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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help.

However, in opposition to my own idea, I consider that simply requiring a more effort wouldn't necessarily change the groupthink problem, but would just stifle low effort downvotes.

Let's consider then the whole idea of votes in the first place. Are downvotes considered "speech" in an abstract sense? Should they be protected in the same way disagreeable opinions are? Is the level of effort necessary to express the speech relevant to the level of protection it deserves? Would restricting downvotes in any way be considered a speech restriction?

So these are all interesting aspects to the problem that cause me a lot of internal debate.

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To reply to a part of your comment: I've come to realize that most downvotes can be mitigated by simply adding in disclaimers, explicit assumptions, general kindness and general positivity [1].

In that sense HN really made me a more civil person to discuss with, while I am still able to write controversial opinions when I happen to have them.

So on balance, in my experience, the downvoting has been a good development for me.

[1] There was a year where I was arguably mildly depressed about my job situation. I graduated had all the bells and whistles, and worked amazingly hard for it (I almost burned out twice). Yet, I couldn't get a prestigious job. And for me, that was the whole point. Why work hard if it doesn't get you anywhere? I gave up on a lot of things.

The tone in my comments during that year was more negative than usual despite my opinions being similar. I experimented with being more positive than I actually felt, while still expressing the same opinions, and noticed I'd be downvoted less and upvoted more.

>I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help

I think old school sequential forums were actually much better, outside specific niches they're harder to find these days though. Having the things everyone strongly agrees with at the top where they're the first to be read just encourages flamewars straight out of the gate and a lot of stuff just got lost in the middle to never be looked at again. But when casually reading you see replies from everyone, there's no distinction between controversial opinions and group think approved ones. One of the few I frequent regularly is actually a political and has posters with the full spectrum of beliefs, but the lack voting makes things much more pleasant than a similar topic on here or reddit would be.

There were a couple of other advantages too, bumping threads meant the conversation was over when it stopped being discussed, not when an algorithm decided it was no longer interesting.

Sequential forums can be good for discussions. It was definitely nice to be able to bump a discussion that was older than 16 hours to unbury it.

I like ranked forums for Q and A content though, Eg, like stack overflow or even reddit when I’m trying to answer a technical question.

Mostly though, nothing can replace a good forum culture. I just meant to encourage that with my remark, the downvote button itself is only bad if people use it recklessly

We could remove downvotes. They had three purposes:

1) Crowdsourced moderation. Well, everyone is using manual moderation anyway.

2) Silencing others. This is a misfeature.

3) Finding the best content. Upvotes are enough for that.

That said, I'm not sure this will reduce groupthink. Twitter has no downvotes and plenty of groupthink.

In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h, so people eventually saved them for really bad / offensive / spam comments instead of punishing people for their opinions (except a few who even wrote scripts to downvote certain people systematically...).

The problem is in my opinion that once people begin to act like this, their victims behave like this also. If you get punished for arguing against somebody, you learn to stop arguing and just downvote that person instead. It's a chain reaction.

> In the forum I was working on, downvotes were limited per 24h

I believe this is also true for Hacker News.

If so, it must be a sort of "hell" downvote, which has no effect even though the UI seems to indicate that it does... I don't think this would change behavior as described above.

There could be two kinds of downvotes: * "I disagree" downvote * "This comment has no value" downvote

First downvote can be used for arguments like "let's increase taxes to the rich because, this way we can build more fair society, European countries have shown that high taxes..."

Second downvote can be used for comments like "Let's tax these rich bastards".

I want to also mention reddit voting system which I kinda like: they have downvoting, but they also have a sorting by "controvervial": top comments are the comments with high number of both upvotes and downvotes, such comments really help to see the full spectre of opinions in discussions, while the universally true and not interesting comments everyone agrees with like "we should not kill people", are below controversial comments.

The ideal solution is definitely to split ratings, both for upvotes and downvotes. Slashdot did this, and quite a few forum scripts have plugins for it, where you can rate posts based on things like whether you agree/disagree with them, if they're funny or informative, if they're spam/low quality etc.

Having it work that way would significantly discourage using upvotes and downvotes as agree/disagree buttons, and make it much clearer what the community thinks of any particular post or piece of content.

One of the common threads on some limits to free speech is the notion that lies are not protected. Libel, perjury, false advertisement, slander. I treat downvoting similarly: I only downvote things I know to be false and figure the speaker either knows it to be false or reasonably should know.

Since I only downvote in the rare cases where I believe a person is being dangerously disingenuous or unreasonable, I often don't feel there would be any value in replying. If they are misrepresenting facts or I believe they are not reasonable, why would I attempt to reason with them?

Instead if I think the person is just confused or hasn't considered a different perspective, I won't downvote and might reply. Often I will just ignore it anyways, since I am ambivalent about the possibility of reasoning with people over the internet.

One of the problems with upvote/downvote is that it is binary, while topics of discussion in the social rarely aren’t. In the social space of forming opinions, many things happen in a grey spectrum, and need not be polarized all the time (upvote / downvote)

Simple up/down voting is probably a relic of the simple concepts and simplified programming needed for early development of social media (web 1.0).

An overhaul of these networks to adapt more to human-like discourse is much-needed and welcome imo.

Kialo for example has a more complex voting system that works better.

Yes, I absolutely agree, I hope to see more resources and work done in that area.

Sam Harris once proposed a “this changed my mind” button as a way to encourage discourse.

Having multiple different reaction buttons would legit be nice:

I agree

I disagree

Thoughtful

Contentless

I learned something

I changed my mind

This way we could eg. express that we disagree with the post, which was thoughtful and a good effort, and didn't change our minds but still learned something.

One huge poison in a lot of modern discourse is that accepting your interlocutor has a point should mean you start to agree with them. Why? Some of the best things I've ever read in my life didn't change my overall stance on a subject, but gave it a lot of new nuance and depth, and appreciation for the person talking.

>but would just stifle low effort downvotes

With the exception of spam, that's a feature. If something offends you, you should consider why.

Upvotes are useful in reducing spam, as without them, I'd have to repeat a sentiment to show agreement. In my experience (anecdata warning!) that nicely leads to both the best post for an argument, and the best rebuttal, sharing visibility.

Neither combat the problem of "fake news", because frauds don't have to be well done if the local community agrees with the sentiment.

I'm a fan of easy ability to downvote and upvote.

What I would be interested in is a more sophisticated ordering than by net number of votes. For example, I'm sure some people's upvotes correlate well with my own (and probably some people's downvotes correlate with my upvotes!) If comments could somehow be ordered by how likely I am to upvote them, based on historical correlations between my and others' votes, that seems like an interesting approach.

If we must have the one-click convenience (I'm not convinced it's necessary) I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting" etc. instead of downvote button, perhaps also similar for upvote.

I'd really like "I learned something" as a vote button. It's poisonous to think that I agreeing with something means I have to adopt the other person's stance on an issue, and if I disagree I have to denounce their contribution as horrible and bad.

Some of the best stuff I've ever read didn't change my overall stance on the issue, but gave it nuance and depth it didn't have before, and more respect for the person on the other side.

I'd prefer to have few labels like "I disagree" "Not true" "Off topic" "Pls read the article" "Disgusting"

Slashdot used to have that, it didn’t save it.

Or may be both up- and downvoted messages should make it to the top, while ignored messages should slowly sink?

I would rather view in chronological order. I think that it should be an option. Sorting by "controversial" as suggested in another comment should be another option.

But don't you think that if you are exposed more to comments that correlate with your own preference, it would lead to creation of an echo chamber?

> It's a question I've been struggling with lately. Downvotes reinforce groupthink, that much is subjectively clear. I've considered solutions, and I believe forcing people to reply before they are allowed to downvote would help.

I actually don't see any value in downvotes. It's usually used when people disagree, which obviously leads to silos of thought and suppressing ideas. If somebody is being particularly disruptive and unproductive, then they should be flagged, but otherwise I wish downvotes would be removed from HN. It has no place here.

Especially on HN, where I thought the idea was for people to have reasonable discussions about things, downvotes are frustratingly counter to that. If you disagree with something, it's too easy to just downvote and move on. And people pile on without saying anything. And in the end, nobody learns anything because nobody's actually talking about what's wrong with the comment.

Then again, I get the feeling nobody here actually wants to learn anything from fellow users if they happen to represent different ideas. I guess that's by design?

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