Simply make your points and counterpoints.
I vote that the Earth is not flat. I don't want to hear down votes or up votes, I want to hear coherent and concise theories why I am right or wrong.
Down votes are cowardly without comments at the very least.
This place should be a venue for peer revue, not an exercise in US politics.
Just a thought.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188859 "Downvotes", 7 years ago, 94 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987201 "Hacker News, now with downvotes", 6 years ago, 45 comments
"Ask HN: What is your method for up/down votes?", 721 days ago, 68 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214398 "Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?", 3107 days ago, 62 comments
You can see more previous discussions in this query:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downvotes&sort=byPopularity&pr...
Do you think there's any value in ordering by read count? Or by randomly pushing a new or unread comment to the top? I'm wondering if we're ever missing a good comment or thought because it's late to the party.
That, too, I'm assuming is hackable. Then again, up/down seems as hackable. I mean, the link click is just calling a handler:
<a id="up_13164626" onclick="return vote(event, this, "up")" href="vote?id=13164626&how=up&auth=08cc6438787bda18f8904afcf50af38e31d34824&goto=reply%3Fgoto%3Dthreads%3Fid%3Ddvdhnt%2313164626%26id%3D13164626#13164626"><div class="votearrow" title="upvote"></div></a>
Perhaps the auth attribute is a random CSRF token, while the end of the href appears to be this comments URL. It seems like we could use the same idea, hijacking the navigation event on the link itself, applying a CSRF/auth token, and incrementing the read/click count. Seems like this would basically be the kind of granular auth allowed by service like Google Docs.
Just spitballing.
And if you had an actual reply telling you what "wrong" with your post, wouldn't that be more useful? Sometimes people downvote simply because they misunderstood/misread your post.
> Either which way, it's blunt, simple and useful feedback.
I'll give you "simple" out of those three. What is "blunt" about it? And for useful, see above.
Upvotes and downvotes are part of the peer review here. It helps signal who tends to say something of value consistently.
I have been here a while. This issue gets brought up over and over, presumably by new-ish people who didn't see the last zillion discussions.
They used to show vote count next to comments. It caused nasty discussions as people vied for the most validation for their side of the argument. This got the then mod dragged into a lot of things, a thing he didn't appreciate. So he hid the counts and saw a steep drop in how much he got dragged into such messes. So he was not inclined to go back to showing them when this caused a stink from the user base as people felt that knowing the score for each comment was useful information...blah blah blah.
Social stuff is inevitably a messy affair. HN does it far better than average. I respectfully suggest you consider the possibility that what you consider to be a bug is really a feature and part of why things run as relatively well as they do here, in spite of being a space where (large numbers of disparate) people come together.
Best.
Unfortunately, downvoting without comment has been baked into HN culture since the beginning, and as long as it's not explicitly against the guidelines, people are free to do so without consequence.
However, given how diverse the userbase seems to be here, in terms of age, locale, income, political alignment, etc, expecting a single definition of what HN "should be" seems destined to fail, because there are multiple groups with multiple, contradictory ideals. Just look at the reaction to dang's attempt at banning political articles for a week to see an example of this in action.
What would be more likely, that requiring comments for downvotes would result in deeper engagement and higher quality discussion, or more flamebaiting and divisiveness? In comment threads that are already volatile (and garner a number of downvotes) I'm not certain the better angels of our nature would win out. It would just result in more noise and more downvoting, as people began to argue about the reasons provided for their downvotes.
Then again, I think HN should get rid of voting and karma altogether, so I'm even more of an outlier than many here. Simply ignoring a comment with which you disagree, but have no coherent or intelligent response for, is always an option, and this community would be a better place if more people considered it.
Downvotes mean you can get bad comments towards the bottom. So that is good too. But if you people reply instead of downvote, then trolls know they will get lots of free troll food when they comment, so that will encourage them to post more.
And if you're going to have votes, at the very least those should be public, as they are in some forums that I've come across and in some bug trackers.
Upvotes: the only point of those seems to be to serve as a form of "reward", like "badges" and the like, to entice those with an insecurity problem to seek some validation. The only ones benefiting from it are the site admins though, as people tend to generate more content in order to collect "upvotes". Note I said "more", not better quality. See Stackoverflow for example.