I find that most of the down-voted comments tend to contain at least one (or a combination of) a number of things, including being off topic, using immature language, presenting opinions as facts without anything to back them up, being hostile, etc.

It is because of these observations that I haven't gotten the impression that there is a trend towards down-voting solely due to disagreement. I believe it does happen, but not as much as some say.

My feelings regarding downvoting are that downvotes are virtually inconsequential, aside from the rise they get from some as a result of bruised egos.

I also think that it's kind of silly to try and establish upvote or downvote "guidelines" because there's no way to ultimately control or accurately measure what upvotes or downvotes are being used for. You could put big, red text in the HN Guidelines that instructed people to upvote or downvote in a certain way, and users would continue to upvote or downvote however they wished.

Once downvoted to below 1, insightful comments tend to get ignored and this a real loss beyond bruised egos

I tend to read all of the comments, regardless of their comment score. The score just ends up affecting what order the comments get read in, which is fine with me. I often see downvoted comments still receiving replies, so I'm not sure it's fully accurate to say that they are being ignored. Also, quality and insightfulness are still subjective. You may feel that a post is of high-quality and very insightful, but someone else may feel that the post is junk for their own reasons.

Once downvoted to below 1, insightful comments tend to get ignored and this a real loss beyond bruised egos

Do you have some current examples with links at hand? I have noticed that one can upvote comments, however old, so any of us who like to emphasize the positive can upvote good comments whenever we find them.

By the way, I asked in my reply to the thread-opening post what kinds of upvotes are most helpful to the community. I'd love to hear replies to that question in that subthread, if you please.

I'm a bit confused. Who can vote something down? I don't have a down vote button and thought only moderators had one or something like that. How does that work?

I believe if you have over a certain number of points you can downvote items

From the FAQ:

Why don't I see down arrows?

There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.

The threshold being 200.

that may be the threshold now, but it almost certainly won't stay there. pg regularly increases the thresholds, to account for 'karma inflation.' so it's a good idea to quantify numbers, if you give them, so that people don't google them up in the future and come to mistaken conclusions.

Yep, I had downvote access for a while and then it passed me by... story of my life.

There's a karma threshold.

Downvoting needs to cost a karma point, or perhaps a fraction of one.

That's an interesting idea and should be explored further. The idea that as you gain standing (karma) you can expend it on socially damaging acts that may be useful. It would certainly alter the dynamic and make the downvote less casual.

I challenge the assumption in this subthread that downvoting is a "socially damaging act." In many cases, downvoting is simply cleaning out the trash and improving the community. There are quite a few downvotes that should, if anything, GAIN karma for the users who make them.

Like it or not, downvoting is often perceived as an act of social violence by the downvotee. And it is intended and widely understood to be a punishment, the opposite of approval.

Social sanctions like that may be necessary, but they also degrade the quality of life overall. Downvoting should have a cost, especially when it's an anonymous act.

That's actually a great idea. Maybe the karma point could be given back if the post is voted down to -4 (showing that it actually should be voted down).

I like this idea. Could be gamed by a group of 'bullies', but it would be very obvious and easy to pick up by an automated filter similar to those already in place.

This could damage some beneficial behaviour. For example sometimes I'll check out new users comments ("noobcomments") and go on a spree of downvoting spammy stuff.

Such behaviour would appear to be negative if it cost karma. Sadly social conditioning and moderately low self-esteem mean that this would moderate my application of this [apparently to me] beneficial behaviour.

This might sound silly, but what about just listing those who have upvoted and listing those who have downvoted somewhere. I think there would be alot less downvotes if it wasnt anonymous.

At the moment I am reading this, several most recent (and, it seems, perfectly legitimate) comments have been downvoted to zero: one by Mz (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189009), jacquesm (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189007), algorias (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189004), coryl (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188999), as well as arnorhs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188988) and pbhjpbhj (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188906). And a few minutes later, they are now back in the positive.

Could it have been a case of vandalism?

I agree with it "costing" something to down-vote, I actually thought it already did.... hmm.

However, when you click the down-arrow, what if it prompted you with options like Digg does (minus an "other" option) as to why you are down voting, and you have to choose one.

If the reason why you are down voting is not listed, you learn pretty quickly what reasons are valid for down voting.

what if it prompted you with options like Digg does (minus an "other" option) as to why you are down voting

pg opened a thread a while ago asking options for flagging posts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589

Didn't see that one.

What's so bad about downvoting comments you disagree with? IMHO the problem rather is "kharma whoring", which is incited by the possibility of accumulating kharma. IMHO2 those points should be only relevant for sorting articles and comments but there should be now way to hoard "points" on a user level.

This has been discussed to death many times. The system isn't perfect and various meanings get assigned to downvotes. I believe pg was considering a separate voting axis for uncivil messages, maybe he'll do that but I don't think there's any use us discussing this yet again.

This is one of the flaws of the upvote/downvote system, it can give people a bit of a mob mentality where making a comment or opinion disappear is as easy as a click (and anonymously too).

Maybe downvotes could cost the voter karma, or have a higher bar for who can downvote.

pg should just start charging a nominal fee for new user accounts. Cuts down on trolls AND spammers.

This is a cool idea. I'm just wondering how people without credit cards would be able to join (I know quite a few people who don't have credit cards). Perhaps via a premium SMS (very few people have neither a mobile nor a credit card).

There's certainly no trolling on Somethingawful, home of the :10bux: entry fee!</sarcasm>

what bothers me most about downvotes is their passive aggressive nature - when you get a downvote but no explanation. that, more than anything, has made me consciously try to ignore karma.

I don't like drive-by downvotes, is basically how I feel about it.

. . . ironic.

(Downvoted. And others too. Did somebody just spam downvote as a joke?)

What do you mean by "drive-by downvotes"? Some comments are more apt to elicit written responses than others. Sometimes a downvote is a user's efficient use of time to improve the quality of the forum, saving time for posting written responses in other subthreads.

I mostly mean downvotes without an explanation, which you discerned. Technically, a drive-by downvote would be a subset of "downvoting without an explanation," since you're not always drive-by downvoting if you're not giving an explanation. Some comments just don't belong, and those comments are normally obvious.

I often get the impression that the downvoters did not read a comment too carefully, quickly passed judgment without thinking about it too much, downvoted, then moved on. Hence, the other reason I call them drive-by downvotes.

It is annoying to see a reasonable comment downvoted to 0, or less. I feel like I'm missing something and what I'm missing is an explanation. Why was the comment voted down? Then the comment gets voted up. I'll never know why the comment was downvoted, and it feels like a small loss. What's happening here can play out in different scenarios. So, that's it. I wish there was more explaining going on, and perhaps people would be less disposed to pass thoughtless judgment.

It is what it is. The submitter asked for our thoughts about the downvote system, so if there's one thing that I'm going to complain about -- and I don't mean to say that this is a horrible, horrible phenomenon -- it's drive-by downvotes.

The problem is that we are given a single qualifier that is then conflated to represent a variety of reactions.

Even just one additional qualifier would go a long way to disambiguate the community opinion.

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