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Comment by nsns | Hacker News Reader

And please make the up-vote button larger than the down-vote one. (They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

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A lot of the comments below engage in back-and-forth (up-and-down?) about whether or not it is permitted to use downvotes to indicate disagreement. Pretty much every time long-time users of Hacker News participate in a discussion on this issue, someone remembers to bring up pg's comment in an early thread from 1608 days ago.

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

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If you check the currently posted site guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the only guidelines you see about downvoting occur right at the end:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

A thread opened by pg 466 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

asked, "How to stave off decline of HN?" He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

So at that time, he thought that a significant subset of comments was getting too many upvotes (and, by implication, too few downvotes). That led to a software change such that users can no longer see the net comment karma totals of other user's comments. (You and I can still see the individual net karma totals for each of our own comments.)

To sum up, what I really like to do is upvote good comments. But there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is mean (definitely not), nor is there a rule against downvoting a comment if it is dumb (the trick is perceiving whether or not a comment is dumb), and especially there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is both mean and dumb. And if a comment is just a snarky remark that doesn't advance the discussion, or a lame attempt at a one-liner joke, or otherwise doesn't add value to the discussion, it doesn't harm the community to downvote such a comment without further reply.

(They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

I'm happy to upvote more than downvote. I get the sense that some of the best stuff here on Hacker News still isn't upvoted enough.

How are they not logical opposites? Isn't an upvote exactly the opposite of a downvote?

Upvote = I like this. Downvote = This is noise/off-topic/abusive.

Thats the way it should work, and is part of what makes HN different to say Reddit. In reality, its becoming increasingly common for people to downvote something simply because they disagree with it.

Then upvote/downvote are the wrong semantics for what you are proposing. Change them to "like" and "spam". For a multi-lingual audience, that is easier to grok than to hash the up/down arrows.

I'm not proposing anything. "Upvote" and "downvote" are the names given to functions of the HN site. My descriptions of those words are my understanding of the consensus among HN users on what they mean and how they should be used. If my understanding of that consensus is wrong then I hope that others users will put me right.

Edit: Would whoever downvoted this care to explain why? I'm genuinely interested.

Ignore the downvotes. Unless you get more than one.

It would be nice if Upvote meant "This is good quality (whether I agree with it or not" and downvote meant "this is low quality, and should not be here, but is not spam, nor flagable". But since PG has said (something like) downvote can be simple disagreement you're going to meet people who use it for exactly that.

Also, reddit is trying to move away from "downvote to disagree" - they have a lot of hover text saying this.

I agree, but I also believe a little ambiguity and heterogeneous modes of use are actually beneficial, make the place alive. I tend to up-vote people who make efforts and contribute important information or opinions, not necessarily those I agree with. (Will only down-vote trolls.)

By downvoting you in order to show disagreement, it looks like the consensus is quite eloquently explaining why it thinks you are wrong.

It's also a reddit rule, though hard to enforce.

That is how it works, especially since downvoted comments are literally harder to read.

One could argue that an upvote is more often about agreement than a downvote is about disagreement.

People do it that way, but it's incorrect. You are not supposed to use downvotes to disagree. (Initially it was like that, but not anymore because it stifled the conversation and caused groupthink since people were too scared to post anything controversial.)

It is correct. What is incorrect is to thing that symmetrical interface elements can have asymmetrical actions. How would you like if turning steering wheel to the left would give left turn, but turning it to the right would stop the car? If you want asymmetrical meaning, please, use different elements.

By the time someone aquires 500 points, they will likely have spent enough time on the site to learn the distinction between the two. While using text labels would be fine, I do not think that would be better than using the symbols.

The reasons for clicking may not be symmetrical, but the actions when clicking are symmetrical. The points go down with the down arrow and the points go up with the up arrow. This is symmetry even if the reason (agree, disagree, quality, spam, etc.) for the increase and decline of the points is asymmetrical.

When the site was initially made that was what the meaning was: Agree/Disagree.

However that norm changed when people realized that was a bad idea.

The UI didn't change with the norm change.

At one point the norm was you could downvote to disagree if the comment had a score greater than 1. But now that comment scores are no longer displayed, that norm changed too.

Now the downarrow basically means spam/stupid/useless, etc. Actually for spam you also need to click on flag.

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