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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

> Respond to me, don't downvote me.

I wish the guidelines contained a statement like, "Downvotes are for posts that don't follow these guidelines, not posts you just disagree with." Downvoting for disagreement seems equivalent to replying "Shut up."

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I have never found it productive to respond to a post saying "I downvoted this because I think you're needlessly injecting toxic partisanship into your response". (I'm not entirely sure it's productive even as a meta-comment here, but I feel obligated to explain it's not just a "shut up" button.)

Let me say I made a mistake mentioning it, and I don't care about points. I really only wanted to challenge people to reply in the case they disagreed. I respect their choice not to reply, also.

I don't know what you mean by productive, but I think it's just a matter of courtesy. There's no need to convince anyone or do follow-up discussion.

They mean that it’s more likely to cost the world utility (in terms of starting a flame war, often between third parties who are neither the OP nor the downvoter) than produce any utility (by satisfying the curiosity of the downvoted person.)

Not everyone has time to articulate their disagreement and since that is often more work than was put into the original statement, not really fair to expect.

I would interpret it as a more general "nah". The author could then reflect and likely see reasons why someone would disagree.

It does have the effect of shutting them up by obscuring the comment, though.

Reasons for disagreement could be many. Doesn't seem right to shut them up and leave them to guess what the problem was.

Downvoting is for cowards.

I find 90% of downvotes are douchebags who disagree on HN. Maybe 99% on sites like reddit. It leads to an echo chamber effect. People with different points of view feel unwelcome.

I create throw-away accounts (one per device, until I clear cookies, and then a new one). I have one where literally everything I post gets a pile of downvotes. I'm assuming someone's stalking that one and using an army of bots to downvote everything I post, presumably because I offended them at some point.

I think the fix is for a downvote to require a rationale -- you need to state why you're downvoting. Poster learns what not to do. Downvoter needs to do it for a quasi-rational reason.

I mean you have to have 500 karma to down vote and they can detect bots especially if you contact admin and report it. If you require explaination it enables trolls to do the equivallent of logic bombing the discussion, requireing an asymettric amount of resources to respond and spamming the thread with meta convos.

I don't know that's why that account always gets downvoted; that's just a hypothesis. I don't know who downvotes. And I've never bothered reporting to admin.

The internet has a small set of hyperactive people. It has a larger number of people (like me) who don't bother with karma. And a huge number of people who check out and don't participate in discussions. I don't think there's much alignment between the groups, and who you want posting.

The mods / downvoters / etc. are in the hyper-active group, and on most sites, overactive mods tend to lead to echo chambers, and to a lot of people checking out. I haven't left HN because of this (I think the karma minimum for downvoting helps a lot), but I've left many web sites when they became too dumb or too one-sided.

HN hasn't yet gone stupid, but there is a strong correlation between downvotes and political alignment. I'm not so much talking about just left/right, but also libertarian, tech elitist, etc. I think 90% of whether my posts end up +10 or -2 depends on how well they align.

You're the one in the wrong place. That's reddiquette etc.

Behold, Word of God: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> pg: 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.

I honestly wish sites like HN would get rid of downvotes. It's generally only useful for generating an echo chamber. If a comment is particularly disruptive, it should just be reported. Otherwise lack of upvotes will naturally send it to the bottom of the page and comments giving reasonable responses if the comment is wrong about something are more than sufficient.

If I’m editing code and I see some code that doesn’t belong, then I delete it. Sometimes a downvote is similar. To comment further is to perpetuate a conversation which is, perhaps, better deleted.

Please don’t take offense, but that includes this post of yours. I don’t need to read this down-vote debate for the 1000th time. This entire comment chain is basically off-topic and breaks the flow of an interesting discussion.

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