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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a multi-tier system where questions aren’t posted “at the top” for answering directly and moderated down, but instead a first step where the question is treated and discussed without possibility to answer. The community can suggest edits, and upvote it, but not close it. If it’s a duplicate the asker can get some time to explain why it isn’t, or retract it if it is.

If it gets a thumbs up, it qualifies for the regular Q/A where people can answer - and expect a certain quality (and don’t risk spending 20 min writing an answer to a perfectly good question that was closed while the answer was written).

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Makes sense to me.

No open platform, as far as I can tell, has solved the problems of vitriol, but the down-voting is absurd (as attested by some of the experiences described in this comment thread) and can absolutely by addressed by changes like the one you propose or some other system.

Imagine if Facebook had a “dislike” button.

Now imagine if that thumbs down was anonymous and what that would do to the atmosphere. That’s SO.

Isn’t that also HN? I don’t think the existence of the down button is a factor as much as the moderation. FB is a nightmare without a downvote, SO is like a dysfunctional family, and HN seems to mostly work.

In a way it is. But I think it works much better for comments/discussion as on HN, than getting downvotes for your cat picture or SO questions. Perhaps it's because even though HN downvotes should be on quality not content - that's not what the majority of downvotes are, they are disagreement. And people accept disagreement.

I completely agree that anonymous downvotes are an unfettered negative _in systems of discussion and opinion_.

I remember a friend's grown adult brother was learning Python and just entering into programming and I was commending him and encouraging him and what not as a professional software developer. I did a mental dump of resources to use that could help him out in his first months of struggle and what not. At one point I told him to post questions to SO and I literally watched his body language become perturbed and he cringed with a tinge of fear at being brutalized over there. He immediately said something along the lines of "no thanks those guys seem pretty brutal over there", something like that. I thought he may have been a bit too sensitive but over time I've seen some harsh things on the site and could see where he was coming from.

a first step where the question is treated and discussed without possibility to answer.

How would you enforce this - would you try to enforce it? If there's any kind of comment box, you'll get people posting answers in there, if it's amenable to a short answer.

I'm not sure. But suppose you did it another way then: Questions that are poor are (instead of closed) moved to a holding area from where they will either never return, OR they are improved upon, will be reviewed, and can return - at which point they don't have the baggage of multiple downvotes and close votes. Because they are now "reborn".

The only thing I'm trying achieve is that the people trying to HELP the asker, and the people who are trying to close questions now work as quick as they can, simultaneously, but towards opposite goals.

Have you seen the "closed" messages? From the bottom of here:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions

Closed "low quality" questions are marked "on hold" for five days, when they can be commented on and edited to be improved upon, and go into a review queue. From memory that message is in the big yellow close box on the question - that it is on hold pending improvement and review - but I can't google any to see.

What you describe sounds like that, but in a separate area and without downvotes. Or, it sounds like they've tried to implement what you describe.

Would it work if downvotes were reset when it got put on hold?

It would be enough if the downvotes and close votes were reset when it’s taken from hold. As per the other answer there are apparently tons of functionality in this area that I didn’t even know of - perhaps this already works!

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