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Comment by asjw | Hacker News Reader

That's actually a great idea! I would also abolish votes in general and only sort comments chronologically. users could vote and see the posts/comments ordered by their votes that would not be public

The "first" kind of comments are easy to detect, so I think they wouldn't be a big problem

The chances that a post written later in the game will become one of the most voted because it's really a good comment are close to none anyway

Another interesting feature would be highlight and prioritize content written by users you follow, based on some simple rule like how many votes you gave them before or how many interactions you already had in the past

But downvotes are a prize and a status, you have to reach a certain amount of karma points to be able to downvote something so I guess unfortunately they are here to stay

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After hearing about pol.is[0] on HN, I've wondered about a system that allows or even encourages downvotes (with all vote counts hidden), but doesn't penalize content for being downvoted. Then downvoting to disagree becomes okay.

With this kind of system, you could even boost downvoted comments as long as they also receive upvotes, encouraging more diverse discourse. If we want an online space that doesn't become an echo chamber, we need to make it okay to respectfully disagree.

[0]: https://pol.is/home - pol.is uses votes to find common ground between divisive groups

Interesting idea. But, then, I think why not abolish downvotes and just encourage people to reply? Then, you could sort by engagement (i.e. replies and upvotes). The replies could stand in for implied divergence, as there's usually not much reason to continue a long (especially deeper) thread to simply agree.

An exception to that assumption might be if people have unique additional insights that could enrichen a topic, so they're commenting a lot while not necessarily disagreeing. But, such enrichment has notable value in its own right, so is probably worth surfacing as well. Engagement should breed engagement.

>If we want an online space that doesn't become an echo chamber, we need to make it okay to respectfully disagree.

And, that's what it all boils down to. So, the central point is to encourage people to engage and reply with their respectful disagreement vs issue downvotes into a blackbox. The only way to get diverse discourse is to encourage actual discourse. Downvotes are an explicit discouragement of it.

>I would also abolish votes in general and only sort comments chronologically.

Congratulations, you invented Usenet. :)

Back in the day we didn't have voting, we had kill filters. If you didn't like another user, you'd have your reader filter out their messages. There were far fewer kids on my lawn in those days as well.

Back in the days I was there :)

In late 80s I was actively involved in some of the BBS of my city, that also gave access to Usenet, engaging mainly in cyberpunk, science fiction and C programming

Eternal September is still going on

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