Ask HN: Disable downvoting?
I feel downvoting is out of hand. People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn't match the HN culture. Content should be about quality not conformity.
I know this affects me and suppresses my willingness to post. The result is that I keep most of my shitty comments to myself. I behave much worse on other discussion forums.
For example, if I have a countervailing opinion, on other forums often I'll just post it, and the way I'll post it will be designed to make the people that would disagree with them (prototypically, havers of idiotic European political opinions) unhappy by making them witness opinions that they disagree with. I do that with less frequency here -- here, I'll try to make it palatable and relatable in a way that's not totally saturated with spergacious obnoxiousness. I guess most of the reason is just the general expectation of professionalism that's maintained here, not specific fear of negative karma, but that atmosphere is not maintained by upvotes. (In fact, my most-upvoted comments, not that I have many, are almost always pop vacuouity that I think should have been downvoted.)
I think a lot of other people here would post a lot worse, too, without downvotes and without the visible "fade" effect.
Edit: For example, here's a comment of mine that was rightfully downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833 My opinion is right, of course, but it could have been much better presented. And here's a comment where I got downvoted for disagreeing with the thread-local hivemind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309 So what if I got downvoted! Sometimes that's what you get when you engage with idiots. It's not the end of the world.
What's usually lacking in these discussions about downvotes are specific examples. I'm biased, but it seems to me that's because it's usually pretty easy to see how downvoted comments got there. But you have to wait a while to see the effect. Unfair downvotes happen, but the community usually corrects them after a while. So reacting too quickly to unfair downvotes—other than by giving them a corrective upvote—is always a mistake, as is making the thread worse by complaining about it.
HN's voting system is flawed, but I've yet to hear of any alternative to downvoting that wouldn't, in my view, make the quality problem worse.
Downvoting already seems to do its job affecting the sort order of the threads - people who want to avoid low karma threads can just not scroll down to see them.
The thing about sort order is that it only applies to root comments, and plenty of downvoteable comments get attached to higher-ranking ones. So it doesn't feel to me like sort order is sufficient.
Yes, not showing it at all, or maybe not showing it immediately. Initially, downvotes don't really provide concrete feedback other than "someone disagreed with this for reasons," since there are no real guidelines for downvoting. But if a comment gets downvoted more than a few times and not corrected by the community, the commenter has likely crossed some line the community in general agrees on.
>The thing about sort order is that it only applies to root comments (...)
Fair enough, but why not sort the entire tree then?
Interesting. Will think about that.
> Fair enough, but why not sort the entire tree then?
I might be misunderstanding you, but I don't think you can't do that without giving up threaded comments (i.e. comment trees). That is, if a good comment is at the top and a heavily downvoted comment is its only reply, the latter will be second from the top no matter what we do. No?
Then again, I have a script that edits the "fade" effect to still be readable (it changes it to green instead, like new usernames).
It frustrates me that I have to use said script, however.
I really don't like that heavily downvoted comments are invisible, it's literally silencing the opposition in a way.
Upvotes only lets people surface the stuff they think is really good. The upvote action is inspired by strong agreement or liking of a comment, or respect. Down vote is almost always a negative emotion.