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Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

While I don't agree that your argument was high-quality:

Paul Graham:

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

News Guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

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

View on HN

Thanks for clarifying and stating your opinion about the quality of my comment. However, seems a bit too broad-stroke to use downvoting for both the (lack of) quality of the comment and to express disagreement.

I do not personally have downmod capabilities, but I don't think it is necessarily too broad: If you interpret it as "People shouldn't read this", it seems reasonable.

I think equating "I disagree" with "people shouldn't read this" is problematic for a forum that wants to encourage discourse.

Revise that slightly to 'it is a waste if time to read this' maybe.

I downvote quite rarely in HN over disagreeing with someone. Usually it is when I don't feel the reply adds any value, and is actually negative for the discourse.

That is, e.g doesn't reach me anything about the opposing position, or is argumentative without any substance, but distracting from comments that are more constructive.

Of course other people use different judgement. At the same time, HN doesn't hide comments to a great extent. Even 'dead' comments are optionally visible (with the 'showdead' setting) and quite a few of us read HN with that on. It's very rare for downvotes to silence people here who aren't actively disruptive.

Couple that with first enabling downvotes when people hit a certain karma threshold, and various other limitations, and HN is free of a lot of the downvote problems of other places.

That to me makes it less of an issue if people downvote to signal disapproval here.

Often initial downvotes will be countered when people feel a comment has been downvotes too much as well.

HN doesn't want to encourage discourse, it wants to encourage worthwhile discourse, and the distinction is significant. Consider "people shouldn't read this" as short for "Having made the mistake of wasting my time reading this, I will flag it to help others to not make the same mistake."

I thought it was a comment that deserved an upvote.

But I always always downvote complaints about downvotes, such as your edit.

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