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Comment by mihaitodor | Hacker News Reader

Is it really such a useful feature, though? I have mixed feelings about the way this is used on StackOverflow, for example. I post there extremely rarely and it always bugs me to get a quick downvote without any explanation or anything. I'd very much rather see my post get no or very few upvotes and maybe some constructive comments on how to improve it than to have people use the lazy one-click solution to downvote it into oblivion.

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With no down-voting, you'll inevitably end up with a different metric: engagement/popularity, where controversial opinions are featured as prominently as agreeable ones.

>where controversial opinions are featured as prominently as agreeable ones.

This is a feature if meaningful discussion is your goal.

I've felt for a long time voting of any sort is poison to quality discussion, and downvoting is downright deadly for it.

I'm not sure that having the ability to downvote prevents this issue. Do you have any explanation on how it works in practice? I'd be curious to see some study with real data.

I'd love to see a study with real data on this topic too, but at the the most basic level, with up/down voting you can figure out several metrics:

- quality (or rather, agreeableness): up - down;

- engagement: up + down;

- controversy: min(up, down).

First one is the most common (HN, reddit, ...). Second famously is (was?) one of the core metrics for youtube recommendation algorithm, and also something pretty close to the only metric upvote-only forums end up with (twitter); same goes for forums where "reactions" are intentionally orthogonal/ambivalent/confusing (facebook). Third feels a bit dangerous for direct use, but might be a good signal to flag for a human moderator to review.

Interesting, thanks for that! I'd guess the one which Facebook added is quite skewed, because the default action is thumbs up and the rest are hidden, especially on mobile, where you can't just hover to see them and people are lazy.

Downvoting this! Just kidding. Seriously, while I don't think downvoting is intrinsically bad -- I think it can be a good signal -- I definitely get the impression it's occasionally used less as a signal of quality (e.g., this comment is off-topic, incoherent, or just trolling) than as a signal of identity (e.g., this comment seems to align with ideologies I oppose). The latter tends to happen more on political topics, of course, but not exclusively so.

And, "controversial vs. agreeable" is kind of at the heart of that, right? I'm pretty sure there are a small handful of people who just aggressively downvote anything that sounds too [ socialist | capitalist | libertarian | communist | ... ] because they don't find it "agreeable."

Personally I would say that the downvote features is extremely useful and valuable. Especially on Hackernews, as it helps to protect the community standards which are quite different from for instance reddit or other tech discussion sites. You very rarely see anything like blatant flamebate, trolling or flamewars, because they quickly get downvoted and grayed out, and are generally ignored instead of going to the top of a thread because "controversy increases engagement".

It's driven by the top x% of the users, though, who I'd guess are not that many (maybe 1%?). This makes me think that HN managed to select a healthy moderator community, but I doubt that the downvote feature was the main driver for that.

I'm not really a StackOverflow user, but it sounds like some other communities I know. Basically, upvotes equals visibility, so other posters will downvote your post so theirs becomes more visible. For some reason I didn't think HN users were that shallow, or that HN would fall into that trap.

StackOverflow is basically different communities segregated by language or tag

The Javascript one is pretty toxic, where instead of something constructive you get a bunch of leetcode studiers racing each other for karma, and can get a totally different experience by using another tag/language

The C++ one felt similar, TBH. It put me off after using it extensively for a while.

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