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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see an experiment with no downvotes. For a long time HN was my only "talking with strangers on the internet" spot but in the last couple of years I've joined a few old school forums.

I found that no downvotes meant that people who disagreed ended up talking to each other the most (since you can't downvote, if you disagree you need to argue), leading them to become rivals and then friends. Actual synthesis of viewpoints happened.

Perhaps HN is too big for that effect and it would turn into chaos, but I'd be curious to see it tried.

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HN bars downvotes until you hit 501 karma, but maybe the limit needs to be increased. I’ve often had people downvote my posts without explaining why they disagreed with it, which stifles opportunities to broaden my mind to other perspectives that other people have.

Something like Lesswrong’s dual voting system of up/downvotes + agree/disagree may also help, but I’ve never engaged with discussions on Lesswrong to tell if this works on larger communities such as this one.

HN does have flags but I have no idea what they do besides attract all my accidental clicks while I scroll.

Moderators do take action based on flags, when the occasional trashy comment or article gets through.

Welp, HN has nerdsniped me again: After some unpaid pondering, here's my suggestion for a middle ground on downvoting:

1) Reduce issue-related downvoting by only allowing some random subset of the current active users to downvote, a different set per post. Don't let the user know their vote won't work in advance, but tell them after.

2) Reduce vote sockpuppeting by recording which pairs of voters downvoted a post, then disallow that pair from downvoting a post again. This includes votes that failed due to 1).

This is how it is on some Slack and Discord groups I've joined. I used to disagree with people who I'm not friendly with.

There was a bot on FB that posted random submissions from Hacker News. I think that was a good study of no downvotes.

Comments get loaded with unpopular opinions, which is often things like the ineffectiveness of masks in stopping pandemics, or people who post evidence on how dangerous vaccines are. When someone dies, someone will post all kinds of slander about them. Because there are only upvotes and no downvotes, these float to the top, and the comments are usually counted as engagement, further boosting the comment.

A lot of the most commented on submissions were actually flagged/killed on HN.

There would still be the flag mechanism, the same community, and the same rules would apply, so I'm not sure if I would draw any particular conclusion from that natural experiment.

It's certainly possible it would turn out the same way though.

Communities are self-selective too. I moved far away from the HN Facebook, haha. dang also described downvotes as white blood cells - they can backfire, but are powerful and necessary ways for the community to moderate itself.

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