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Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Well, it shows the incentive to run a product company. Even with a monopoly on consulting you're not going to have great profit margins.

That said, it really pisses me off that you were down voted like you were. There seems to be a rash of that on HN now. You were contributing to the conversation and backing up your argument with numbers. Right or wrong, that doesn't deserve a drive by dismissal.

The voting buttons mean "More or less of this content on HN", not "I agree or disagree". If you disagree, post a reply. You might teach the OP something, or might even learn that you're wrong, as I have plenty of times on HN.

Edit: I've turned this into an Ask HN thread here, since I think it would be helpful to have a discussion about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275

View on HN

Actually, pg has stated that the downvote arrows mean the latter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Paul is wrong on this, though. We as the community should override that.

I downvoted you because I don't agree with you.

Let's be fair, people up-vote the stuff they like/agree with whether it contributes a lot or little. Symmetrical actions in UI should do symmetrical things, how hard is to grasp it? Something I like/agree—up-vote. Something I disagree—down-vote. If you want different behavior then remove down-vote button. There is "flag" if one thinks comment is inappropriate.

Flagging a comment can get the entire account banned, so use that option with care.

Also, there are more important things to consider than an OCD-fueled (yes, this affects me, too) obsession with UI symmetry, like overall discussion quality.

Slashdot got this (nearly) right. You select from a list of moderation options like "Interesting", "Informative", "Funny", "Off Topic" etc.

Insightful - I agree, completely

Informative - I agree, but you may be full of shit

Interesting - I agree, stick it to those other guys

Funny - I agree, either schadenfreude or grits

Idealistically, humans would only vote based on content quality and not their personal opinions. But Slashdot is certainly the counter example on why this doesn't actually work

I guess the rationale for slashdot's voting "values" is that they are also moderated.

So "Insightful" as an "I agree, completely" on something that is not insightful may be metamoderated out.

It's basically impossible to do that if the value is only "+1".

But downvoting has materially different results (disappearing text, banning). I downvoted you not because I disagree with you but because you matter-of-factly made obviously false comments.

> Let's be fair, people up-vote the stuff they like/agree with whether it contributes a lot or little.

But they shouldn't do this either. Personally, I try to downvote--or at least not upvote--comments which I agree with but which add nothing to the discussion. (I'm sure I'm far from consistent, of course.)

I mean, the functional use of votes is to organize the comments page. It just makes zero sense to organize the page based on the average opinion of the community rather than constructiveness/usefulness of the comments.

PG is wrong here.

I'm totally with you on this.

At the very least, if someone down-votes they should reply as to why they disagree. There a great sense of loss when you say something factual and relevant and get down-voted without explanation.

When I've brought these issues up in the past, the conversation usually resolves with "don't worry about karma." And, I don't, but it does change the community, and about that I worry.

Basically, the community will turn into whatever is rewarded. If you reward hive-mindedness, that's what you'll get. If you reward interesting discourse, that's what you'll get.

I'd like to see anonymous upvotes, but when you downvote you have to leave a comment or it says 'downvoted by UserName' (maybe only for negative-karma comments).

It turns a downvote from 'I disagree' to 'I disagree and everybody else you should too'. You have to be willing to risk your own karma to take away somebody else's.

For instance the way HN works now afaik, somebody could post 'me too' comments to get enough karma to downvote, then turn around, downvote all posts supporting some idea they dislike, and there would be no way for other posters to correct this or know it was happening.

> For instance the way HN works now afaik, somebody could post 'me too' comments to get enough karma to downvote, then turn around, downvote all posts supporting some idea they dislike, and there would be no way for other posters to correct this or know it was happening.

FYI, I think that this is supposed to be automatically detected and nullified by the website software, although I can't speak to the details.

So you have a group of trolls that all upvote each other's comments. Unless the system also penalizes upvotes then they get disproportionally too much karma. And if the system does penalize upvotes then somebody that always posts really great posts gets too little visibility because his upvotes look trollish (ie maybe they come from the few people that really recognize an expert in a small domain). It seems that an automated system is always going to promote mediocrity.

Well, thanks for not just downvoting me :)

PG posted that comment five years ago; reflexive downvoting just wasn't a problem then like it is now[1], so I'd be interested in hearing if he's still got the same opinion - it wouldn't change mine, though.

[1] It's easy to look at the past through rose colored glasses, but that's not what I'm doing in this case. I actually think most of HN has improved with its new size. Niche areas are more likely to have discussions between experts, there are more people like Grellas who write lengthy and insightful commentary, a significant number of startups get successfully launched on HN, and we still managed to do all that without making too many of the original core users leave. That said, get off my lawn.

Edit: Now you're being downvoted. This is ridiculous.

This tangent is close to my heart - what we need is a filter bubble! http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

Silent disagreement should not stop someone from being heard.

Maintaining a civil discussion is one thing. Literally silencing and erasing opinions we do not agree with is completely different.

Does anyone actually believes this is the approach we should be taking?

I tend to agree that using a down vote to express disagreement eventually isn't constructive. I've seen a number of posts that didn't say anything objectionable or controversial, nor were meaningless in the context of the discussion, and yet were down modded.

My theory is that while the risk of being down modded on HN is a helpful factor in keeping discussions more courteous than on an out-and-out anonymous forum, the same cannot be said of down votes, which are in fact anonymous. As a result, users tend to be more careless or perhaps even callous in the use of down votes. I'm not sure what the solution is though: making down votes transparent might help in creating a bit more discreetness in their use, but might spill things over into flame wars into the comments themselves when exercised. Still, I think it's the total anonymity that causes its over use.

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