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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Comment down/up votes have to go. People should be adult enough to be able read a post without someone telling them what's readworthy or not. Life is not a popularity contest where you tally how many points you've gotten for playing the game well.

Members should, however, be able to flag comments that violate the guidelines so that the mods can deal with spam and other transgressions.

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I disagree, but am upvoting you anyway because you were in negative territory. Comment scores are necessary because:

a) Not everybody has time to read every comment on every thread, and

b) The scores provide a slight psychological reward for writing good comments, thus encouraging that sort of behaviour.

Forums without comment scores usually wind up looking like a complete mess.

Not everyone looks at it as a popularity contest though. A lot of people look at it as "holy shit, there are a hundred comments in this thread, I don't have time to read them all, and I'm glad I can see what the collective opinion is about which ones are worth reading first". The "popularity contest" aspect of it is a problem, but the "popularity" aspect of it isn't.

Yes, either scores or scrap voting. I don't think this middle way works at all.

Just to prove my point, I'm getting downvoted for the comment above :) Some people simply cannot handle the downvote.

What the downvotes probably indicate is that your argument is not well supported with detailed rationales and relevant examples. In other words, downvotes are a sign that your post could benefit from additional editing in the near term.

Taking downvotes as either a failure to communicate your ideas, or as the price for saying what you feel you must is the healthiest approach.

BTW, I didn't vote on it.

This isn't really the sort of thing that can be supported with relevant examples. It's just an idea. And I think it's an idea worth discussing -- what might happen to the discussion if moderation were removed completely?

But I happen to disagree (for reasons stated elsewhere) and suspect that the folks who did downvote this also disagreed. And that's the other problem with invisible comment scores -- I think it's legit to downvote something merely for disagreeing if it has +30 karma, but not if it has just +1. But you can never tell.

If it can't be supported with relevant examples or detailed rationales, then what is it contributing? And if it is not contributing, then isn't downvoting appropriate?

And a comment score debate is pulsu equus mortuus.

Yes. Even if I partly disagree with you, I upvoted you. Actually, I find myself upvoting comments that are in a negative territory and that present a valid point more often than good comments that are in a positive territory!

I believe we need upvotes for the reasons hugh3 mentioned. Regarding downvotes, there should be a cost, like with StackOverflow where each downvote costs you one reputation point.

Another orthogonal dimension to voting could be agree/disagree. I saw this on a national news forum and it's quite useful (e.g., 5 people agreed, 100 people disagreed).

I like this idea. Four buttons: "good comment", "bad comment", "I agree" and "I disagree".

Agreement vs disagreement would be displayed but would not determine comment position or commenter karma. Comment quality would determine comment position and give the commenter karma, but it would not be displayed.

I don't know if it's right for HN, but I'd like to see a site which did implement this kind of two-dimensional voting.

PS. Good comment, I agree!

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