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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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