Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

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PG once before weighed in with "it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement" [1].

But, the mixing of the "quality" axis with an "agree/disagree" axis risks coarsening discussion. A disagree-downvote is mildly censorious: it lowers a comment's placement and docks the commenter's karma. It stings.

I don't want to downvote comments simply because I disagree, but if such comments are highly-placed because of some superficial popular appeal, and comments I more agree with are lowly-placed, I want to restore some balance of attention. I then tend to cast a few votes based on agreement/disagreement.

One possible answer is an idea I've plugged whenever this issue comes up: start a second orthogonal rating axis that is explicitly for agree/disagree [2][3]. It could be little left/right arrows, at the end of the comment. Then you might 'disvote' a comment you disagree with, but still 'upvote' it because it was well-stated... etc.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117196

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126917

The mixing of the "quality" axis with an "agree/disagree" axis risks coarsening discussion.

I think in practice there are only three useful situations:

- you post a good comment, and I agree

- you post a good comment, but I disagree

- you post a bad comment

I think we all want a scheme where I can reward you in the first two situations and punish you in the last one. Unfortunately what we seem to be getting is one that encourages rewards in the first and punishment in the second and third.

Here are my suggestions:

For comments, an upvote or downvote without a followup comment should only add or remove some fraction of a point in order to diminish the effect of people who silently agree or disagree. If you really want your disagreement to count significantly you'll have to comment and also take the risk that people will downvote (or upvote) you.

For posts, remove the upvote arrow from the main list until after someone has clicked on the link. People should have to at least read the thing they are upvoting.

Finally, make it possible for me to change my mind within a short interval of upvoting or downvoting.

I can agree with a comment and not want to karma-reward it, if it's mundane or repetitive. That might even go so far as to agree with the sentiment but find the comment of punishable quality, a sort of "OK but enough already".

The idea of weighing ratings from commenters in the same thread more highly is interesting.

Discouraging votes-without-reading and allowing quick corrections, as with comment text, both make sense to me too.

If someone says "People should downvote to express disagreement." and I disagree with them should I downvote them?

I downvoted you because I can't stand it when people use footnote notation in a posting that is only 1/5 of a page long.

It looks longer when you are in the tiny HN comment text box. I think he is excused.

URLs inline look crappy:

News.YC as yet has no syntax for linking from text as in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Li... Wikipedia] or [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode]BBCode[/url] or [Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown).

News.YC also doesn't follow the recommendation of appendix C of RFC3986 <http://www.rfc.net/rfc3986.html>; with regard to angle-brackets as URL-delimiters -- and it even inserted that stray semicolon.

Hence the footnotes even in tiny comments... they look nicer, not breaking the flow of the writing so much.

I hate foot notes period... unless their are links to them... and links back. They aren't so bad in books... (but still suck there) but in web pages they drive me nuts.

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