I wish the downvote button was two step (while upvote as is) where a user had to select from things like off topic, spam, etc. Maybe a decoy disagree too for letting the new user downvote but not counting it.
I say this because I often get downvoted because people don't understand my point (sometimes due to my own fault badly explaining myself, sometimes the readers fault for skimming my post) and it's not until several downvoted before someone finally chimes in an clarifies why.
Negative rep get so badly abused on this site and the most frustrating thing about it all is whenever the topic gets raised you get downvoted to hell.
There is also a disappointing trend to kneejerk downvote any comment that disagrees with any of the "famous" (for want a better description) names on HN simply because member "xyz" must be wrong if they're arguing with the famed member "abc"; regardless of whatever point xyz had made. It's daft hero worshipping.
Then there's the amount of times people can get down voted on popular threads just because they dared express and unpopular opinion.
Overall I genuinely think the quality of comments on this site has dropped over the years and I think it's directly related to the increase in members reaching the threshold to negative moderate. It gets harder to have an adult conversation when half the time people are kneejerk downvoting rather than posting a rebuttal or simply asking for clarification on why an opinion was formed to begin with. It's gotten to the point that I'm sure many people now question whether they can be bothered with the potential backlash or whether they're better off just keeping quiet. Which results in some tropes (for want a better description) not getting peer reviewed or debunked because it's such a popular piece of misinformation that the correction isn't worth the backlash.
Lastly, I get sick of people saying we shouldn't take negative rep personally. It's someone actively saying "I don't agree with you but I'm not going to state why." There is no other response to that other than frustration.
I downvoted because I disagree with you.
The purpose of downvoting is to reduce the effective signal to noise ratio by:
(1) reducing the prominence of low-quality posts, and
(2) signalling the types of posts the community finds to be low quality, which will then be reduced in prominence.
Commenting increases the prominence of a post, and as such counteracts part of the purpose of downvotes. It may occasionally be warranted to reinforce the other half of the purpose, but generally not.
> I say this because I often get downvoted because people don't understand my point
Just because someone else suggests that as their reason or a possible reason does not mean that is why other people are downvoting you.
> There is also a disappointing trend to kneejerk downvote any comment that disagrees with any of the "famous" (for want a better description) names on HN simply because member "xyz" must be wrong if they're arguing with the famed member "abc"; regardless of whatever point xyz had made.
I don't think that's true at all; I do think that replies to some of the more well-known posters are more likely to get read and, therefore, voted up or down, but I don't see a lot of evidence for the kind of fan-club voting you suggest (I don't think I'd be on the leaderboard if that was the case, since I think even when I was fairly new a fair share of my posts were disagreeing with some of the more prominent figures here.)
> Then there's the amount of times people can get down voted on popular threads just because they dared express and unpopular opinion.
IME, that doesn't really happen. Any opinion on a controversial thread can get downvoted for no apparent reason -- there defintely are people who downvote for shallow disagreement -- but it rarely seems to last if there isn't a better reason for downvoting, and it seems to happen across the space of ideas (I've seen HN be accused of being a left-wing hive mind, a libertarian hive-mind, and a hive-mind of several different other bents; its not any of those, its got lots of different active factions with lots of different views.)
> It gets harder to have an adult conversation when half the time people are kneejerk downvoting rather than posting a rebuttal or simply asking for clarification on why an opinion was formed to begin with.
I'd rather say it gets harder to have an adult conversation when people lack the introspection to realize the reasons that their comments are getting downvoted into oblivion while others expressing similar ideology in a different manner or not has nothing to do with disagreement, or popular poster fan clubs, and everything to do with the quality of their posts.
> There is no other response to that other than frustration.
Yes, there is another possible response and its called introspection and review of the guidelines.
I've gotten posts downvoted, and of those that have stayed that way more than a few hours, the vast majority have deserved it and I've gotten better at not making the same mistakes. Sure, I think there have been some mistakes (but I have seen a lot more cases of posts of mine being upvoted that don't deserve it.)
...whereas in practice it's often used as a "I disagree" button.
BTW Personally I often check flagged stories - they tell quite a lot about the HN community and deeply rooted prejudices.
Also I think from your last paragraph you do agree that moderation often gets abused even if you don't agree with the individual points I raised?
I think it works well in aggregate, even though there are some individual bad votes. I think that the system is designed in a way which anticipates imperfection in individual acts but is designed to get good results on-balance, and I think obsessing about the individual bad votes is unproductive in most cases.
I disagree with this bit:
> Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment.
I think the site needs a mechanism where people can express disagreement without leaving a comment, because a downvote is mostly meaningless and comments can lead to angry bickering threads.
I do agree (and I've changed my mind on this in the past 2 years or so) that people downvote too quickly, and that people don't supply enough corrective upvotes.
I guess that's been discussed/thought about many times. Does sound good at first. So how would it work? People would have to leave some kind of decent comment, not just one word, I suppose, like other comments. Could you downvote those comments in turn if they weren't substantive, or were snarky etc? Would you have then to explain why you did that? Hmm. There'd have to be a different comment category, a downvote-explanation comment. Sounds complicated..
> There is no other response to that other than frustration.
Well, yes there is! I tried that, doesn't work. I tried not caring. Is working great! They're only fake internet points, after all. But you said you're sick of people saying that. Sorry. ..Sometimes it's just too obvious why horrid, abusive comments are downvoted. From what I've seen, how people say things is almost always the problem, not what they said. What seems to drive people nuts is presuming it's always what they said.
I used to believe that until I put it into practice on my forum. Nah, turns out there's a class of comment that's so stupid that you're just forcing people to waste their time by responding to it. And that sort of comment is more common than you think, you just may be insulated from them by the work of other people.
Browse reddit by controversial posts first, for example.
Try posting here about anything related to nutrition and the health risks of eating meat...
On Slashdot, upvotes and downvotes each came with a label. So upvote wasn't just an up-arrow, it was more like "+1, Helpful" or "+1, Funny". And downvotes weren't just a down arrow, the options were like "-1, Off Topic" or "-1, Abusive". Don't hold me to the actual labels, but you get the idea. There was also a cap; each post could only go so far down (can't remember) or up (pretty sure that was 5). Overall, this system was called moderation.
There was also meta-moderation, where people had to review someone else's votes up or down, and verify them. This way, people who were making bad votes could get caught by the community.
The ability to moderate or meta-moderate was hooked into the karma score, but I can't remember exactly how. Meta-moderation was like a chore you had to do sometimes to maintain the right to moderate, as I recall.
I'm sure there is a write-up somewhere that could do a better job than my off-teh-cuff remembering.
At some point, you could adjust your personal measure for the categories of positive or negative moderation. e.g., threads turned into boring rushes to post memes for +1 Funny, so at one point I made Funny worth zero and Insightful worth +2. It was an interesting way to influence how a thread appeared for you. But around that time, I lost interest in the site and quit it for HN.
You couldn't vote all the time (like on HN), but you periodically received 5 mod points to use, so you would tend to pick the most deserving to boost or demote.
From memory, periodically, you might get meta-moderation points. Say, 10 chances to assess whether a post's moderation was fair or unfair. It was half-chore, half-interesting so it was often a happy distraction.
More info for those with too much time on their hands:
https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtmlThis is a worthwhile video to watch on the subject if interested: http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2010/07/5_reputation_...