Ask HN: Could downvoting be required to include a comment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Could downvoting be required to include a comment?

21 pointstuxie_40 comments

I know that downvoting is a controversial topic, and while I would prefer that there was no downvoting at all, I also understand why it exists. I also think that in HN downvoting is used very responsibly, signaling comments that don't follow the proper etiquette.

However, what I don't see so often is a reason for the downvote that would inform the OP of the undesired behavior and maybe give the opportunity to explain, elaborate, or even apologize. Downvotes seem to be "fire and forget" in nature. I wonder if anyone ever removes a downvote after an exchange with the OP.

That's why I'd like to propose, could we force those who decide to downvote a comment to leave respectful feedback for the OP? Assuming that downvoting is not a way to retaliate against a user but to correct unwelcome behavior, I think that a comment would be much more effective in reaching that goal.

Edit: Autocorrect.

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If I downvote someone, I usually do so without commentary, so perhaps my viewpoint will help you see the flip side of the coin. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt about best intentions, I'm already well aware that they think their comment is a valuable addition to the discussion — after all, otherwise they wouldn't have made the comment. When I downvote, either they're breaching the community spirit/rules/what-have-you, or I simply flat-out disagree with their take. Often this is straw man arguments, picking apart quotes without context and so on, but it could be a number of things.

The crux of why I don't comment is almost always the same: I'm not interested in investing my time in debating them. I already know they think their comment is good, I already know I think their comment is (subjectively) bad, I'm not interested in hearing their righteousness in finer detail. If I want to have a discussion with someone on their comment, I will add a comment myself and usually upvote because their commentary invites further discussion which is good.

In short, I look at (subjectively) bad comments the same way I look at spam email. I'm not interested in wasting my time to be convinced by someone else that their content really is good, when for me it clearly isn't. My downvote will hopefully help save others the time the same way spam filters help save time for everyone.

I’ve seen comments with data and explanations are downvoted. Objective facts are downvoted if it doesn’t fit the narrative or political angles.

It’s actually fun to go back and read comments from 5 years ago and see a stark difference in the way we used to have a discourse.

The initial downvotes can sometimes turn around, so looking at past accumulation of upvotes paints a too rosy picture.

Not least because downvoting disappears in a day but you can upvote stuff no matter how old.

I think it is far more likely that the current political climate is rather steamy. Everyone is on the edge, not just on HN. Comedy has died. I've seen families arguing about politics which used to be a rather uninteresting and docile conversation.

The entire world feels like it is boiling over after the pandemic.

First, no, you can't force "respectful".

Second, here's someone who leaves a lazy, drive-by comment. It's two words long. It took them five seconds. It has no actual thought, and therefore it's not the kind of comment we want on HN. How long should someone have to spend to be able to downvote it? If it's longer than 5 seconds, that's a problem. That puts the lazy, thoughtless commenter in the advantageous position. So what will happen instead is that users will flag the comment instead of downvoting it, because that's faster (under your proposal).

Even if it's a more worthwhile comment, it can be factually wrong. You may want to downvote it for that reason, but you may not have time (or mental energy) to explain why it's wrong for every such comment that you see. (The explanation is better than a bare downvote, of course, unless someone has already given the explanation.) But a downvote with "factually wrong" (and no explanation/details/evidence) isn't really going to raise the level of discourse much. I mean, it tells the original poster more than a bare downvote does, but not much more.

> First, no, you can't force "respectful".

Yes, you are right.

> it's not the kind of comment we want on HN

I agree, but if the goal is for the OP to understand this and change, I feel like the downvote acts more like a way for the downvoter to feel better than to teach the OP what was wrong with the comment.

> isn't really going to raise the level of discourse much (...) it tells the original poster more than a bare downvote does, but not much more

I see what you mean, and I agree, but at the same time I think that the difference between 'nothing' and giving some feedback is in my opinion what makes the difference between making downvoting about retaliation vs. teaching and correcting behavior.

> Second, here's someone who leaves a lazy, drive-by comment. It's two words long. It took them five seconds. It has no actual thought, and therefore it's not the kind of comment we want on HN.

Every time the subject of downvotes come up on HN, this is always the stance most people take, but in reality HN has grown to the point that people are downvoting with a hive-mind like reaction.

Look at the sibling comment to mine by tuxie_. I see no reason why their post should be downvoted, yet it is.

I personally think downvoting on HN has become large scale deterrence of any discourse that goes against the hive-mind or is provocative, because people drive by downvote, then someone sees that comment is downvoted and piles on because "Well if the community thinks they're wrong, then I do to."

When in reality, "the community" is often juuuust enough accounts to trigger gray text--a fraction of a fraction of a percent of total accounts.

People don't tend to react well to feedback from a random internet person, no matter how respectful or well-intended it is. Especially the ones that also don't react well to a minus-one fake internet point from an unidentified user.

I've noticed we often reiterate our own string of thought, but fail to uncover and acknowledge other people's best intentions and perspectives. It is tough to know what is behind short and long strings of online text. Also discussions rarely go well with participants out to convince eachother, while failing to really listen.

No, I like it the way it is. Humans are not that great at receiving feedback. It can also cause more drama and tension than necessary. Downvotes can and will be used to express disagreement and dislike for a position, and that’s ok. Not every argument is always in good faith or is useful enough to spend time justifying a downvote. So let’s leave it how it is.

Even pg acknowledged and agreed long ago that downvotes are/can be used to flag disagreement or dislike for a position. [1]

[1]: unable to find the more substantial comment, but here’s one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

There is also a UI/UX problem on mobile, the buttons can easily be fat fingered. There'd be a nice externality to this extra step.

What if the down vote button was rearranged like this?:

https://imgur.com/a/xJOO0Bu

Agree, I fat-finger the arrows a lot.

But thanks for "undown"/"unvote" links (which are bigger and thus easier to hit) this has not been a big problem so far.

Here's a previous fairly large discussion on this from 2015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559376

Thanks!

This is a big fat nope for me.

Some people aren't going to behave better just because you asked them to or explained why people downvoted their comment. Especially coming from a random internet stranger, this is usually experienced as an attack, not an attempt to be helpful.

And it's often not actually meant to be genuinely helpful. It often is fairly ugly behavior where someone feels like they can dictate to you how you are allowed to participate.

This means demographic outliers, minority views of any sort (in the sense of "a view not held by most people here") and anyone who has ever been picked on can be bullied, told to get in line and it's your fault you are being attacked.

That's not a path forward towards a better discussion forum.

As things stand currently, if you are willing to soak up the downvotes and you, yourself, follow the rules and are respectful, you can speak your mind and take a stand on unpopular positions, etc.

This is a forum that values rigorous scientific discussion. When social crap becomes more important than being able to state the truth as you understand it and have some hope of meaningful discussion, then HN is dead.

Hurt feelings about downvotes is social crap.

The culture supports the practice of corrective upvotes. That is sufficient to ameliorate most bad downvotes.

We don't need to actively encourage negative engagement, bullying and an attitude that you are required to get with the program and march to the same tune as everyone else lest a single downvotes lead to a pile on of ridiculous and pointless drama.

If it requires a comment to downvote, then it should be the same to upvote.

Maybe an optional pulldown to say: "Offtopic", "Unsubtantive", "Blasphemed the orthodoxy" etc.

I've been genuinely curious why some of my comments have been hammered, and an indicator would be helpful, but keeping the feedback loop simple is likely to increase the usage.

I like this idea. It gives the comment poster a statistical summary of peoples generalized opinion without being personal and potentially starting attack/counter-attack contrarian wars. Those could probably also be buttons to avoid having two actions, pull down + select.

Can you both comment and downvote? I have a vague recollection from back in the old days when you could see vote totals that if I downvoted someone and then replied to them that removed the downvote. I could be thinking of some other site, though.

Anyway, there are a couple of problems that come to mind with the proposal.

1. If someone says something that draws a lot of downvotes there is going to be a lot of redundancy in the required comments. Do we really need or want the worst comments to have dozens of replies all giving the same reason for downvoting?

2. It will attract trolls who enjoy posting downvote worthy things for the enjoyment of knowing that people have to waste time commenting in order to downvote them.

You could maybe fix these problems by having an option to instead of writing a new comment explaining your downvote cite an existing comment.

Perhaps something lighter than a comment could be considered. For example, tags. A downvoter could select one or many from a pre-selected list of reasons for disagreement or distaste. A few possible such options could be "erroneous", "discourteous", "irrelevant", "unsubstantiated", "insubstantial", "disorganized", etc.

Downvoting is too blunt a tool. You can downvote for many reasons "(I think) you are wrong", "your comment adds nothing to the discussion (simply repeating the original)", "I don't like you (lets be honest that is some peoples reason)"

Also the suggestion would balloon the number of comments and make the thread even harder to read

Here's a hot take: Once Digg/Reddit (and then later with the social apps such as FB) showed strong engagement numbers to VCs with a simple up/down community moderation system (or single button in FB's case), it sucked all the air out of the room for innovation in community-based moderation. Now all social websites just seek to grow in the same well-tread path.

I haven't seen anything really innovative since Slashdot. Has anyone? Is there any room for innovation in user-based moderation and curation for social websites?

Innovation would have to come from making it more expensive to downvote, if one assumes downvoting has inherent issues (it does). It's simply too easy to knee-jerk react by clicking the button. Same thing with upvoting, too. I think both directions of voting should require some "payment" (if you will) before they go through.

HN, Reddit, Kuro5hin, gaming, many places. What differentiates them isn't the tech, but the admins and moderators curation of social behaviours.

They're just internet points, they don't mean anything.

They determine how prominently a comment is displayed in the thread, so they do affect the user experience.

I don't even see a downvote button on desktop. Do y'all do it by altering the link behind the arrow to include "?how=down" ... ?

There’s a min karma threshold for it. I think it was 400 at one point. Not sure if inflation has adjusted that yet.

It's 501, and has not been inflation adjusted since the early days of HN IIRC.

I think your proposal would be really good for flagging an article - why did you flag it? The reason for the flagging can be made public, even if the flagger is kept private - though the HN mods should be able to see the flagger.

I can't understand how people are so insulted by a downvote. If people are so thin skinned no wonder they are in arms about "cancel culture".

When I was a kid people called me names, kicked me in the face, etc. Many of the most successful people in history (say Benjamin Disraeli) took the worst kind of crap from people and spun it into gold. Complaining about it is going to get you more downvotes at best.

Hi Paul. I must admit that I find it quite ironic that you seem insulted (or at least triggered?) by my question :)

I don't find it insulting, I never said that, all I'm saying is that if the goal of the downvote is not to give a virtual kick in the face (to use your example) but to change behavior, then I believe that this is better achieved attaching a comment to the downvote.

I don't think there is really a goal to votes/downvotes other than democratizing the content that people want to see (see: digg.com's genesis)

If people wanted to leave a comment then they would, but forcing one is going to incentivize drive-by quick "dunks," so that they can hit whatever minimum text limit that is set, and then move on.

If you say something factually wrong but honest (in terms of arguing in good faith), I've found that you usually get a lot of replies on popular topics with people correcting your mistake. If you get drive-by downvotes but minimal replies, it usually means you are not on the same page as the rest of the users you share the site with, or you've made a comment that is a hot mess (or very off topic).

>insulted (or at least triggered?) by my question :)

I don't read either of these in the parent's tone. Why did you feel the need to paint them this way before responding (and add a smiley face)?

Imagine you’re sitting in a circle of friends. Arguing about something. You propose an argument and the rest of your friends just shake their heads and indicate with thumbs down. No words are uttered, no response, it’s just silence.

It feels oppressive to be downvoted without explanation about reasonable, well articulated points. I’m not talking about rude, disrespectful comments. Just because you disagree, you shouldn’t just walk away with “Take that! Downvotes for you! I’m out”.

It’s rude. It’s disrespectful. It’s very un-HN.

There are many disadvantages and zero upsides to “Downvote as a disagreement”. It is a signal to others who are now primed with the gray text. It affects people’s thinking. It invalidates arguments before others have had a chance to think about it. It’s downright dangerous.

Downvotes are totally OK for rude comments.

Maybe it's just a signal for trying to come up with something interesting, or refrain from engaging in pointless comments? Voting is separate from comments, and entangling them makes for even less interesting discussions.

I can easily imagine something like this in IRL. You are sitting in a circle of friends and someone proposes well argued and supported point in support of something very horrible. You avert your eyes, attempt to pretend that you haven't really heard that. Then change the topic. If this happens frequently enough, maybe next time you won't invite this person.

Remember, "reasonable" is different for every person. And "well articulated" and "respectful" does not mean "reasonable".

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