Ask HN: What does motivate you to down-vote a comment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does motivate you to down-vote a comment?

7 pointsthepanister18 comments

Well, I am very interested to know: What does motivate you to down-vote a specific comment?

What is your judgement criteria on a specific comment to say: Oh, this comment should be down-voted!

I down-vote boring comments, pointless comments, comments by people I don't like, false comments, comments I disagree with, comments that are already down-voted, meta comments about what constitutes proper voting behavior, and accidentally hitting the down-vote arrow instead of the up-vote arrow.

I think I'm in the minority, but my position is that the arrows should be used liberally and for whatever reason a person sees fit.

I like things like voting and scores because I have a kooky personal theory that reading too much stuff online scrambles my thought processes and sometimes even makes me feel physically kind of sick. I'd rather simply ignore down-voted comments than read a well-intentioned but vacuous back-and-forth discussion about why people disagree.

There's another common notion that high scores on funny quips are a bad thing. I also disagree with this. Reading genuinely funny stuff makes me laugh and boosts my serotonin levels, which is actually good for you. The issue with this phenomena on Reddit was that funny quips that weren't actually funny started getting high votes.

Next to YouTube style comments, the worst stuff you can read online is the sort of middle range discussion between two people who sort of know what they are talking about but not really. It's like listening to two dentists on vacation talking about time-share apartments and tee times. It turns your brain into mush.

I've been here since the beginning and have not noticed any significant abuse of the voting system[1]. Most buried comments seem to deserve their scores. I wonder why this topic keeps coming up. The stark reality is if your comments consistently get down-voted, you're probably making stupid posts.

[1] aside from long ago when you could nuke someone's karma into oblivion by repeatedly downvoting everything they had ever posted.

Things that are false, mean, or devoid of content (things like: "thanks!", "I agree", or "haha"). Only exception is things already at -1 or below.

If a comment is none of those things and below one, I'll mod it up because I don't believe in burying someone you disagree with.

As for things that are blatantly trollish (linkspam, racist, stream of curse words, etc), I'll gladly pile on until they are too faint to read... and usually flag them as well.

I think meanness in service to a larger cause, ie a site's quality, as opposed to just an arguing tactic, is a good thing. I used to hang out at K5 (when it had traffic) where one finds that meanness to dummies is quite effective at shutting them up. Shutting up dummies is the #1 thing to preserve a site's quality. High quality comments is a fragile thing, imo too rare to ruin with squeamishness about people's feelings. There's a threshold of tolerating bad comments past which you can't do anything anymore (eg, Reddit).

I disagree for the most part. HN is a pretty polite place and I prefer it remain so. There are very few trolls that need piling on. Some dummies just need elightenment. http://xkcd.com/386/ guides me.

I'm not against meanness in defense of people's feelings, I'm against it because the only outcome is starting a feud or feeding a troll. Being mean directly degrades a site's quality... in no way does it preserve it.

When you say something mean, even to a troll, you become part of the problem.

In the short term. In the long term, a witty or angry putdown is quicker, conveys more information and gets its point across more deeply than politeness and downmodding. imo.

I ask whether the comment detracts substantially from the HN community? If the answer is yes, I downvote.

The nice thing about this question is that it implies many derived reasons for a downvote: being mean or insulting; egregious stupidity; being irrelevant; being "clever" without adding real value. And so on. I try to be careful to NOT downvote someone just because I disagree with them.

"the nice thing about this question is that it implies many derived reasons for a downvote"

I like this way of thinking about it, I think the same approach is good for upvotes. Is this something that makes HN a better community? Is this part of the debate thought out and valuable (even if it's ultimately not the stance I end up agreeing with)? etc.

For example, I will always upvote the sincere "review my new startup/application" submissions. They are a special thing going on here and so often full of good observations (and good 'vibes') so I want to encourage them.

Meanness, especially when combined with mistakenness (which is not unusual).

I down-vote:

  * ad hominin attacks with no substance
  * unoriginal snowclone jokes with no substance
  * "+1" and "I agree", if that is the entirety of the post
  * if a post is vastly, enormously over-rated

I try to reserve downvote for the last resort. Well, second to last, now that we have flag.

Generally, I ignore the arrows. They are only there for things that make me say "I (dis)agree with this, and it is so good/well thought out/interesting I think everyone on HN should take the time to read it."

I usually reserve my downvote for the most absurd of comments. Stupidity, trolling, immaturity.

I DO NOT downvote things that are false, things I disagree with, or comments that make outlandish claims. All of these are discussion instigators, and not worthy of negative ratings.

I upvote comments that make smart and sound points, get me thinking in a new way about something, or effectively counter an argument, even if it is mine.

I also upvote in lieu of a comment if what I would have said has already been sufficiently covered.

I have to be pretty annoyed to downvote. I almost never vote up or down, actually, and downvotes are extremely rare.

A personal pet peeve is when someone willfully misses the point of an article or comment in order to go off on some pretty much unrelated tangent. It happens on reddit more than around these parts (I suppose because politics are free game over there and not welcome here, and politics bring out the worst in people), but it happens around here occasionally, particularly on religious topics (Apple, text editors, pg essays, programming languages, etc.).

Plain old stupidity will do it, too. Willful ignorance, spam, self-righteousness due to ignorance of limitations (e.g. a "business/idea guy" looking for an engineer and offering a pittance for the work being shocked and angry that no one wants to work with him), that sort of thing.

I'm more forgiving of stupid posts if the poster recognizes their limitations and can laugh about it. Humor goes a long way towards nullifying any annoyance I might be feeling about flaws in a post.

I'll consider a comment for a down-vote if it negatively affects the conversation. Usually this means it's off-topic for the conversation that it replies to (including insults and just plain meanness).

However, when I determine whether to down-vote, I first figure out what I think the score should be, and only down-vote if it's above that value. I've even up-voted comments that I thought were bad because I felt the author was being punished too harshly for saying something they obviously didn't realize would be bad.

If it is obviously factually incorrect.

Only if the down-modder is actually correct. Some of the more sarcastic ones are usually wrong.

I asked a similar question a few months ago, and included my policy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361390

If a comment is logically invalid, intellectually lazy or cruel I sometimes hit the down arrow.

redditness

p.s. I would totally downvote my comment since it is stupid, on the other hand it is the most correct answer to your question.

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