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Comment by doorhammer | Hacker News Reader

The question I'd have about a downvote being opposite of an upvote is what is an upvote supposed to be for? I mean that as an honest question. Is it because it's something I like? Is it because I think it adds value to the conversation (usually why I upvote)? I've never seen guidlines for voting either way. The flag guidelines also seem pretty hazy (spam or offtopic [1]).

Of course, that could be totally intentional, and I'm not implying it's a bad way to do things. They might not want to nail down the upvote/downvote idea so much and just let them represent a general will of the readers instead of getting into semantic debates over guidelines. Just a few things I'm curious about.

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I figure that's up to the voters. Personally I upvote things I disagree with all the time, provided the comment presents a compelling argument worth considering. As for downvotes, it's never due to disagreement for me - only in times I find a comment to be unnecessarily negative, personal, or the opposite of "a compelling argument worth considering".

Yeah, this is how I generally approach it.

I don't care if I agree with someone. I just want them to provide more information and add some value to the discussion. If the information is invalid, I just do what I can to provide counter resources.

I also generally try to approach downvotes the way you're saying as well, though that brings us back to downvotes being "mini flags". I don't know that I disagree with that.

Mostly just bringing up that upvotes and downvotes aren't really defined. They represent the general unspoken opinion of the people voting, which I think is fine.

AFAIK upvoting a story is the only way to save it in your profile. I believe that this 'bookmarking' side-effect can induce a good measure of the value of a comment as well (one would have to kill the personal comments history page for maximum effect, though).

To be trite, one reason for an upvote is to be an opposite of a downvote. Frequently I find myself upvoting greyed-out comments (even if I disagree) simply because they have merit, despite the fact that some folks find them disagreeable.

Yeah. I think the real answer to "where is an upvote defined" is that it isn't, and there are probably good reasons for that.

I try to ask "does it add information to the conversation?" and upvote or downvote based on that.

I should also say that I think whether or not upvoting and downvoting should have guidelines is largely a choice about what kind of community you want to create.

If you provide guidelines, you're prescribing the behavior you'd like to see and, it seems, doing more to manually try to carve out a culture.

If you leave the barest guidelines, you allow the culture to define what it means organically.

I don't think either of those is right or wrong. I think prescribing behavior through guidelines is more complex and harder to do well, though, but again, not better.

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