Ask HN: Is voting on social news sites rude? It would be in real life.

4 points·amichail··4 comments

In real life, if people were to vote anonymously in real-time as to how interesting someone's comments are, it would be considered rude.

So why is this practice acceptable online?

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Voting is not the point. The point is to bring to people's attention things they will be interested in. HN/Reddit/etc do this through voting. Twitter does it through retweeting, which is similar to how it happens offline.

So, it's acceptable because it's part of the medium.

We implicitly "vote" in real life through our verbal and nonverbal reactions to the comments of others.

Its a different medium from real life hence the different mental model (You don't go around poking people in real life but there it is on facebook right?)

Think of it as a public discussion about the article and when someone 'likes' a comment, they're just nodding in approval ... which does actually happen in real life.

Lots of head nods just means you're winning over the crowd.

In real life, you are very unlikely to be interacting with your 60k closest friends. Things that work in a setting of 5, 10 or 20 people don't work so well on a very high traffic website like this one. This level of interaction is basically unprecedented, so the world is still kind of fumbling around trying to figure out how best to manage it. If you come up with some brilliant alternative that works better, fabulous! Otherwise, I see no reason to dismantle it and no reason to try to compare it to "IRL" interactions. It's just not the same.

Peace.

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