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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

My personal anecdote is the opposite of yours: it was easy for me to convert people to Signal.

Concerning your edit: I thought it was a pretty established part of the etiquette on HN that a downvote is used also for simple disagreement. It means "I do not agree", not "you are wrong and should be shamed".

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 here at least pg argues for downvote for disagreement

And the mods have consistently upheld that since then (although quite a few people don't like it, or think that it is against the rules - but such a rule exists on reddit, not here)

Sometimes I upvote people despite disagreement, because good points are made regardless.

That's even better of course.

I've always thought downvote on HN was for comments that are inappropriate, incompetent/harmful, or not following rules. In other words a vote that a comment holds no value on here. Anything else is just a discussion.

I’m surprised downvoting isn’t even mentioned in the guidelines. Assuming they didn’t want to mention downvoting unless you have enough karma, they could just display the clause for those with downvoting capability.

It is! ""Commenting on voting is boring"" or something. Like this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Near the bottom

I may be wrong, but comments are meant for that. Ideally when there's a disagreement, people can openly discuss it. I thought downvoting is to flag unproductive comments.

I had that impression too, but I just read the guidelines and can't find anything to that effect. They do say that we shouldn't be commenting about the voting though ;).

Maybe on Reddit, but on HN downvoting is supposed to be a moderation tool. That’s why you need a certain amount of karma to access it. It should be used to flag content that breaks the rules or is unproductive in some way. Please don’t use it like you do on Reddit.

You are making a couple too many assumptions. For starters, I do not use reddit. I wrote my message above with the caveat that I am unsure ("I thought"), but you are presenting a front of certainty without backing it up with evidence (and evidence rarely exists when talking about common culture).

Downvoting for disagreement is ok on HN, and always has been - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314. What you're describing is more what flagging is for.

When substantive comments get unfairly downvoted, it's good to give them a corrective upvote. People mostly tend to do that and that mostly fixes the problem. Not entirely—but close enough that there's no globally better solution that we're aware of.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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