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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

> What’s needed now, of course, is a test of this idea. There are certainly social networks that allow up voting but not down voting (Medium being one of them).

The prototypical example of this type of system is Facebook. And there's a reason that people continually clamor for a Dislike button: not all content is good, in terms of either quality and sentiment, and allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality, which is a bad thing in the long run.

(Fun Facebook Fact: Reporting a Facebook post actually decreases the number of Likes by 1.)

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People clamor for a dislike button on Facebook because it is an emotion they would like to express with a button. Whether it would lead to better comment threads is a completely different matter, and if Reddit is any indication it does not protect against hivemind, and in here as well it occurs frequently that comments are downvoted merely for containing arguments that people happen to disagree with.

I think with FB, people don't necessarily want a button that's just a counter to the "like" button. They want a "dislike" button, but on its own axis. So n-likes and m-dislikes don't add up to n - m = score but n + m = score.

In other words, when somebody posts that their dog just passed away or whatever, I want to hit "dislike", not to pull down the like score but as a separate emotional indicator.

Exactly. When some one announces that they have cancer, the last thing you want to do is click "like". Slashdot has several options, not just "like" and "dislike".

There's already an infinity of emotions which you can express with the comment box. I don't think another flavor without a different mechanism adds anything to the dynamics of commenting, which is what this article is discussing.

"allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality"

And allowing downvotes fixes this?

The best forum I take part in doesn't have upvotes. Chronology and individual filters only.

Forums usually have strict content moderation for that reason. That does not scale at all (Dunbar's number), so very few startups would attempt it.

Upvotes are a quality filter, and downvotes are a quality filter for the quality filter.

No, downvotes makes the incentive to conform stronger because it makes people risk averse, so it increases the potential for hivemind. A quality filter for the quality filter would be some kind of arbitration, which people currently do in an ad hoc fashion and often prematurely by complaining about the downvotes in an edit.

It actually makes sense that Facebook doesn't provide a dislike button, for two reasons. First of all on Facebook you're interacting with friends mostly and disliking a friend's post cannot lead to anything good and generate resentment. Secondly, being downvoted or dislike creates a bad feeling and people would either reduce or entirely stop posting or simply avoid Facebook altogether to not be met with disagreement.

> disliking a friend's post cannot lead to anything good and generate resentment

Dislike != downvote.

Dislike can also be "I don't like this thing that happened to you" / sympathy.

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