Ask HN: Should you downvote based on disagreement alone?

No. I really dislike that downvoting is used merely for disagreement. I think it hurts the discussion by discouraging or even silencing unpopular views, the worst thing that can happen to intelligent discussion. There's probably some sort of solve by reserving downvoting privileges for thjose with karma or some other proxy on "understands what makes for quality discussion".

With comment scores visible we used to have a system where people voted in the direction of the score they felt a comment should get. So a well placed but highly dislike comment wouldn't be [very] negative but it wouldn't get a high score either. A well liked opinion put poorly similarly wouldn't get a high score as people would vote it down if it was getting too much credit, etc..

There's barely any comment that I find disagreeable enough or so poorly presented that I think it deserves to be greyed out (censoring dissent) and so whilst I barely ever vote now on comments I find mostly I vote up comments that I disagree with but are well put or highlight a worthy antithesis or what-have-you but have gone grey. Also I'm finding that I need to highlight things to read them; further worsening the usability of the site.

Personally I think my ideal would have a Slashdot-style differentiation of agreement, quality, humour, and what have you.

I've actually tried moving back to Slashdot but it seems the community there isn't what it was.

I favor cogent and on topic comments over agreement with my views or formatting to site convention. Even if I think you are wrong, I will upvote what you say if you lay out your thoughts clearly. And I hope when I'm wrong or ignorant but cogent, people will do the same.

I completely agree. I just saw a C++ thread where someone has posted decent enough code and its greyed out without a response.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757762

How code can be greyed out on "Hacker" News while opinion gets high ratings is beyond me.

That is particularly egregious. From the author's perspective the conversation is basically this:

"I'm with you alex, I tend to only use classes when I've got to maintain state, I just use a function otherwise. Here's how I'd likely code this ... <long code example>"

"You're not welcome here."

It takes seconds to say he should have used pastebin, or to point out mistakes or bad practices, or whatever (I'm not sure why he was downvoted, exactly). Way less time than it took the guy to write the post in the first place.

I would have downvoted it. He posted a big honking main function and other irrelevant parts of code.

But how much effort is it to reply and say "Please use pastebin for large code segments"? Isn't that a much nicer and more effective way to make sure he doesn't do it again?

I completely agree. There is far much downvoting purely based on 'i disagree' even if the post brings up some interesting and valid points.

It makes you think twice before providing constructive criticism.

Why not just remove the down vote altogether? Have a 'flag as unconstructive' or something.

I'm not even so sure the upvote should only be for things you agree with. If someone makes a good point, even if you disagree with their conclusions, I think that is worthy also.

A simple solution is just to revert to showing vote numbers, but not affecting the comment whether the vote is positive or negative. Then have a separate system for flagging comments (like articles are), and comments that are flagged get the grey treatment. It separates the 'I disagrees' from the 'this is bad content'.

Flagging should still have some minor hurdle - like a click through page or similar - otherwise it'll still be too trivial to silence folks with dissimilar views, something that a site catering to self-appointed mavericks should be concerned about.

As it stands, a single dissenter can discredit you with no accountability whatsoever, and this causes much frustration.

I wish people would save down-votes for "comments which should not appear on HN".

I wish people would leave some kind of comment about down-votes.

Downvote based on disagreement causes unpleasant environment.

Perhaps a different mechanism for "agree", "disagree", "doesn't belong here" and "obvious spam" could be found? Because at the moment there is confusion over "disagree".

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.

@DanBC: I think your suggestion for agree, disagree, etc. provides better granularity to the process. Strong up vote for you.

Agreed. I think we could do without "disagree" and merge "doesn't belong here" and "obvious spam".

While it's pretty clear when you are upvoted on agreement, you could at least leave a short comment or reason why you down voted someone. Feed-back, positive or negative, alsways helps a discussion and is, at least as far as I am concerned a question of politeness.

The downvote button should be replaced with a "flag" link (the two arrows are too close anyway)

A flag link becomes available while you are writing a reply post.

Isn't the whole point of reading comments to get more views on the matter?

If all (upvoted) comments say the same thing, I wouldn't bother to read them.

Eh, are you saying that's why it's important not to downvote comments just for disagreement? So they don't get grey (and eventually dead)?

Yes. At least for me, the value proposition of reading comments is that I get further (and propably different) insights from reading the comments on the topic.

If there is just one opinion in the comments (because everything else is greyed out) why would one bother to read them at all?

I think that this could have been a poll. It seems that some people either don't have the time, or don't take the time to write a comment. That's why the arrows are so tempting. We should remember though that you don't get access to the down vote until your karma is at a certain level. I don't know what that is since I haven't hit it yet.

I don't downvote anyone, but I occasionally upvote the occasional useless comment everyone else downvotes.. just for kicks.

Disagreement is a key component of an interesting discussion (well sometimes). Down-voting as a short cut to contributing to the discussion is pretty childish - if people do not care enough to make their point in words then they should totally refrain for participating.

I trust HNrs will reserve down-votes for off-topic, rude or spam comments.

You trust? Unfortunately, unless something is put in place that makes it clear this is intended (in the site guidelines, or by changing the down arrow to something else), this won't change.

What saddens me is not that these discussions happen with alarming frequency, it's that people always come up with relatively good solutions to the problems discussed...which pg never implements.

Conversely, pg posts relatively frequent "ho hum the quality of HN is declining" posts, but I never see him address how he'd like to fix the site.

So after being a long time lurker on HN, wrote my first comment and got downvoted, but don't know why I was downvoted, there were no comments. I prefer replying during disagreement and downvoting when a comment/post doesn't make sense or gets stretched in a different direction.