Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea why you're being downvoted.

Please don't. It's off topic, against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and generally stops being true after awhile. Instead, just give a corrective upvote and move on.

I'm sorry, I'm not going to follow your request. I consider it detrimental to HN. When someone just downvotes an insightful comment, I have every right to ask why. Of course I can be downvoted too just for asking, but if enough people do that, others might stop to think a bit and use an argument instead of easy click.

I completely see your point though, I just have a different POV. That's OK, we don't have to see everything eye to eye.

It breaks the site guidelines for you to post that sort of comment, so you don't have "every right to ask why". The rules are the way they are for good reasons, based on over ten years of running this place, and users who want to post here need to follow them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Were it a different site, I'd follow your advice. However, HN is not just like any other Internet forum. Moreover, I do care about it and I want it to be a better place, we just differ about the means.

I'm glad you care about HN!

Too often items seem irrationally downvoted. The policy shouldn't be so one-sided, and sometimes downvotes should require justification. How do we signify this - possibly with something similar to the Vouch feature?

One possibility that comes to mind: you can spend 1 (maybe this number can be increased in high-traffic contexts) karma and forfeit your ability to gain net karma on a specific comment, to force people to reply to it in order to downvote it.

Something like this is pretty obviously necessary at this point; it is trivial for me to find examples of bad-faith downvotes that cannot be backed up with argument, and it shouldn’t be.

> bad-faith downvotes that cannot be backed up with argument

Would forcing them to make bad-faith arguments really improve the place?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com