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Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk their own downvotes.

I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked downvote I learn nothing.

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Something that I've learned: nobody owes you an explanation for why they disagree with you, nor are they bound to care whether you learn something.

Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

What makes you think no one owes you an explanation? If they're downvoting you and influencing how visible your comment(s) are I'd argue they do need to explain.

Likewise you seem to need to take your own advice to brainstorm to understand why it is likely to add value to someone else leaving a comment and not simply requiring you to brainstorm and make guesses, e.g. bias and blind spots a person may have; what other possibilities are there?

Edit to add: 2 upvotes then down to -1; it's hilarious how bad and poorly used downvotes are.

This is a perfect example of the point. I hold your view too, but your comment is being downvoted and I have no idea what the counterarguments are. It would be enlightening to know.

> What makes you think no one owes you an explanation?

What makes you think they do? You think you could use something, that doesn't mean a stranger owes it to you.

If you change seats to get away from someone on a bus, do you tell them why? If not, how would you feel if they followed you and said you embarassed them and you owe them an explanation?

I'm almost just on HN so I can't talk about other places. But the few times I get downvotes I would like to know why somebody voted me down.

In many communities (HN, Reddit, etc.) downvotes are ostensibly not to be used for disagreement. Forcing users to supply a reason could introduce enough friction to encourage more thoughtful usage of the downvote.

Please kindly enter a constructive reason for your downvote:

"ur dumb and wrong .stay mad!"

HN is not such a forum, downvotes to disagree are perfectly fine here.

"ostensibly" is an important qualifier.

>Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

It's easier to practice empathy when you're not blindly guessing at what bothered the downvoter.

Except, not? Empathy as a practice is the process of thinking about and correctly guessing the feelings or thoughts of another. If you are given the 'answer' then it does not require any further though. It is trying to cross that gap, 'why did no one like what I said', that I think you find empathy in.

It's not owed to you, but it is still best practice to do so.

Shouldn't they do the same if they agree with you? What if they are wrong, or agreeing with you for purely strategic reasons rather than because they sincerely thing you're right? Any argument about downvoting is equally applicable in the opposite direction.

Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and they are merely echoing that. Trolls exploit this because many of them derive amusement from stealing others' time and attention by deliberately posting drivel and then demanding it be taken seriously or that people educate the troll out their misconceptions (a wholly insincere request).

Nobody owes you agreement, and sometimes you will be rejected for unfair reasons. That's life. Expecting to only get positive reinforcement or always be fully supplied with context will only lead to disappointment.

The last paragraph really nails it. Especially in these online spaces, how you say something and tailor your voice to specific communities sometimes matters more than your content. No amount of downvoter commentary is going to capture that.

It seems like a lot of opposition to downvotes comes from people who take them personally. The internet is fickle and often dumb, don’t let fake points push your emotional state around. This is coming from someone who likes to share unpopular positions and, as a result, spends a lot of time thinking about fake points.

Well thanks. I too get upset sometimes when a comment I thought was good gets downvoted and I don't know why. Sometimes it's wrong and I only realize that later. Sometimes it's because I'm an asshole. Sometimes it's because other people are assholes. That accounts for (I guess) >90% of comments,a dn keeping an open mind on these possibilities means that I don't get downvoted too often, and that when it does happen I can keep the reasons in perspective and minimize disappointment and hurt feelings.

That's kind of how Slashdot used to work: you couldn't just up/down vote, you had to pick a reason why, from a list. "Insightful", "Funny", "Informative", etc. for upvotes, "Incorrect", "Trolling", "Off topic", etc. for downvotes. Of course, Slashdot also had meta moderation, where you could occasionally be given the job of up/downvoting other peoples' votes, which in turn influenced how often they would be allowed to vote in the future.

I think it was the best system. Importantly - not having the power to moderate all the time. You were given a certain amount of moderation points at random times so you felt like you had to use them wisely. This prevents a site from being consumed by the same active up/down voters which creates an echo chamber.

And yes, moderating the moderators was a decent idea too.

I'd also support a system of moderation where you don't get to necessarily moderate whichever comments you want but rather are given moderation points and maybe a few comments within a topic are sent your way and it's you moderate those. This would prevent users from deliberately seeking out other users or topics to +/-.

The top 10% of active users were actually prevented from getting moderation points at all, which helped prevent those users dominating the site. If you browsed /. a couple of times a week and read a few articles each time you'd likely get mod points each week, whereas I never once got them in a decade of reading the site because I was on there all the time.

This doesn't really work because every bad comment would have to generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations of its badness. It's also worth thinking about why this logic is so readily applied to downvotes but not upvotes. Presumably you learn nothing from a plain upvote so upvotes should come with a note as well, right?

> generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations

I just recently heard about a system where upvotes/downvotes themselves could be upvoted/downvoted. I could see a system like that to avoid the duplication, and if every original vote came with explanation, it would be nearly indistinguishable from regular conversation.

Plus, something getting downvoted would presumably get less traction over time since it’d get pushed down.

Reminds me of "was this review helpful" feature at many websites that sell things that can get reviewed. But "was this up/downvote helpful" instead? (I like the idea)

Such a system would mostly add ceremony, complexity and meta without obvious benefit to conversation interestingness. I think the other thing is a more fruitful line of inquiry - how come nobody wants notes on upvotes? The answer, I think, is getting downvoted feels bad and people naturally want more friction, 'accountability', etc when something makes them feel bad. However natural, though, this isn't a great way to design forum systems - it's more elabourate rationalization than design. The question of whether a particular forum's negative feedback system is too punishing, imbalanced, makes users feel too bad too easily or too soon is a perfectly sensible one and worth exploring, of course.

I've always thought an evolution on the threaded messageboard system where

1) Votes are tied to comments inherently

2) People can argue with those comments

3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to oblivion I guess)

4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd like to summarize the thread)

5) People can go on to argue with that stub

Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting experiment.

There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for example it would probably be necessary to group posts as "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving into two sides with horns intractably locked.

Have you ever thought about becoming a Wikipedia contributor?

Wikipedia is cool (so is stack overflow). However I prefer to engage in arguments that do actually terminate at some point.

Actually, though I think there's something to be gained by reading something that is explicitly phrased as a back and forth argument, rather than an explanation. Arguments between informed people usually bring up objections that I wouldn't have thought of, or that somebody writing an encyclopedia entry wouldn't want to deal with.

Sometimes people can dislike something but they are unable to articulate the reason. Yet the reason may be valid.

So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one point from the downvoted, let it cost the downvoter one point also.

This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express displeasure for free. Which helps keep the discourse civil.

Wow, I love both of these comments. I've been on the receiving end of downvotes after making helpful comments reflecting strongly-held opinions, that are the result of years of battle-testing them, and even building free software to put them into practice. Silent downvotes are maddening, and I often edit my comments to invite people to just disagree and give me their strongest arguments as to why they think my comment is bad / shouldn't have been posted / etc. I prefer they focus on substance, and I would welcome great counterpoints that I haven't thought of.

But it's worse than that. Every time I link to the actual solution that I spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building, rather than just talk about it, I get silent downvotes. Watch, I will do it here:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

It's pretty easy to farm karma here. Would double-edged downvotes incentivize more submission karma farming in order to spend it in downvotes?

Maybe building up and selling high carma accounts with lots of downvote ammo?

I would much rather see tags than an upvote/downvote.

Some people downvote all jokes, others downvote opinions they disagree with, others downvote misinformation. It's a very ambiguous signal with little value.

Slashdot had it right very early on with the various tags (insightful, funny, interesting) but also gets it wrong by allowing only a very small percentage of the user-base apply those tags. Tags like misinformation, and agree/disagree would allow more nuanced and better filtering options.

downvoting to disagree is totally acceptable on HN

I complained once and dang corrected me.

It's how I use it in reverse. I see my number tank and know people on HN don't agree.

What I would like is the ability to hide my score. If I notice the drop I may check a comment to see what the disagreement was, but I stopped after several times of seeing nothing just the downvotes.

Anyway, I don't need my number on every page I visit on HN, and would prefer the ability to hide it.

I'd also love the ability to mute users. Some people post on here way too often for my tastes and always with the same rhetoric. I'm sure others feel the same.

But, it is what it is. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the forced civility reminds me to be more civil IRL and I appreciate that. And it's probably good to see things I don't agree with, echo chambers are bad.

It can be somewhat arbitrary.

I remember posting a link to a BBC article which got downvoted and eventually flagged. Two weeks later I posted a link to the original research the article referred to and that time it was heavily upvoted.

I think unless your posts are getting repeatedly downvoted its not worth worrying about.

Downvoting to disagree is effectively a heckler's veto to make minority positions literally disappear. It rewards organized brigading from motivated parties you don't want to see particular criticisms be surfaced.

I don't understand why that type of discourse should be encouraged.

Although I agree that downvoting alone is not very constructive, if the comment is obviously spam/troll or especially when someone else already pointed out what is wrong with it, I don't see a problem.

Isn't that what flagging is for?

It can be useful to have a range of signals. Flagging is a rather hard-line "this is not appropriate" mark that many are unwilling to make on borderline things, e.g. when only somewhat misleading or partially incorrect.

Plus it requires clicking into the individual message, so you are required to see the contents twice, and can't do it quickly. That friction alone slows down using it on any softer or higher volume cases.

The reality of this of course would be a bunch of meta comments "." or "dumbass" or just general low-effort insults

> I have no problems with people disagreeing with me

Anonymous downvotes exist in the first place because this isn't a common character trait. If everyone was like that then we'd all be giving each other feedback

I totally agree. Twitter's ratio is probably the best upvote/downvote system. At best it results in providing context for the disagreement. At worst, if the person is a complete idiot then a constant stream of people dunking on them is more entertaining than a downvote.

That would be cool. In order for a downvote to be cast you have to reply

Arguing with people posting in bad faith or complete ignorance is a waste of my time.

You can come with a mountain of evidence and/or a well written edited thought out post and they'll just ignore it, post elsewhere with the same argument, or complain about inconsequential things. In my younger days I used to waste time arguing with racists, Nazis, etc but the argument comes from bad faith and they've already made their mind up. I just down vote or report them and move on.

They are specifically egregious but similar people are not owed my time and if it's an actual good faith argument they'll eventually learn to word their statements better.

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