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Comment by hhm | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree... I think it's better to have good content in the sites I visit, than to get less than a few seconds a day back for downmodding links. I prefer going to a good library, with many good chosen titles, than to a terrible library, where I have to do the full filtering myself, wasting more of my time by reading tons of useless book titles only to get one or two good ones.

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It's not obvious to me that if everyone has a downmod button the library will be better. Somebody is upmodding books you don't like. How do you know they aren't downmodding the books you like?

I suggest that if the library has a few titles you don't like, going without a downmod button is a good thing, just ignore them and move along.

But if the library is overrun with bad titles, giving everyone a downmod button won't solve the problem, because the problem is caused by the librarians.

Now, that's a good argument for not having a downmod button. But not having a downmod button for avoiding wasting the people energy? That's what I don't agree with.

Well, the two motivations are orthogonal and neither is really right or wrong. So I can appreciate your point of view.

My point of view is that I only care about the quality of articles on the front page. If a downmod button would increase it, I would agree with such proposal, but I'm not sure (as you said) that such would be the case, and anyway I think the flag button does already work in a way like a big down button.

What I do believe is that content can get better if people actively submit more articles (so spending a little more energy in the site), not only by voting the articles in the new queue.

Anyway I have the feeling that the quality of articles in the site isn't always getting worse... these days I'm quite happy about it.

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