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> Downvoting is not a sign that a comment is poor quality, but a sign of simple disagreement even if the person downvoting can't formulate (or does not bother to formulate) a response indicating why.

You can lose karma if you reply. You can't lose karma if you downvote.

I never understood this line. It seems antithetical to everything the site wants to be/claims to be/is .

Votes allow people to express agreement/disagreement without cluttering the discussion. In old-style forums without votes the same sort of basic agree/disagree dynamic actually took up screen space. You'd have people writing "+1," "me too", "so true" (or "I don't think so", "educate yourself", "yeah right"...) as separate comments, each of which you'd have to skim past before finding the next bit of real conversation. You can't eliminate the human impulse to express disagreement, but you can try to channel it out of the way so that comments are longer and more substantive.

I've used newsgroups, mailing lists, forums for 30 years. This has never been a problem on any of them.

Perhaps the venues you used had stronger norms than those I used. To check my memory I just downloaded a collection of posts from rec.arts.sf.written (one of the newsgroups I used to use) from the Internet Archive. Matching my recollection, I see nested replies that are short and express attitude without substantially advancing discussion. e.g.

  >>>> DeLaney didn't say it could have happened, merely that he
  >>>> would have been happy if it did.
  >>
  >>> A distinction without meaning or merit.
  >>
  >>Wrong twice.
  > 
  > On the contrary.  It's dead spot on, in fact.
  
  You really are a retard, aren't you?

I consider it better for participants to vote down this sort of noise rather than add to the chain of "nuh-uh" responses.

Oh, there were flame wars. I don't remember any with individual responses this brief though! I don't remember brevity of any kind being an issue.

Flame wars sucked, but I'm beginning to think it's a case of 'cutting off tails on one side kills them on the other'.

HN in particular has always given me vibes of: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734580/

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I think the tricky thing in evaluating comment voting is this: It's easy to look at a thread and see that junk comments were downvoted, and conclude it's working. It's harder to know which comments were never posted at all.

I'd love to see a system where where you could inject nuance into upvotes or downvotes. Say, one set of arrows for agree or disagree with the conclusions, and a separate set of arrows for whether the comment was respectfully or rudely written, and maybe even another set arrows for arguments that are cogent versus poorly thought out.

I usually make an effort to upvote comments that I thought were particularly well written even if I disagree with them. But we all have our biases, and I recognize that, as with most people, I'm likelier to upvote a comment that I agree with even if it was poorly reasoned. It would be great to be able to rate comments "+1 informative, but -1 author is being a jerk". Or "-1 I disagree, but +1 polite and respectful".

I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. Getting the UI right could be a challenge. Netflix used to let you rate content from 1-5 stars, but they later changed it to just thumbs up/thumbs down. The same pressure that led Netflix do dumb down their system might apply here.

Agreed! I think this is the idea behind Facebook's emoji responses.

While not exactly the same that reminds me of metamoderation at Slashdot. Admittedly that was a pretty geeky audience, but the trolling and griefing load there was huge.

I guess very much YMMV.

My experience here has been the opposite. I try not to be aggressive or antagonizing here, hard as it is via text, but at times have written things that came across as rude and things that were not popular opinions.

Most of the time one or more people would take the time to respond explaining why they feel I'm incorrect, or telling me I'm being harsh. And my upvotes usually just sit at 1, despite perhaps having 5 or more disagreement comments.

Compare that to Reddit, where even mentioning anything against the hivemind, such as disagreeing with a liberal cause, will get you downvoted to oblivion, sometimes even banned.

I think it'd be nice to have emoji on here, even if it'd break the aesthetic a bit. They add just enough extra nuance and color that it can diffuse matter-of-fact statements and completely change an interaction.

Honestly if I didn't have emojis in Slack I'd have a much worse relationship with coworkers

I find myself using the old text emojis or whatever they are called here :). Kinda a blast from the past, since every other platform insists on inserting some object. Part of me wonders how long until kids have no idea what those ascii symbols mean.

Given this is actually relevant to the article and not meta, we can actually talk about the "turning into slashdot" meme without it being off-topic. It of course is impossible to really quantify how much HN is like reddit or slashdot (or what remains of it), but on relative terms, it's still easy for me to see the difference. You still have much fewer "meme posts" and worse meme threads. I admit this is real nerdiness here, but I favorited this thread years ago, preserved in amber, for you to see[0]. You can still tell it was heavily downvoted. Anyhow, even still, these kind of "meme threads" which pervade reddit just aren't that common here at all even today, usually being snuffed out before they're even started. So, even now, certain ticks that are common across the internet are still discouraged here.

I think one thing that has changed over the years is more acceptance of one sentence replies as long as they uphold the median political perspective. Things like, "this is terrible, how can this be permitted" used to get downvoted more (a lot, in fact), while I see some make it through the cracks lately, as long as they somewhat express a thought. Other than that, not much has changed. I can only say that being on HN so long makes you realize that there are memes and political groupthink here too, it just takes different forms or can be obscured somewhat by the longer more written out comments.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141357

> Things like, "this is terrible, how can this be permitted" used to get downvoted more (a lot, in fact), while I see some make it through the cracks lately, as long as they somewhat express a thought.

This sort of comment is the hot grits and petrified natalie portman of HN. Probably not good enough to consistently rise to the top, but popular enough to farm karma.

The problem, I think, is that HN is attracting the late-stage users, who see up/down as agree/disagree and not contributing/obstructing.

Eventually, after sufficient pain, it will become like the homepage of LinkedIn.

> Downvoting is not a sign that a comment is poor quality, but a sign of simple disagreement even if the person downvoting can't formulate (or does not bother to formulate) a response indicating why.

Because it requires no effort. But if downvoting required at least 140^W280 char comment describing the reason... or a micro-payment...

But jokes aside this is an unsolvable problem. Though I liked /. comment marking system, but it's not that better too.

The other side of the coin is that Karma is all fake internet points and HN's system makes it pretty easy to farm enough Karma that you don't have to care what other people think for a very long time if you so choose. The cap on downvotes means that while it is possible to have a single post that generates hundreds of Karma, the most you can ever be downvoted is 4. It's almost impossible to lose significant Karma without continual trolling that would probably get you shadowbanned anyway.

Reddit encourages in-group domination, by way of ignoring policy-violating cross-subreddit moderation and banning; Twitter, by design, encourages user retention through passionate engagement with other users, and most often that passion is hatred.

HN doesn't have a corollary for sub-reddits, or a personal feed, or similar. Its singular subject focus is its virtue; but, as you claim, it will fall. All things will, and the problem with HN is that there is _too much money to be made_ by swaying opinion on this forum.

There is definitely groupthink here too, albeit in certain threads and certain types of articles. It isn't as much of a club like a subreddit is but it definitely exists.

Oh for certain; allowing group-moderation by way of up/down voting will _necessarily_ encourage groupthink.

Any slightly political thread on hackernews is a cesspool on reddit or twitter level. Topics about january 6, the abortion ban, anything adjacent to the "cultur war"...

I suspect the only difference is that technical topics like shiny-rust-program or webframework3000 are less controversial

Don't lump HN in with Reddit. Reddit has a single opinion on the majority of political topics and by the time I arrive at them it's just people arguing that view (often with ad hominem attacks) vs a bunch of deleted comments.

Twitter is much less heavy handed with the deletion of comments but if you read the replies they are often the same ad hominem stuff you'll find on Reddit if you dare stray away from the majority opinion.

I don't consider a place that allows views different than mine to be a cesspool, or people that have different views to be defective. A cesspool to me is when someone makes a reasonable point about a subject like economics and the replies are all about his penis size, that's how Reddit and Twitter operate, not here.

I do like that you cannot downvote people replying to your own comment

I think there's a tipping point to social sites. There's a point where they become too big to moderate.

Maybe make downvotes have a mandatory "and this is why" comment field that forces the downvoter to formulate grievance... Then you can show what kind of downvoter someone is. Even maybe have rationality check on these downvotes rationales?