Personally, I think your opinion is worth the full 2 cents. I won’t ever take it from you, whether I agree or disagree.
Fight club rule for this thread: Don’t down vote anything here.
I do not downvote opinions I don't agree with. I often see a well-crafted comment that is being downvoted, and upvote it although I do not agree with it. I think it's nice to have opposing views, and it's a tragedy when one viewpoint is silenced. Especially on a tech-focused forum.
If I were downvoting people who disagreed with me, I wouldn't always feel compelled to defend myself with a comment. I think those comment threads are almost always quite boring and so I try to avoid them. Being several "generations" deep is often indicative of this.
Well-crafted and/or sourced argument, regardless of whether I agree or disagree = upvote
Reddit-level discourse, knee-jerk commenting, trolling / flaming = downvote
I'll also upvote or downvote based on context of comment. Is a comment taking a thread off-topic, when the parent was fairly clear?
And finally, karma fairness. Is someone getting downvoted for no apparent reason, without anyone commenting in response? Upvote.
Same thing in tech; a discussion about why you don't like a family of languages is great. A discussion about why people who use that family of language are all terrible curmudgeons probably isn't.
Overall, I think toxicity is something you know when you see. A well-worded, earnest disagreement is nowhere near toxic.
If I'm taking the time to post a counterpoint, I'm usually not going to downvote the comment I'm replying to. But if somebody is posting something that I've seen here a dozen times before, I'm not going to write the dozenth attempted refutation. That's just more noise.
The rarest combination is when I flag a comment without downvoting it. That's when I agree with much of the spirit of the comment but it also contains a personal attack against another poster.
Slightly less rare: I'm reading through a comment, about to upvote it, and then the final sentence turns out to be needlessly inflammatory. Or it starts out inflammatory and then makes some good points. I neither upvote nor downvote these. I don't comment on the comment style when I see these cases, because writing about style instead of the substance of the original article under discussion also worsens the SNR.
I downvote low effort comments, including views I disagree with if they are off topic or poorly expressed. Nobody is owed an explanation of downvotes, but if someone asks for one on something I downvoted, I would reply if it hadn't already been adequately addressed by someone else.
When a comment is partly greyed out, I'm almost certain to either upvote or downvote. If I think the downvotes are unfair, I will upvote, and if I think the comment should be hidden, I'll hasten the process.
The point of downvoting is to keep the site as a useful resource, and that means downvoting when appropriate without spending an inordinate amount of time on it. Nobody has time to read every comment posted on HN.
I reserve the downvote for comments that are mean-spirited or total non-sequiturs. I flag even more rarely, and that's for blatant bad behavior. I avoid engaging in any way at all on threads that deal with political issues I feel strongly about. Any engagement, even downvotes, is fuel for the fire.
IMO, it is strongly preferred. Downvoting is about controlling signal to noise ratio; if it is not a waste of everyone’s attention to respond to a post, it doesn't deserve a downvote, and vice-versa.
Alternatively sometimes I make a comment that I think is worthwhile saying, even though I know it will be downvoted (for reasons I may disagree with).
Making comments just to farm karma is very easy but I don’t find it satisfying (and certainly doesn’t help create good discussion).
I've suggested it about 50 times here. Not the same categories, but some form of metadata associated with the vote. As soon as you click the arrow, it can prompt a list of tags to click. You could very quickly express yourself along with your vote and move along.
My suggestions for categories would be emotional (angry, happy, funny, confused, indifferent, stupid, crazy, awesome) and non-emotional (citation needed, seems right, false, morality, ethics, expert, novice, etc). This way you get a good picture of why somebody voted: what their emotional state was, and what their (perceived) intellectual position was.
Perhaps one reason it doesn't happen is it would fundamentally change the dynamics of the ingroups here. You'll notice that on some posts, it seems like everyone is parroting the same opinion as if it's an established fact. Or they upvote someone's comment because they have a high reputation. If you had to add a qualifier to your vote, it may quickly become transparent why these people are voting, and then the algorithm would have to change so as not to expose these defects in group social dynamics. Or the algorithm would stay the same, and people could see that the structure of the forum is based on a lot of crappy human heuristics and not strictly adhering to "the rules".
I think of this forum as a well-moderated “put a penny in the pot” sort of place. You say your piece and move on. You put your penny in because you’ve gotten pennies in the past. Nice to know you’re generally making a positive rather than a negative contribution, but ultimately it’s just pixels on a screen.
But others quite reasonably want more feedback. Perhaps to refine their ideas, or to improve on their presentation or persuasion skills. Be nice for them to have the option to get that feedback.
Perhaps the setting would also be enforced on the first five postings from new accounts, or if the user is an obvious troll or shill. For the new account, the feedback should be softened as they ease into the culture. Perhaps with helpful tips.
In-groups are everywhere, sadly. Easier to address if you have a solid sense of self-esteem and a proven track record in life to support you if you are swimming against the stream. Perhaps the movie “Twelve Angry Men” might be of service. Outsider status can be quite powerful in its own way...
And no, we've been having "But science requires skepticism!" debate for 10+ years as well. I can literally hear both sides' argument in my head, there's no point in repeating it.
Sometimes my inner keyboard warrior gets the better of me and I end up replying to these comments instead of downvoting, but in retrospect, I think I'm doing this community a disservice by amplifying the noise.
What are the facts that someone has to share on this topic to avoid your down vote?
This comment I made a while ago is a case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736220 The person I was replying to had no literal idea of how economics is supposed to work (according to economists), so I downvoted, then explained.
Just remember that the point of up and down voting is to create that bunch of interesting articles on the front page. The goal isn't to be a fair & honest system or to put the truth on trial. Slight shallowness is even beneficial as things at times already get technical enough to exclude a lot of users.
This can take the form of “citation needed” or “sources please” bad faith sniped requests for “evidence.” It can also take the form of overtly abusive attitudes, defending things like misogyny or defending repression of different classes of people, for example if someone said something like, “I don’t feel like I have to make my heterosexual identity widely known at work, so I think people with a homosexual identity also should keep it to themselves.” This sort of thing is masqueraded as fair and balanced or “just an opinion” to make it seem like it deserves equal footing or equal consideration, but really this sort of thing is flagrantly uncivil and harmful, and dressing it up like it’s some innocuous comment is one of the worst parts.
Unfortunately, I can’t always explain my reasoning for these sorts of downvotes, because the community guidelines of HN are often very, very unfairly enforced, giving a free pass to things that are genuinely horrible yet reprimanding any follow-up comments that call those people out on their toxic bullshit. Sometimes the comments are so bad that I’ll take the risk of misplaced moderator admonition. But usually I just downvote & move on.
On technical topics, I will downvote things if they appear uncharitably one-sided or unfairly ridiculing an alternative on unfair grounds. For example I see this a ton in posts focusing on Nim & Julia, where instead of just dispassionately mentioning preferences or benefits, the posts go further to unfairly deride alternatives or make straw man comparisons.
I think downvoting is actually quite important for keeping bad commentary off of HN. Very sincerely, there’s a lot of commentary here that is one small step removed from The Red Pill or MRA toxicity, and unfortunately the site guidelines allow it to be treated as if it’s innocuous and fair / civil discourse.
I really worry a great deal for HN. As a site that aims to set high standards for community participation, it paints a bleak picture of societal discourse at large and in fact people who stand up for basic social norms and respect are the ones who get unfairly downvoted and admonished.
Is it possible that valuable contributions to a discussion could be "one small step removed from" negative, toxic, or detrimental ideas? For example, someone could say "inequality is increasing and its reaching a critical point where we may have to do something about the staggering amount of wealth held by the 1%" or "gun rights were enshrined in the US constitution so that a tyrannical government could be changed by force" which could both be interpreted as a small step from extralegal measures to rectify the situation according to the speaker's values, but may also be interpreted as a justification for legal measures (in the former case) or a recitation of historical fact (in the latter case).
I mention this because part of the problem I have observed in social media discussion of controversial issues is that on the one hand, people use certain tropes/memes as signals to invoke a particular perspective and people have responded to this by inferring their interpretation of this reference and jumping to condemning the perspective they believe has been referenced. This makes the discourse seem bizarre to outsiders who lack the requisite background knowledge to make those same inferences and polarizes people by suggesting that some signals are always used to refer to certain perspectives and not others.
I can give other examples, if you like.
I submit that it looks like it is you who is being intellectually lazy, and using "scary genocidal mustache man bad" level reasoning, unless you'd like to explain yourself.
Please note I never said genocide was justifiable. I've merely stated that Stalin did a thing which had some good effects for the Soviet people. And, yet, here you are deliberately misreading my original comment in bad faith, and all but saying "scary genocidal mustache man bad."
> I've merely stated that Stalin did a thing which had some good effects for the Soviet people. And, yet, here you are deliberately misreading my original comment in bad faith, and all but saying "scary genocidal mustache man bad."
You just invoked some historical facts in a way that suggests a connection without explaining the connection. Thats what was lazy. On my end it has nothing to do with moustaches. Thats just your preferred reading.
That's what I call intellectually lazy, and why this thread is a great example of exactly what I was talking about in the initial comment.
there's a vast difference between a journal article and mentioning some historical facts and allowing the reader to infer meaning. Of course I had to read into your post, that's because you didn't make any connection between the things you mentioned. its also not realistic to mention a satellite in the same breath as genocide without any connecting framework and expect people to read it in a positive way.
> That's what I call intellectually lazy, and why this thread is a great example of exactly what I was talking about in the initial comment.
its lazy to wave your hand at some historical events and let the reader infer what you mean. its trolling to take exception to their interpretation when you haven't provided an interpretation that you prefer and I'm sorry I took the bait.
> great example of exactly what I was talking about in the initial comment.
that's confirmation bias and not applicable since I didn't downvote you but I replied as though it was a serious comment. troll 1, chordalkeyboard 0.
If there was a reliable way to detect the good faith attempts, then maybe, but it is so noise-jammed by the people taking hate or bigotry and trying to legitimize it under some false pretense of open inquiry that it’s not practically achievable.
As for people using memes or tropes as stereotypes to reject them, I think that is super, super uncommon. Especially with communities like MRA, which is even seen federally as a domestic terror group, it is not at all an unfair generalization to reject the discourse commonly associated with that community. It doesn’t deserve any further due process or open forum - it’s just hate speech. I don’t think it’s fair to act as though instant rejection of that sort of community is unfair. It’s not simplistic reductionism based on an in-group, it’s really actually based on analysis of the group’s core tenets and goals and a widely agreed perspective that it’s inappropriate.
The point is that what is "one step away" is often subjective and relies on a web of inferences that the original speaker may not share. The views that are downvoted for being "too close" to "hate-based agendas" may not actually be close at all, merely shared by a variety of people, some of which also have hate-based views and some who do not. In other words it may be a mistake to infer that the view is too close to a "bad idea" if the idea itself cannot be labeled as bad. Refusing to discuss ideas that are legitimate objects of discourse because they are "too close" to bad ideas prevents reasonable-minded people from responding to those ideas if they are incorrect and drives discussion of these ideas to areas that have been taken over by extremists.
> If there was a reliable way to detect the good faith attempts, then maybe, but it is so noise-jammed by the people taking hate or bigotry and trying to legitimize it under some false pretense of open inquiry that it’s not practically achievable.
The remedy for this is to treat assume good faith and interact on the object level, explaining why an idea may be good or bad, and explicitly draw the boundary between the acceptable idea they put forth and the unacceptable idea that you suspect they really mean.
> As for people using memes or tropes as stereotypes to reject them, I think that is super, super uncommon.
Actually I see it all the time.
> Especially with communities like MRA, which is even seen federally as a domestic terror group, it is not at all an unfair generalization to reject the discourse commonly associated with that community.
How then could we ever discuss reform of child support or divorce laws if any argument that suggests that something might be unfair for men pattern-matches to "federally [designated] domestic terror" and is therefore forbidden? Actually, how does being federally-designated as terror make it somehow forbidden to talk about? What if the feds wrongly designated something as terror, how could we talk about that?
> it is not at all an unfair generalization to reject the discourse commonly associated with that community. It doesn’t deserve any further due process or open forum - it’s just hate speech. I don’t think it’s fair to act as though instant rejection of that sort of community is unfair.
So do you see how you have identified discourse that you associate with a community as the same as that community? What if your association is the part that's incorrect? What if a bad community discusses things that are both good and bad? This guilt by association is exactly the problem here. Observe that if an extremist community has somehow obtained a good idea, and you refuse to permit discussion of that idea because of its association with that community, you have given people who want to discuss that idea no choice but to discuss it with extremists. This occurs even if the idea is itself bad but the person wants to explain why it is bad.
> It’s not simplistic reductionism based on an in-group, it’s really actually based on analysis of the group’s core tenets and goals and a widely agreed perspective that it’s inappropriate.
Actually I think its based on pattern-matching and inference, both processes that cover a lot of terrain because they tolerate error in results.
This is just not true. Many many things in the sphere of alt-right hate speech, attacks on so-called “snowflake SJWs,” dismissal of the metoo movement, tacit endorsement of misogyny, dehumanization of immigrants and more are very widely understood now. Being “one step away” from MRA or Proud Boys hate speech or “one step away” from transphobic or homophobic hate speech is really not a widely debated subjective matter. These kinds of attempts to slowly legitimize hate speech are directly recognizable and ought to be called out and rejected.
It is wrong to hide behind vague claims that because “it’s subjective” we should allow the Overton window to be dragged toward endorsement of hate speech.
> “ So do you see how you have identified discourse that you associate with a community as the same as that community? What if your association is the part that's incorrect?”
No, I do not think you’ve succeeded in making a case for this point. I am not substituting my association of speech in as an unfair characteristic of a group. That group is doing the association all on their own.
This is exactly the kind of extenuating excuse-making that should not be treated as reasonable or civil inquiry.
To me, your comment would be like saying, “Can’t you see how you are defining the KKK as a cross-burning anti-black group? You are letting your association of cross-burning as ‘bad’ lead you to ‘subjective’ judgment that the group is bad. Maybe it’s just an unusual social group and we should all be more open-minded.”
To me, that is identical to what you are saying in your comment.
Sometimes the answer is just no. The group defines itself with horrific practices or words, nobody else applies that association for them.
When hate speech is slightly watered down and dressed up as legit inquiry it is even worse. It attempts to legitimize it like a Trojan Horse to establish unequivocally unacceptable beliefs as if they deserve equal footing in some “let’s all be above the fray and act like more evolved rational agents” disingenuous claptrap.
those things are bad in themselves, they are not "one step away."
> It is wrong to hide behind vague claims that because “it’s subjective” we should allow the Overton window to be dragged toward endorsement of hate speech.
If something is in fact hate speech, then it shouldn't be normalized and can be identified as hate speech and condemned for that. We were discussing things that are not hate speech but are associated with it according to certain persons. There are only three cases: something is hate speech, or it is not, or it is debatable whether it is hate speech or not. If it is hate speech, then it can be condemned as such. If it is not hate speech, it doesn't move the Overton window towards hate speech. If it is debatable then it is necessarily a proper object of discourse. None of this involves banning innocuous statements because someone heard a bad person say it somewhere.
> No, I do not think you’ve succeeded in making a case for this point. I am not substituting my association of speech in as an unfair characteristic of a group. That group is doing the association all on their own.
You are responsible for your interpretation, not some other people somewhere else. If your interpretation is correct then you can make that case. Good ideas don't become bad merely because they exist in the thoughts and speech of people who also have bad ideas in their thoughts and speech.
> To me, your comment would be like saying, “Can’t you see how you are defining the KKK as a cross-burning anti-black group? You are letting your association of cross-burning as ‘bad’ lead you to ‘subjective’ judgment that the group is bad. Maybe it’s just an unusual social group and we should all be more open-minded.”
This is a bizarre misreading of what I said. The kkk are racist by their own admission. I don't need to associate anything. This is more like you saying that being a fan of the Atlanta Falcons is a dog whistle for racism because everyone knows Georgia is full of racists.
> When hate speech is slightly watered down and dressed up as legit inquiry it is even worse. It attempts to legitimize it like a Trojan Horse to establish unequivocally unacceptable beliefs as if they deserve equal footing in some “let’s all be above the fray and act like more evolved rational agents” disingenuous claptrap.
unequivocally unacceptable beliefs are not the issue here. We are discussing statements that are unacceptable only because they associated with a bad group, not because they are bad themselves.
What does this mean? I personally think all arguments should be based on logical deduction and evidence, otherwise it turns into a bunch of people just yelling at each other.
I guess people can sometimes abuse it. Person A: water is wet, person b: [citation needed], etc or demanding citation for an ancedote about someone's personal experience, but i dont think i see that very often.
I see this quite often. In particular, a common pattern:
Person A: water is wet
Person B: [citation needed], you clearly have an agenda
Person C: I experienced water and found it to be wet
Person B: [citation needed], anecdotes are not data
Person D: water is dry
(Person B silently clicks to upvote and does not respond, or less subtly, continues the discussion but does not apply the same "standards")
Rare meta-discussion follow-up: Hey person B, you seem to be selective in your standards of evidence.
Person B: I'm neutral and rational!
All of this wastes people's time and energy, and nobody (including B) are going to derive any value from any further responses to B's comments.
The generous interpretation: Person B is fooling themselves into thinking they're being rational by asking for evidence instead of saying "nuh-uh!", but they don't realize they're only asking that of statements that bother them, and they're unlikely to actually change their mind regardless of the amount of evidence.
The less generous version: Person B knows exactly what they're doing, but is playing neutral to waste people's time and effort.
Versions of this pattern, with more incendiary topics in place of the humidity of dihydrogen monoxide, appear often.
If someone makes claims (extraordinary or not), then they should be able to back them up with evidence. Asking for a citation or evidence is pretty much fine as far as I'm concerned.
Further if you self-reflect and still really believe their point is incredulous without bolstering evidence, why not just say nothing? What possible value is it to add a sniping comment like “uhm, citation needed”? It’s plainly not contributing anything, solely looking for the evidence challenge itself to bring some kind of undercutting rhetorical flair, which is frankly worse than making uncorroborated, but civil, claims (because others can fact check them for themselves).
I respectfully disagree. If you're making claims, especially in a discussion that is perhaps contentious or controversial, it is absolutely your responsibility to back up these claims. We shouldn't have to do all the work to decide if true or to begin debunking them, especially if the evidence for your claims come from unreliable and shady sources.
If the response is "just google it", or "the facts are out there" then I'm flipping the bozo-bit on you.
If you respond to them by saying “citation needed” you’re not helping. Number one, your claim that a citation is needed might be wrong - they might not actually need to provide sources because their point is extremely widely proved already or is extremely easy to verify. Just because you think the claim needs evidence doesn’t make it so.
Number two, requesting a citation doesn’t refute what the other person said. It might be true. But because humans use various heuristics that are still rooted in tribal in-group or out-group thinking, it will be perceived like a “win” or like you “got them” and people will keep a mental tally, so the rhetorical effect actually worsens the quality of discourse.
When I see someone saying “citation needed” it immediately tells me (a) they are too lazy to research it for themselves, (b) they are too lazy to steelman the argument and engage it assuming it’s valid, (c) they are too lazy to produce their own counter-argument and (d) they want “credit” for “winning” the other side of the argument, but without actually contributing anything that answers whether the claim is true.
Of course, people posting tons of claims that don’t have evidence also come off badly - but the right thing to do is either ignore them, steelman their argument or provide a counter-argument. Pedantically demanding evidence is worse, even assuming that strong claims should have strong evidence. It harms discourse more.
Wait, so at no point in time does it go through your mind that the second person is claiming that the original person is making a descriptive claim about the world that is false, and requesting they put up (evidence) or shut up (i.e. what [citation needed] is short for)?
> [...]even assuming that strong claims should have strong evidence.
What's an example of a strong empirical claim that wouldn't have strong evidence? (If you're just talking about non-empirical claims, fair enough)
You are correct. A “citation needed” comment absolutely does not lead me to think that. The original comment that a “citation needed” comment is replying to might make me think that because of omission of evidence, but any comment that “calls them out” on omission of evidence would only reveal laziness and counter-productive argumentativeness.
I would never see a “citation needed” comment and think, “yeah, you’re right, a citation is needed.” I might separately, on my own, and privately come to that conclusion, but never as a result of a “citation needed” comment.
I believe you are confused.
- Do strong claims need strong evidence? Yes, they do.
- Is it useful or rhetorically acceptable to point out omission of evidence with a “citation needed” comment? No, it’s not, and it has nothing to do with strong claims needing evidence.
Isn't one of the guidelines of this site "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."?
If you say “citation needed” and you believe that has rebutted or refuted or challenged the other party in some way, you are wrong. It has not done so, regardless of the merit or lack of merit of their claims.
Ironic when you bemoan the discourse but then downvote discourse with which you disagree. If we followed your lead, HN would become an echo chamber.
Why shouldn’t MRA, as an example, be part of the discourse when the topic is appropriate? If anything, it provides a contrast and intelligent people can make their own decisions based on the arguments. And your comments about red pill stuff indicates that you don’t actually want “discourse” that goes against your own biases.
And “bad commentary?” What is that exactly? Commentary that counters your beliefs? Let’s take a contrived example. If we discuss minimum wage and someone opposes it, it would seem that would be downvoted because the mere thought of such of thing is deemed offensive, merits of the argument be damned.
By downvoting something, you are essentially saying “this should not be on HN” because the results of excessive downvotes means that the comment is literally greyed out. If the only thing that should be on HN is an opinion with which you agree, then what’s the point? It becomes an echo chamber. If someone supports Trump and makes a contextually relevant comment about that, it gets downvoted because we aren’t supposed to like Trump. It gets classed as “bad commentary” when in fact, it could be extremely relevant commentary even if you happen to disagree with the conclusions or reasoning. The very term misogyny itself is extremely loaded. Opposing women diversity initiatives isn’t necessarily misogynistic, but even expressing such an opinion gets downvoted without even addressing the substance of the argument. It’s the equivalent of a child sticking his fingers in his ears and singing la la la when encountering an idea that he doesn’t which to hear.
Climate change is another good example, expressing any skepticism about the default view is met with downvotes — yet scientific debate is supposed to be filled with skepticism rather than dogma. Climate skeptics are treated as flat-earthers despite there being light years of difference between the observable fact of a round earth and the debatable theory that using a car warms the earth. Trying to compare an extraordinary complex system like the climate to a simple observable fact that there is no edge of the earth is designed to marginalize dissenting views by comparing them with an absurd view. It’s like discussing religion at this point. No amount of convincing will change someone’s mind about their chosen god. Even broaching the subject is met with downvotes. But science isn’t religion yet on certain topics, there is a religious-like faith that any competing evidence is automatically “bad commentary.” Imagine if the bad commentary argument were listened to when it came to genetics. Lysenkoism would be considered “scientific fact.” In the Soviet Union Lysenkoism was law. Eugenics was another place where the term “settled science” got used a lot. The political support of Eugenics made an indelible mark on early 20th century science and public policy. It too was “settled science” and those opposed would have been downvoted in the 1915 version of Hacker News.
Dogmatic downvoting is a poison of HN. It’s pointless to discuss anything if the discussion consists of simply variations of agreement.
I’m not sure how effective the system really is though. I’ve seen plenty of my own posts get downvoted for no reason other than I had a different opinion.
When people downvote without offering their own opinion, it feels more like censorship than anything else.
Yes.
The Russians (ie IRA) on here for instance want to promote disinformation and conflict. The best way to do this is would be up voting and down voting.
Once you get into comments it is quite time intensive. But it is also easier to get caught, the community can't self regulate voting, it's invisible.
Different topic, I think a reason for down-voting with a 100 drop down options including options not allowed/encouraged(ie they are a Republican, I disliked another one of their comments) would be a very interesting experiment.
It might kill HN, so HN won't do this experiment since they have a working site. But there does need to be another evolution done by someone.
[edit] Probably wouldn't help, but HN should have a private "downvoted comments" to complement the private "upvoted comments" link in the admin panel so people can see their behaviour.
Due to these effects, downvotes are used as a tool of censorship. It's explicitly used that way in many cases, to make sure that unpopular opinions/ideas are not seen by more people. Because they do not believe people are capable of making judgements for themselves, and must be protected from unpopular speech, because if they accidentally see it, they might end up agreeing with it. We can't have that, can we?
Using downvotes for disagreement is simply a bad practice. They should be used for off-topic or inappropriate posts.
Ironic, how some actually downvote this post but don't comment :) This demonstrates the point.
You have a point that not everyone might think it's a problem though.
I personally don't agree that downvoting to disagree is OK.
If they wanted better policy though, they could simply remove downvote button and leave the flag one for off-topic / offensive posts. But that wasn't my main point.
Edit: Yeah, I just googled "click trolling" and found zero instances in the first 3 pages of search results suggesting the usage you're implying, except your original comment. That tells me you probably just made it up, and, by the tone of your comment, it suggests to me you made it something that sounds objectively bad.
Click trolling describes this behavior. If you have a better term for it - feel free to propose one. What's objectively bad is disagreeing, clicking "downvote" and cowardly running away without commenting. How to call that is less relevant, you can call it any way you want.