Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if I'm surprised that dang didn't touch on to mention downvotes as an even more rapid "contrarian dynamic" mechanism; wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction, effort required for the action - like qualitative text from the downvoter as to why a comment is being downvoted to then allow OP the opportunity to clarify or expand on their comment - "to be more reflective and therefore better written"? The downvote-comment doesn't have to be identified as being a downvote-comment, showing up as a regular reply.

That added cost/friction may also act as a filter for lazy readers/skimmers or those misinterpreting what's said at first glance, and therefore if forced to include some critical text response along with their downvote then OP and other readers can begin to get to the bottom/foundation of the distaste, giving OP at least some guidance as to why someone/people are downvoting - arguably a valuable learning/crowdsourcing moderation tool/mechanism.

I feel the added cost of time and mental effort for downvotes would add a great balance.

This has been discussed many times and it's not a good idea - it adds friction to the discussion, more than anything else. The threads would be full of pointless meta.

The fundamental problem is that getting downvoted feels kinda bad - nobody ever asks for explanatory notes on upvotes. It's reasonable to wonder whether getting downvoted feels, say, too bad too soon and if there are UI ways to address that. But it's worth remembering that for downvoting to actually work, it has to feel at least somewhat bad. It's going to feel somewhat bad with or without notes from others about why they thought you ought to feel a little bit bad.

I like the idea.

Perhaps asking users why they are downvoting could help. Maybe not necessary to show their reason to others, but add friction and force someone to think twice.

If there's no witnessing or critique/scrutiny by the community possible then I don't think there will be the pressure necessary for quality comments to be made - and leaving a moderator to privately review them would likely have more comments left toward the spectrum of "this guy's an idiot" then toward side of constructive or useful criticism.

Hmm, what about being able to see a list of downvotes and explanations on a user’s profile? With maybe some minimum karma before you can see that on someone else’s profile?

So there is potential scrutiny by the community, but not in a way that disrupts the original discussion?

Why would it be disrupting conversation and not simply inherent to it? Top replies will still be at top.

> wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction

Upvotes have much less friction. Downvoted posts are not merely downvoted, they are also not upvoted. Why don't people upvote posts that are unfairly downvoted?

What about this: to to downvote, you need to also specify a keyword as to why you are downvoting. It's a text field (not a pull down). Whatever you enter, will not be visible to anyone except to the person who wrote the comment you are downvoting.

Adds just enough friction to reduce downvotes a bit, provides information to the person being downvoted (no more "why all the hate?" comments), and doesn't pollute the experience for everyone else, since those are not visible by most users.

This assumes that it would be good to reduce downvotes. I'm not convinced that's true. We need those white blood cells.

Downvoting to express disagreement is ok with 'pg. More information would likely to lead to more turmoil.

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