I feel like downvote is a censure | Hacker News Reader

I feel like downvote is a censure

5 pointsgumbo9 comments

First of all sorry, for any potential grammatical error or error, i'm not so good in english.

We all hate being censored right, we fight censure whenever we see it because we think it is not right.

All is in the title, i know that down vote is there to discourage people for posting craps, etc... Down vote is a tool, and a good tool if used wisely.

But how many time have you been down voted because you were THINKING differently from the main stream? often people down vote you just because they don't like your arguments or because they disagree. When you are down voted because you expressed your thougths, this is censure, because the next time you'll think twice before posting anything, the next time you'll just refrain because you don't want to loose more karma.

I think that down vote should have a cost for the one that down vote.

For example, when you down vote someone you also loose karma somehow. or we could see how many time every one down voted. So we can see the haterz just by reading the thread.

What do you think about Down vote? do you feel the same about it?

The way I understand down voting, it is meant to help clean up the conversation by marginalizing useless posts. For the most part, it looks like it is used correctly for that purpose. However, I have noticed a few down voted posts that were expressing an on-topic point of view, in a civilized manner. And that does feel like mob-rule censorship.

The "seeing the haterz" proposal would only be introducing another form of censorship.

The "cost for down voting" idea, on the other hand, makes sense and has been proven. It does give some disproportionate power to users that have high karma (their perceived sacrifice cost of one point is lower), but I see that as a meritocracy (they should be the most valuable contributors to the community to earn all that karma).

While it's true that I have been down voted by people who disagree with my point of view, I think it would be very difficult to govern correctly.

The "make them lose a point" idea might work.

I think think it make sense. I will definitly downvote someone who publish craps even if i also loose a point when it make sense.

My statement stands.

I hate to use the site as an example because I feel the quality of it has been totally lost over the years, but Slashdots meta-moderation could be an effective idea but only for downvotes. As system where if enough meta moderators disagree with your downvoting enough times, your privilege is revoked, if it happens too many times your account get's a permanent down vote ban. As well maybe have a mechanisim where any user can flag a downvoted post for review as possible downvoting abuse to enter the meta-moderating system. It would have to be implemented correctly but if it did, it would put an end to the growing group think and dog piling that is seen when a site get's popular.

Is this in response to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564397 ?

Sure it is. It is not the first time i get downvote for just expressing my humble opinion.

By the way, i'm not here by any mean to count my karma. However it is frustracting to see people act this way.

I don't think down vote = don't like. It is not there so you can downvote whenever you don't like a statement.

Just my thoughts.

I had a very hard time parsing your comment to understand what it meant. Probably I'm not alone in that and probably a lot of the people that downvoted it thought it was incoherent.

Maybe you should take a bit more time if you're trying to say something complicated to make sure the point comes across.

Thank you for the advice. I'll do my best next time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com