Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it. | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

41 pointsrokhayakebe123 comments

What is the point of downvoting someone?

I apologize to anyone who may take offense to the following, but I find it very barbaric.

Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion. I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them.

Maybe web communities are still primitive, or maybe there is a real flaw in current commenting/rating systems.

If there were some consequences to downvoting, i.e. we knew who downvoted whom, what do you think would be the result?

View on HN

I downvote the following kinds of comments:

- comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in the tree.

- most comments made in reply to an article that definitely should be flagged.

- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand, saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard English in a non-bad direction.

- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.

- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes comments because they want to share their opinion, but some are indulging the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.

- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self-indulgent comments.

Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.

And yet, my only comments that actually get upvoted are garbage one-liner humor comments.

EDIT: I believe this is what we call irony: http://i588.photobucket.com/albums/ss323/araneae/hn.png

I didn't bother with that topic, but your comment seemed like a valid, even if tongue-in-cheek, proposal to me. Apparently 9 other people also had that reaction.

I upvoted you for the rather ironic screenshot. As for the best way to get upvoted: "Agree with the rest of the crowd." HN is a very "Go with the flow" crowd. In my observation it doesn't usually pay to have a difference of opinion, which is slightly ironic since this site is aimed at hackers, who, you would hope, should have unique viewpoints.

Every community has a set of shared assumptions and a particular viewpoint, this is pretty much axiomatic given the definition of the term. Most forum systems on the net are unable to deliver much nuance in terms of expressing this viewpoint, so it is easy to perceive "groupthink" when the bulk of the community disagrees with you. Where things get interesting/contentious is when people who share community view A assume everyone else agrees with B and get indignant or defensive when they discover that this view is not shared. There is nothing about "hackers" or startups or other standard topics of this community that necessitates a unique viewpoint, so why assume the rest of the community is going to tolerate large divergence from a standardized norm? Too much input from "unique" viewpoints usually leads to chaos, and that seems to be one thing of which the community has a low tolerance.

I always find opinions like these to be illuminating whenever people claim that people don't care about karma, as it's obviously just a silly number in some computer running this website. As it turns out, some people find losing just 1 point to be indistinguishable from throwing a rock at the person.

For what it's worth, the downvote is for the comment, not the poster. It influences a sorting algorithm that shapes the way people read as well as serves as a signal for how the community feels about a given post. The value of this signal is debatable, but that's the point.

When I personally down-vote your comment, it's because I think you're wrong or your post is of zero or negative value (spam, noise, etc), and it really has nothing to do with your worth as a person (or any desire to hurt you).

Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed.

The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button.

I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and contribute > 0 should be upvoted.

If people only down-vote fairly (ie. to suppress a comment that contains a factual error that has been explained by another comment) then the net effect of allowing down-votes is to give users relatively more influence over the ranking of posts. The issue of whether to allow down-votes ultimately is a trade-off between stronger and faster filtering of comments, and fewer opportunities for abuse.

I think the problem is that down votes have more potential for abuse than to increase the efficiency of sorting. A factual error, corrected is just as valuable as any other average comment in my opinion. Perhaps they should be pushed down, but then you have people who will down vote to suppress opposing ideas and unpopular ones.

By only allowing up votes, it becomes much harder for people to manipulate any single comment, as it would require up voting everything else. So the filtering of better comments would end up being delegated to the majority consensus of up votes, and less possible manipulation by a minority of down votes.

While upvoting better comments is a really good thing, I don't think it's enough. Let's say that instead of trying to give a counter example for your idea, I simply write something like:

"No - that's lame and you should be downvoted, because you're wrong right now."

If that was the last response - everything's fine - the thread gets lost. But if someone tries to explain that I'm not correct, we get a standard war that doesn't really prove anything. If people wanted to upvote "better" comments, then anything after my post could be considered "better" and I can keep the thread afloat by just contradicting everyone (if I don't simply abuse them). I'm still at ~1 vote with every post, but with others being upvoted, we would just grab attention and pull more people into the "conversation"... and that's what I think happens in forums that simply move the updated threads up.

The only way to break that cycle would be to start upvoting most of the other threads... But then what to do if some of them are actually worth upvoting and some aren't?

Now the question is: did I, or did I not try to start a noisy attention grabbing thread just now by saying you're wrong but not in a trollish way (and was it really not a troll post or did I just try to assure you it wasn't by my definition (how meta! ;) ))

I think you're talking about a different problem. And this problem specifically deals with responses to threaded comments that are on top.

I think in this case simply flag it if it seems trollish. Or only allow down votes on responses. Because allowing down votes on all comments introduces a whole new set of problems like majority induced silencing.

Another solution would be to offer the ability to sort comments strictly by karma.

So what action do you propose for a situation where some person writes an incorrect post and is then corrected, but the whole thread doesn't deserve to be upvoted?

If you just upvote the correction, you mark it as significant in some way. But if it's only correcting a flamebait, why would you? It seems to be better to leave the correction there (so that people who read it get more information), but force the whole thread to go down by downvoting the first incorrect post. I think it's a good protection against flamewars which may contain a lot of "correct" posts, but you may want to push them down anyways.

The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.

> The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.

Exactly. So rather than try to determine "correctness" because sometimes it is subjective, just try to determine what's clearly "better."

Up voting better comments will have the side effect of pushing down comments that are not as deserving.

If you can't judge a comment for a degree of "correctness", you can't judge one comment as "better" than another.

Yes you're right. We each have our own definition of "better," as we do have for "correct." But it's less detrimental/errpr to just have you judge "better" than to have you judge both "better" and "worse" which is what happens when we allow judgements of "correct."

Why?

Really, please explain.

Because we can still sort comment by just up voting. But removing down voting would slow down the sorting process, therefore less power is there to disrupt the organization of comments.

I'll agree this may be viewed as one disadvantage of the system, but it also means there is less power in the individual to to push down the comment. It would require a bunch of up votes all the other comments in order to push down a comment.

That's why letting people to only up vote is less capable of silencing an opposition or unpopular view.

Wouldn't it make more sense to downvote either to eliminate spam/noise or to signal disagreement? I'm all for stoning spammers, but I think it's more constructive to write a response if you disagree with someone.

Sometimes a response is not worth writing.

If people make reasonable (and even to your knowledge correct) arguments for X, then someone replies to say nothing more than "X is wrong/bad/inefficient" with no counter-argument or evidence, why answer that? If someone makes a bigoted remark (anti-gay, anti-American, whatever), why answer that? If someone's trying to drag a discussion off-topic, why answer that?

The answer is "I don't have to write an answer." You have a channel for expressing a reaction, and just as it's unnecessary to write "That's so right!" replies instead of up-voting, it's unnecessary to give gratuitous replies instead of down-voting.

Your bank account is just a silly number in a computer! The money only has value because other people think it has value.

I'd give you 10 points for that answer. Only if I could :)

My point was not to take the position that karma is an unimportant number in a computer somewhere, but that people often claim as much in defense of various scoring systems on sites like this and Reddit and so on that create perverse incentives for the users.

I work on online videogames. You don't need to tell me the value of a number in a computer somewhere that means a whole heck of a lot to someone, and shapes how they act. :-)

He's right the number is insignificant. The number just represents the sentiment of the person who gave you it, or the sentiment of the person who who down voted you.

It gets even worse if you're someone who worked hard for karma, only have it taken away by someone for your opinion.

There must be a better way to asses the "value" of content. I agree that the down vote is arguably a good gauge for how the community at large "feels" about the content but not a good indicator for "value". There are two metrics here that I do not believe can be extracted from a voting system.

I rarely comment, one of the few time I did I got down voted. I returned 3 days later and tried to defend my position, but it was too late and the community had move on. Oddly enough my comment did start a thread of discussion.

As I mentioned in my followup comment assessing the value of user contributed content is an area that we are trying to solve in a web application solution soon to be deployed.

Below is an excerpt from my comment.

"Using my initial comment as an example had I not posted that comment "value adding" content would never have been created. If my contributed content resulted in "value adding" content, is it not then "value adding" content? Is a good proxy of "value adding" content, content which produces or causes other content creation?"

So if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value.

Of course comment score doesn't display value objectively or comprehensibly or indefinitely.

Every topic has it's decay period, you may have made a good point, but if the community doesn't feel that way during lifetime of the topic, then that was a lost cause. If it really matters try again, as you just did. If it doesn't - leave it alone.

There are many other things that HN doesn't do and leaves for people to figure out.

Perfect? No. Good enough? I think so.

I agree the marginal improvement may not be worth the effort.The web application I alluded to would offer this "content valuing" service to a community. It's actually on our wish list and not the main value-add of the offering

Not seeing the original comment to which you're referring, I can't offer any opinion on it in particular. However, I generally disagree with the statement "if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value." Trolling is, at its heart, the creation of discussion by posts of negative value, usually by eliciting a strong emotional response from readers. Most troll-posts don't have value to those trolled (though there may be exceptions).

That is a valid point. The minority view however does have value, and at times adds the most value to the discussion. When the minority view is treated in the same way the troll-post is then I believe the community suffers.

It influences a sorting algorithm that shapes the way people read...

What gives you the right to decide how a thread should or shouldn't be displayed for others? Aren't you valuing your opinion too much?

When I personally down-vote, it's because I think you're wrong

You can simply make your point in a reply, or maybe make use of silence.

or negative value (spam, noise, etc)

There is a FLAG link for all comments.

it really has nothing to do with your worth as a person

Comments reflect the way the poster thinks. You will not find anything more personal to us than the way we think.

or any desire to hurt you

But you do.

I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them.

You don't think there is any difference between throwing a rock at someone and reducing their overall vote count by one vote in an electronic voting system? If someone downvotes me, I have a reason to look again at what I posted and whether or not it fit the discussion. If someone throws a rock at me, I have a reason to report a case of assault to the police.

Both, however, are instances of expressing disapproval without in turn adding something valuable. It was a ridiculous simile, but I understood his feeling because it's one I have also. When I take time and effort to argue something and get voted down, the message I'm given in liu of an actual counterpoint is that my effort in a community has not been appreciated. It's not as drastic as my being hit by a rock, but it's still something that engenders an emotional response on my part.

Of course, I then go on to contribute to the pool of negativity by downvoting people without responding to them, so it's not like I'm blaming everybody who's ever downvoted. But I do understand where he's coming from.

You're taking it too personally.

How do you know the reasons your post got downvoted?

And why do you revenge against community after that?

Community has it's moods too, if it annoys you too much at some particular time you're always free to leave. That's what I do, but I know there's some value in this community so I return. But revenge is simply immature.

Both can be threatening. So certain types of comments that may be not accepted, but may not necessarily be wrong, have the risk of being censored by the mob via this social means. And so this risk in censorship by social degradation can be powerful enough to sway certain viewpoints from gaining traction here.

It may not happen all the time, but it certainly does happen. And since the "ranking algorithm" that is the voting can be achieved with just an up vote (at least in theory), I do believe the risks associated with a down vote outweigh any possible efficiency increase to the sorting algorithm.

"Both can be threatening."

I submit that if one is threatened by others disagreeing with or not appreciating one's contribution to a discussion, one needs to find a more harmonious discussion.

When I say threatening I mean with the intent to discourage. so when you down vote someone you disagree with you essentially discourage them from voicing their opinion. Why? Because when I'm downvoted I'm being punished. I don't want to be punished, so I either leave the community and decrease the variation in opinions or refrain from voicing it again. Is that what we want to allow here, or anywhere?

We ignore the kkk. We do not jail them. That is essentially what freedom of speech is about.

Furhermore we can't all have a consensus on every topic. It's good to have differing opinions and it's unavoidable to have disagreements. Being voted down for having opposing viewpoints is inevitable if the system permits it.

So to have a perfectly free speech community, we shouldn't provide the mechanism to condemn speech. We can however provide the mechanism to delete spam and blatantly trollish comments and perhaps even blatantly negative comments. But to give the majority the ability to hurt the minority will have negative long term consequences to the community.

So no one should have to think to themselves, "are people going to like what I say or should I just keep it to myself?" when posting a comment. No one benefits from that and we could all one day miss out on a great learning opportunity.

Discouragement is not punishment.

"We ignore the kkk."

Living in a state that actually occasionally has KKK rallies, "we" sure as Hell don't ignore them. We surround them with counter-protesters whenever they march in their sheets - and outnumber them by many multiples. We look at people ranting on about those dirty, criminal n---s and how America used to be white and pure and call them stupid fucking racists.

No, we don't jail them, we don't attack them, we don't fine them, we don't even raise the price of our groceries when they come in the store.

We downvote them.

Down voting is an official active punishment that is meant to discourage. Down voting is a form of punishment. Ignoring is not a form of punishment. It's passive.

What you describe may be mistaken as an active form of punishment, but you're essentially up voting the non racists, not down voting the racists. You aren't punishing the racists for their behavior so much as you are showing support for the other side.

You rally more anti-racists, but they still have the right to do what they were doing, and even up the numbers on their side too.

That is what I would like to see here. I want to see people pushing support to what they believe, not punishing those that disagree. So let's say there is a hypothetical racial argument here. One guy is racist, the other guy is not. Your example is analogous to everyone up voting the non racist as a form of protest.

I'm afraid you genuinely make no sense.

Please explain?

How is not you surrounding the racists with anti-racists not up voting the anti racists?

You're showing more support for the anti-racists, not punishing the racists for holding their opinion. Not directly at least.

We can't punish them directly by means of jailing or criminal prosecution just for holding their views. However you can indirectly suppress them by showing more support for the other side, just as you can still indirectly punish bad comments through up voting everyone else. Up voting everyone else is not only a nicer way but a better way in terms of freedom of speech.

We ignore the kkk.

No, I decry the KKK. And the FBI infiltrated the KKK, and private lawsuits have largely bankrupted the KKK. The KKK gets plenty of push-back, and deserves every bit of the push-back it gets.

We should ignore the KKK.

Obviously there will be times they will step out of simply just speech and opinion, and for that they should be punished. If they act out on their hate and prejudice that is. But if all they are doing is expressing an opinion then let them, for it is not for you to judge who shall have the right opinions in this country. If you disagree, simply ignore them, for truth shall hold them accountable and you shall be vindicated without effort. But if you condemn their thoughts then you exhibit fear. For any righteous man would not fear a wrong idea, because reality shall not let a wrong idea prevail. So if you truly believe your ideas are right then let those who disagree do so in peace. Reality shall punish them enough for their ignorance.

Also our laws are designed to encourge only ignoring. Why else can't we just jail them right there? Because there is no thought police, and you shalln't be one either!

EDIT: It may be true that they do deserve all negative actions directed towards them. I just want to make it clear that I do not support the KKK. I think physical and emotional attacks from the KKK do justify corrective action against them.

I'd also like to add that the best way to raise a child is to ignore them when they get angry, not punish. I think that was researched somewhere or something.

But if all they are doing is expressing an opinion then let them, for it is not for you to judge who shall have the right opinions in this country.

Allow me to disagree openly with that opinion by posting a reply. :) The KKK opinions are so disrespectful to my fellow citizens, so factually mistaken, and so verified historically as causes of violence and social backwardness that I don't just ignore them. I dispute wrong opinions such as those of the KKK. (And I dispute similar opinions posted here on HN, even at the risk of my comments being downvoted, because it is important to provide refutation of such opinions for onlookers.)

About your legal advice, you are mistaken. The current law on free speech in the United States is precisely designed to allow (and, indeed, encourage) open and continual refutation of mistaken ideas on public policy. That is the whole point of the American experiment in free speech.

About your parenting advice, as the father of four children I call on you to provide references to your sources if you expect to convince me that you have useful advice on parenting. Who did the research, and how?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Are you a parent yourself? How many child-years of parenting experience do you have?

> The current law on free speech in the United States is precisely designed to allow (and, indeed, encourage) open and continual refutation of mistaken ideas on public policy. That is the whole point of the American experiment in free speech.

You're right. And the whole point of not punishing for their opinion is so that you can criticize them openly. Imagine if we didn't let the racists make their argument, then we can not refute them by reason because there would be nothing to refute. So to let them express their opinions, then everyone else can openly see how ludicrous they are, rather than trying to hide them and their so obviously wrong ways.

The parenting advice is something I picked up from various sources. And it's based on the idea that we should constructively criticize, and not scold. I'm sure you've heard the advice to show young children the right way, rather than to tell them explicitly that they are wrong. I have a very young sister that was born when I was 16 (I think) and this is why I even listen to such advice.

I'm not a parent, but I was a child, as has everyone. And being a parent does not necessarily legitimize any specific parenting tactic one has, especially with regard to long term effects.

So the example I gave about showing kids the correct way to do things instead of scolding or telling them they are wrong is probably a better example. I'm not exactly sure where I saw the advice for ignoring annoying behavior to stop it, but let's forget that example.

But this example is more analogous to our current argument. Instead of telling people they are wrong, it's simply better to show them, and others, the better way. The better way should be enough convincing and any need to artificially make it better (by denouncement) would be prone to human error. But to have to show someone the better way would require cooperation by reality if you know what I mean. And such cooperation by reality would only happen if your proposed idea, opinion, or whatever is truly better.

In essence, I'm proposing that we humans do the upvote, because nothing bad comes out of doing that, and let reality do the down voting.

So by only allowing up vote we better prevent people from artificially marginalizing an idea.

I vote (up|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed.

More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system. It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback is a useful tool for molding the output of a system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback

"What if we knew who downvoted whom, what would be the result?"

I love that idea, but extend it also to upvoting, and use it to create a killer social network and/or dating site.

If you and I love the same ideas and hate the same ideas, than we should meet. We may not enrich each others worldview, but that's what HN is for. You and I, in such a scenario would probably get along really well and be great friends. A great way to find that out is a "similarity heuristic" in voting patterns on a site such as this one.

Then we would care [a little?] more about the person commenting and less about the content of the comments. Perhaps content would still win but people would be influenced with decisions like "he downvoted me" or "she believes Y" (where Y is orthogonal to the issue) or dimiss salient point based on past arguments.

Which is fine if that's what you're after.

The data would be pretty confusing, without analysis. I'm also assuming people with enough of a life that they wouldn't try.

Instead of (or in addition to) raw upvote/downvote data, you get a "compatibility score", where 100 means you're soul mates, and -100 means you're mortal enemies!

I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste. This is, granted, a pretty wide area, but when somebody writes something egregiously distasteful—whether it's a terrible sense of humor, or a misinformed righteousness, or craven pandering to the self-important 'social media' upper crust, or indeed the myopic, worthless blather of said upper crust—I am aesthetically offended by that sort of thing. It offends my sense of decency, my sense of wit and interestingness. I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.

Maybe that would be the easiest rule of thumb, then. If you say something which would, if I were chatting with you at a cocktail party, make me fearfully look for some excuse to go refill my drink, I will downvote you.

> I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste.

> I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.

Are you for real? I guess I should downvote you for deeply offending me by needing to get over yourself.

But I won't, because I agree with the OP.

I've noticed that sometimes interesting answers get downvoted, and irrelevant/badly thought-out answers get upvoted. So I don't take downvotes so seriously now. However, there's a backlash: if I get a bunch of upvotes, I'll now think that it's probably just a bunch of those idiot voters. Which in a way is a good thing, because it means I have to fall back on my own judgment, instead of being guided by karma. (I do listen to intelligent rebuttals and counter view-points, as they have actual content, unlike a downvote).

For a long time, I didn't down-vote anyone. Now I'll sometimes downvote, to put comments in the order of insightfulness; and very occasionally for irrelevance/childishness. For really obnoxious comments, I'll downvote to grey them, and also flag them. But my usual response is to reply "please elaborate" (for a content-free comment), which offers the human behind the comment an opportunity to grow into the community; or an impartial recital of the facts (for a mistaken, inappropriate or irrelevant comment).

Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion.

If they do, they're doing it wrong. Downvote someone for not contributing to the discussion.

One of the problems is that people don't down vote for the same reasons. Some down because they disagree, others to resort topics, others because they don't like the person's comment, tone, bias, etc...

Without a consistent use of the down vote, the effect is undesired by most.

"the effect is undesired by most"

Says who?

says whoever upvoted me.

One person upvoted you, at the time of my writing this.

One person is not "most". Everyone commenting in this topic is not "most". Everyone who's ever started a thread against down-voting is not "most", as best as I can tell.

I think he means the effect is undesired because we're trying to get rid of "stupid" comments but in practice such a system gives way to abuse.

People keep saying that, and people keep linking to pg saying that's part of the intended use. Shall we avoid the pointlessness of this argument?

From the keyboard of pg:

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.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

There's an interesting argument in favor of downvoting here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

For context, the author is someone who posts on HN and was (at the time) trying to launch a new community.

Ask the submitter: Why don't you get a blog?

Edit: OK, I will answer the question. People downmod to get people to convince themselves to go away. Imagine I don't like your viewpoint, and you place value on imaginary points I can take from you. I take those points, you get upset, and you stop posting stuff I disagree with.

That's all there is to it; reinforcing groupthink.

Similarly upmods encourage people to keep submitting. Knowing that people like your work encourages you to make more.

This is a very HN-focused point. No reason he can't just post it directly, in this case.

So, pretty much you force people to make comments you will by taking away points.

"reinforcing groupthink"

Do you speak for one group when on HN or do you speak for yourself? If you speak for a group could you please detail which group that is and at which point you were assigned the right to take actions in its name?

Anyone who has read "The Wisdom of Crowds" or has studied the Bay of Pigs disaster knows that groupthink is a terrible idea. I can only hope that your apparent approval of reinforcing groupthink was intended as wry sarcasm.

If someone posts something that is negative, detracts from the discussion, or is generally of negative value, the way to provide feedback is to downmod. If there is value to be had from doing so, a followup comment is indicated.

Many people downmod simply because they disagree, and I think that's wrong. But that's my opinion. Personally, if a comment is of positive value I'll upmod it, even if I don't agree with it.

I don't think that most people downmod for just disagreement, but rather for stupidity, noise, trolling. Sure, some people vote a comment down to express disagreement, but their votes are often cancelled out. And it's not so unusual to see two HN'ers having an argument and both gaining karma from it if their arguments are well-formed, respectful, and informative.

On the other hand, comments such as 'more like CLOWNvote, amirite???' don't really improve the quality of the discussion, do they?

I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth commenting on.

Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit.

The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.

Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?

I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.

In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.

I didn't see your comment until now, but I'd guess it was downvoted for 'feeding the troll'. While the comment you responded was reasonable, the grandparent was a bad joke that was rightly being beaten down. I'm not sure how the page placement algorithm currently works, but I'd assume, and I think others assume, that downvotes on the children help to move something down the page. In other words, you were a victim of collateral damage.

BTW on just the beginning of your comment: This might explain why I sometimes get "correct" replies that totally miss the point: they've seen it in the newcomments page.

It's really baked my noodle a few times, that a seemingly intelligent person could be so self-confidently blind. Now it seems likely that it simply was because they were blind.

Maybe responding to single comments out-of-context is a questionable methodology.

I understand what you're saying, but my initial reaction is WTF! Now I need a freaking methodology to surf the net?

I like to think of users as always being right, even when they do things I do not expect or would not approve of. So in this case, even if it weren't me we were talking about, I'd have to take the side of the user poking around at the system, trying to get it to work as well as he can.

"Now I need a freaking methodology"

Sorry, I was trying to be less blunt than ending that sentence with "is a bad idea."

"I like to think of users as always being right"

Here's the problem - you weren't a user being resisted by software in that context. You were a person interacting with other people. You weren't poking at a system, you were having a conversation.

Yes. Of course you are correct. I made the mistake of not being fully informed about the conversation before responding.

But I still think overall this process works fine. I just need to take some time to check out the entire thread first.

I view the board more like IRC -- a conversation can start one place and end up somewhere else. So as long as you have 2-3 parents in mind when commenting, you're free to go in a slightly new direction. Some folks, I imagine, view the topics more hierarchically. The site design encourages both views, actually.

I actually think that the newcomments page is part of the problem. My theory is that people reading newcomments tend to downvote something that seems even a little bit controversial, without seeing the context in which it was made.

I notice that after a few hours the scores seem to settle into something more fair. A lot of people will fix unfair 0s and -1s.

I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough "points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be because I haven't been around long enough. Once, I did try to downvote something by kludging the "dir" variable. I was told I couldn't make that vote. What parameters must be met for a person to get downvoting ability?

Enough with the goofy meta-talk, though. Since I don't have downvoting ability, I didn't even know it existed until I saw comments with zero or negative scores. Coming at it from my neophytic perspective, I am torn. At first blush, "not upvoting" and "downvoting" seem like they would serve similar functions: floating better content to the top. My only guess is that downvoting is a catalyst that makes it happen faster.

The only things I've wanted to downvote if I could were trolling, spam, and tangents. To that end, I think "not relevant or contributing to the discussion" is probably the most popular reason.

It's just behavioural reinforcement. Upvote the positive but on the few occasions someone acts out of line with the spirit of the community, there's got to be a way to deal with them. Imagine a troll running rampant on HN with no downvoting; it'd be hard to get them to stop, since there is no consequence for their actions.

As it is, behaviour that acts out of the norm - lame jokes, empty-but-offensive remarks and entirely pointless trivia - all tends to be rewarded negatively, reinforcing the community values nicely. If you get downvoted, it's usually simple enough to figure out why - and if it really is a disagreement of opinion then the downvoters are doing it wrong, or there's also something about the way you express your opinion that is repellant.

I agree that it enforces the spirit of the community. One of my first comments was a joke and it was down-modded hard (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684509). This quickly taught me the community's expectations in terms of quality of comments.

The possibility of downvotes creates an element of risk in posting a comment. Without that element of risk the only deterrent to trolling or violating community standards is deleting or banning by the moderators. Moderating a site like this is an awful lot of work. The down vote arrow allows the community to police itself.

It's certainly not perfect, people have been down voted to oblivion. Pg has put in safeguards so people can only get down voted 5-10 points. I think that it's helped keep the community on track.

People take their karma very seriously for some reason. Notice the amount of angry posts when someone gets downvoted. :)

Respectfully, I doubt downvoting is a deterrent to any troll. Trolls are already determined to anger the community. Downvoting is more of a deterrent to people who care what the community thinks of them--they might refrain from posting their contrary opinions as a result.

That said, I still think downvoting is a useful function, because the point is to filter discussion.

I personally like that trolling comments tend to rapidly vanish into light-gray text.

Yes, that's what I'm saying about the filtering, is that it serves to hide trolling comments. That doesn't necessarily mean that it reduces the number of trolls, as suggested by the parent.

I sort of agree with you, but I would only up vote to show that the topic / comment was interesting, even if I did not agree with it . Up/down voting because i agree or disagree is arrogant. If it makes people feel better, bully for them. The danger is that a group of people will upvote a perspective and alienate alternative points of view from a thread. This creates a narrow minded culture and prevents interesting discussions. Ideally there is no point posing to a thread you agree with if you have no content to add.

I'm impressed by the shifting voting trends when a new, dissenting (sub)opinion is attached to a comment. A string of upvotes now is halted/reversed. And the polarity change can happen several times. An articulated position unleashes the silent thinker or is this a characteristic of mob rule? (When it happens to me, it's mob rule. :)

I'm also terribly sad when someone is downvoted in an opinion-thread (e.g. what is your favorite X). I wish one could mark a post as opinion or even upvote-only.

Someone can be off-topic or troll in opinion threads. "What's your favorite X?" is not the place for "Stop using different types of Xs and start using Ys, noobs.", for example.

For such special-purpose threads, I think it's worth seeing those comments fall through upvotes (or flagging) rather than penalize straight opinions. A similar chilling effect to a downvoted opinion could be had by exposing the downvoters. :)

I'm curious if pg has data on this.

As much as someone could type that, someone could also downvote because they were thinking that.

Indeed. And yet, while trolls get downvoted to pale gray happens, entire threads getting their comments downvoted as far doesn't.

Unpopular opinions can be down voted. And this does happen. While often it doesn't matter that an unpopular opinion is down voted because it may in fact be wrong, there will be certain cases where an unpopular but universally right comment will be down voted. It will be grayed out. But with a system that promotes and allows silencing unpopular comments, such a rare event will almost always result in a down vote will not just marginalize it, but actually suppress it.

It might be interesting to keep every vote for each comment and use something like the Netflix prize algorithm to calculate whether you'd like the comment. Hiding comments would then be based on personal preferences, rather than the community at large. If nobody at all likes the comment, (i.e., it's spam or something), then it can get removed automatically. Of course, this takes a lot of work to implement, and it might require HN to have a longer privacy policy...

This all brings to mind Churchill's quote (paraphrased):

"Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all other forms of government."

You might find Hoppe's book, http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics-Monarchy-... , interesting. He claims democracy is the worst form of government, period. (The book is not easy reading and is pretty repetitive, but interesting.)

Turn it around: why upvote someone? A downvote is equal and opposite to an upvote; what makes the former "bad" and not the latter?

Downvoting has two aspects: reducing the visibility of a post and discouraging the poster from making similar posts in the future. This can be used maliciously (though to limited effect) against viewpoints you merely disagree with. But it does have a legitimate use as well, when harmful or unhelpfully disruptive information is posted.

A few examples to clarify these guidelines:

Spam and inappropriate material (this isn't 4chan).

Advice that is well known to be wrong and/or is very likely to be harmful if followed, such as advising someone to embed raw SQL query strings in web application parameters or to exclusively use javascript for client side input sanitation (both of which would open up anyone to huge security vulnerabilities).

Unnecessary or unfunny jokes (live by the sword, die by the sword, jokes rarely improve discussion).

Completely off-topic material.

Voting is probably the easiest way to quickly express your (dis/ap)proval with little effort, especially when the comment is so obviously insightful or stupid.

Your analogy is a bit extreme, and I wouldn't mind people knowing whom I up/downvoted.

I usually downvote intentional bad or wrong answers (of course, I don't think others opinion are wrong answers). It's more to inform the poster that he/she generated 'noise'.

Of course, I dislike being downvoted. If I think it was because I was misunderstood or misinterpreted, I will post in response to the downvote. Clarification sometimes gets the original post upvoted, as well as the clarification. If it's a case of "Yeah, I was trying to avoid getting into that because I just knew it would go over badly and now I've been downvoted, confirming what I thought" or a case of me just not saying something well because I was having a bad day, I generally leave it alone. No point in pouring gasoline on the fire, so to speak (which is generally what's going to happen if I am already sticking my feet in my mouth because I don't feel well and now I am all defensive and trying to "clarify"....downward spiral ensues).

On the one hand, I often do wish people would converse with me and tell me what they "heard" that they think it's a bad comment. In many cases, it turns out be a misunderstanding. The vast majority of meaning in face-to-face communication comes from facial expression, body language, voice tone and context. The actual words are a very small part of the meaning conveyed. But on the 'Net, the words are about all we have. If two people come from very different backgrounds, misunderstandings are practically guaranteed.

On the other hand, an Iranian friend once told me that there is a saying in Iran: "Silence is the only good answer to stupid people." I would modify that slightly to "Silence is the only good answer to something stupid." We all do stupid stuff at times. It isn't proof we are generally stupid. It's just part of the human condition. An anonymous downvote, though it may be upsetting to the receiver, is probably a lot less destructive to the community than being able to put a name to the criticism and having to try to express the criticism in words. Running battles between two members who just don't ever agree on anything can be very destructive to a forum. I think the capacity to downvote helps avoid such outcomes.

I am still getting a feel for how HN works. But so far I am finding that the system here seems to do a better job of minimizing some of the negative social crapola you find everywhere. Conflict of interest will never go away. Interpersonal friction between some members is inevitable. Spammers and all kinds of other undesirable stuff is also a fact of life. There has to be a means to address that. Warm-fuzzy 'let's only upvote people' solutions won't work. It has no teeth.

Downvoting is there to bury spam, swearing, bad behaviour, objectively false information, etc.

Some people downvote to bury opinions they disagree with, which isn't good, I agree.

People downmod swearing? That's fucking stupid.

Here I agree with the sentiment (swearing is OK and not what the downvote button should be used for) but dislike the comment (a one line personal attack).

Which is why there should be "agree/disagree" and "good/bad contribution" buttons.

What's the utility of an agree/disagree button? I don't think I would want to see that even if it was available to me.

I downvoted the parent comment because it's a crappy one-liner. It adds nothing except to express that some people are cool with swearing, which is not a very novel sentiment, and it does so in a way intended as flamebait.

That's your opinion. To me, I thought it was a good one liner. See our differing opinions? Down voting/flagging should be reserved for those comments people mutually agree on as bad.

What's the difference between discouraging by threat of jail time and discouraging vs social disapproval? Both are threats against you for certain behaviors. While these threats may be justified for stuff people all agree on are bad like racism, I do not think it's a good idea for subjective opinions. It will lead to socially induced censorship and society as a whole will become single-minded, afraid of thinking against the crowd.

I think HN should foster the environment for unique thinking and controversial comments. Sure there isn't official discouragement of certain opinions, but if we allow the mob to do it it's practically the same thing.

I guess it boils down to this: I have absolutely no interest in reading a website with comments like that. If a large proportion of comments were one-line opinions and purely argumentative back-and-forths, I would just not bother reading the HN comment sections. So I downvote it.

Now, I understand that you feel the opposite way. The only objective argument I can make for my position is that there are a great number of general-interest sites on the Internet with a huge amount of discussion which is on par with "That's fucking stupid," but only a handful with discussion that is consistently free of such comments and the associated derailing of the conversation that they frequently bring. (Historically, it seems like the only realistic way to weed them out is by keeping a community small or having heavy active moderation.) I'd like to encourage more of the latter.

I don't really like your analogies between physical intimidation and violence and downvoting, because the consequences of physical threats are so much more serious. I can't understand how it's a serious harm to anyone to tell them "you can't express viewpoints X, Y, or Z on Hacker News." It's a shame, but it's one of the very smallest shames that can possibly be inflicted upon a person.

I understand that you're concerned in an idealistic sense about the ethics of using simple majority rule to tell someone "you can't say that," but I just don't think it's a big concern in this context, when the whole Internet is an ultimate egalitarian arena full of people saying anything and everything. The much bigger problem, to me, is having so much content that you can't read the really high-quality things because they are swamped with noise that adds nothing, or almost nothing. (By high-quality things I mean ideas and arguments that are novel, useful, and well-informed.)

That's essentially what up voting is for. It is a one way distillation that would also avoid any possible majority silencing of unpopular views.

We don't punish people for being dumb, we reward people who are smart.

Jail time is physical intimidation, but it is just one example of intimidation. My point is that such physical intimidation is no different from social intimidation upheld by the majority view in society. And such social intimidation is no different from down voting. Just as you were probably taught by someone at some point in your life to respect other's viewpoints, we should foster that here too. Down voting because of differences in viewpoint is not a sign of respect.

And you can fully respect someone while still getting your share of the "better" comments because there is still an up vote mechanism. Without down vote simply means you can't disrespect comments that while are not overly additive to the conversation, are also not overly disruptive either.

Meh. I've never had a problem with throwing out a dissident opinion on forums with up/down moderation. I've often been surprised how fast I've gotten modded up when I've done that. People do react well to interesting, thought-provoking arguments, and many will avoid down-modding them even when they strongly disagree.

People do not react well to complaints that people who disagree with them are repressed or afraid, especially when the dissenter's expressed fear is that they will be down-modded. (The same goes for the "This will get me down-modded, but..." tactic.)

There will always be many who will downvote simply to supress dissident opinions.

Dissident opinions do not show up as much as mainstream ones, for obvious reasons. So the opportunity for a good dissident response to be disregarded is less. But when it does happen, it's much greater a loss to the overall community.

The utility of an agree/disagree button would be to prevent the up/down vote arrows to be used for that purpose, which a few in this thread claim is what is happening.

(I doubt that would work though, but am curious to know if that has been implemented anywhere)

I downvoted your comment because I am arbitrary and fickle.

Your assumption that downvotes occur mostly as a result of disagreement may be flawed. (I don't know myself, obviously, but it's not how I personally tend to use the feature.)

The rest of your question/opinion is based on your perceived truth of your initial assumption. I think we cannot proceed with any of that until we know the first answer.

I completely agree. And I suggested that the down vote be removed and replaced with something like a flag. Flagging would be reserved for inappropriate comments. Upvoting can be used to sort and rank the "better" comments.

Frankly if you disagree with a comment, reply, don't down vote.

Because the informationally-equivalent action of upvoting every comment other than yours is not only tedious, but leaves you without the ability to upvote any other comment on its own merit.

Can HN experiment with this...show the users who have downvoted one particular comment or ..make the commenter name invisible until you up/down vote a comment in a particular thread...

My downmodding protocol (I rarely downvote): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361390

>I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them.

Can you really not see the difference ?

The interface should provide two ways to vote: one for relevance (value) and the other for agreement/disagreement.

I like how when you flag on craigslist you have to say why. If multiple people flag, the post is removed.

Why not introduce a cost to both upvote and downvote of 1 karma point?

On a similar topic, the primary use of "ignore lists" on forums appears to be the opportunity to smugly announce that someone has been added to yours.

It's just quality control.

For some reason people value karma. The possibility of a down vote makes you think twice about posting rubbish.

From that perspective the system is working as intended :)

I downvote people who downvoted me before I could downvote. Karma's a bitch.

The worst part is downvoting someone without expressing why you did it. For example :

This is spam. Downvoted.

Most of the time people seem to just don't care about how someone else feels when gets downvoted. In the case of an article this gets more frustrating because there was effort to do it, document it and other things too. Even if the article is not what you think of "cool" it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve an explanation on why it was downvoted. Some might say: This is the internet, democracy etc... Democracy is also getting annoyed when someone thinks of you like a "nothing". Other times, someone might post something that he doesn't like, only to see if others feel the same too.

I've had comments and submissions of mine downvoted before, and I didn't take offense. The article or my comment was simply "unliked" rather than enjoyed (upvoted) or met with indifference (left alone). Reading anything more into it is kind of silly.

You certainly can't please everyone all the time.

I think it's actually natural for people to feel offended, because down voting is an active engagement.

There are actually 3 choices. Ignore, up vote, and down vote. Down vote is taking the time and effort to click and purposely bury something. If it was unliked it would have probably simply been ignored. I seriously doubt most people read through each title and only either down vote or up vote. Most would probably be ignored, with the particularly hated ones being more likely down voted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com