Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thank you for quoting the comment more fully. I've seen it paraphrased too succinctly as "pg says downvotes can mean disagree."

Although pg hasn't implemented a change to this effect, I believe he would agree that -- "people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them down" -- implies a downvote should be more work than an upvote.

I think a downvote should require a response to the parent comment that:

1. contains at least 15 English words, excluding quoted phrases

2. quotes at least min(25% of entire comment, 5 consecutive words) of the parent comment

3. meets current downvote requirements (karma and downvote bombing protections spring to mind immediately)

For the sake of argument, such a "required downvote comment" could contribute almost nothing -- but it would still reduce downvotes. An example of a really bad downvote comment on this comment might be:

  > a change to this effect
  
  This is HN, not reddit. Um, did you read the article? I down voted you.

The 15 English word requirement sort of requires some sort of explanation. Does anyone think this would help?

I think this is an actively bad idea. If I had to reply to a comment, explaining why the comment is bad, then the most likely scenario is that the writer replies, arguing with me, and I reply, and now the thread is full of a bunch of bullshit that nobody wants to read. Multiply this by ten per post.

If the downvote reason was only visible to the writer, then I could go for that. But it's ridiculous to make a rule that drives people to have huge off-topic flamewars in the middle of a comments section.

Agreed, and good suggestion.

Make the downvote reason only visible to the writer, and do not allow the writer to reply to the downvote reason - the system already heavily favors upvotes over downvotes, so that writers can just shrug off the downvotes.

The main thrust of my suggestion is to make downvoting even harder.

Don't feed the trolls! If a comment is bad enough for me to want to downvote it I certainly don't want to engage the author in conversation. In fact, by downvoting I hope to push the comment further down so there to let the better comments float up and to make it less likely it will start a stupid pointless argument thread, replying would do the oposite usually.

Also, I think that, in general, quoting in comments tends to lead to lower quality comments. It's a lot easier to do a point by point nitpick than the write a proper response to the ideas contained in the parent post.

I think that's going in the right direction, but arbitrary rules on replies will always fail for some situation.

For instance if someone wrongly states "There are five lights." my reply would probably only contain the correction "There are FOUR lights!"; anything beyond that would be artificial inflation.

Quoting the parent article is a bad idea. It promotes arguing trivial points of the article ad infinitum. See USENET circa 1995 for a discussion style that should be avoided. (Now called "Fisking.")

You're conflating three separate concepts. There's nothing inherently wrong with quoting the part you're reacting to, and it can be done without resorting to flaming or Fisking.

You are correct, but requiring or encouraging quoting promotes arguing trivial points of the article. See USENET circa 1995.

> The 15 English word requirement sort of requires some sort of explanation. Does anyone think this would help?

I think it would result in lots of redundant comments. I down voted you.

This would work for disagreement downvotes, but it would be terrible for abusive/trollish/spam posts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com