Suggest HN: Downvote button should prompt for a comment
I have a few reasons why I think this would be a good idea:
A) Downvoting someone without a comment doesn't give the user context for /why/ it was downvoted, leaving them in a confused state. Did someone merely disagree, or did the comment violate an unspoken community rule?
In essence, a teaching moment is lost. A downvote with a comment lets people know what the community expects, which helps us to maintain what hacker news is about. When new users see a marginalized comment, they'll know why that happened.
B) It's well known in psychology that people tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. A score of -4 is a lot worse feeling than a score of +4 is positive feeling. This has a subtle effect on user incentives.
In the current system, I think it incentivizes people to post something that they know will be popular but that doesn't add much to the discussion, rather than something interesting but perhaps more nuanced and easily misunderstood. By adding slightly more friction to the down voting process, I think it will make people more thoughtful as to why they're doing it. I think this will also add more civility to the discussions.