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Comment by lukeqsee | Hacker News Reader

> Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."

I've noticed downvotes recently on these style of comments. Like the above states, I think it's important we do not discourage the basic civility of a "thank you".

Edit: I think this is of particular import on comment threads, not submissions. I agree with s_dev and edpichler that an upvote is similar enough to a "thank you" to render the later unnecessary. However, my key point remains that downvoting a neutral comment is not the proper way to address it. Perhaps I'm wrong?

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I have noticed a few of my comments being down voted because people disagree with them lately. I feel that they qualified as substantial and weren't blatantly incorrect, but weren't what other people were looking for.

Downvoting a comment should be reserved for comments that we don't want other people to read. Things that are rude, blatantly false, or in general against the guidelines.

I don't think we should downvote things we disagree with, because to some users a downvote says, your comment isn't wanted here please take it somewhere else.

This isn't about points but instead the message you want to send to the author of the comment. If you do want to downvote someone because you disagree, could that instead be turned into a comment that might enlighten them and anyone else reading the thread?

Edit: I don't want to say that these downvotes were unfair, but more about users not following my subjective definition of the real purpose of a downvote which is to discourage conversation on that thread.

And that kind of problem underlies a growing issue with HN.

>As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening.

There has always been a push for maintaining quality but more and more users are ignoring everything on this page. In your case that would mean that there's not only a growing amount of people who are downvoting who they disagree with but also that those users are getting a significant amount of karma. The theory is that by the time someone has enough karma to downvote posts they are already trustworthy to vote for content that adds to the discussion, this is starting to break down and it's only going to get worse.

It would be useful if you provided some examples of comments that you felt were unfairly downvoted.

Don't forget that your comments didn't just attract downvotes - they also failed to attract upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9891402

This is the link I was referring to. There are a number of other comments I've made in there that have also been down voted.

I think it was downvoted based on disagreement instead of for the content. If I could have edited this comment I would have been a little more clear with you'd see in some of my subsequent comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893764 This and a linked comment both received downvotes about the same time as I published this thread. The comments stopped and the conversation was over with a punctuated You are wrong! It's a bad way to be rewarded for trying to participate in a conversation.

But it happens. I don't want to blame anyone, I just think we need to think more when we vote as a community.

Edit: later comments even substantial ones can fail to attract upvotes just based on when you submit. And many of the people who read that far down tend to be the ones who downvote a day later (but this is only my opinion with no data to back it up).

The argument over the purpose of downvotes usually devolves into "it's OK to downvote to express disagreement" vs. "downvotes should only be used for bad (dumb, abusive, or inciteful) content". But I think there's a third option, and it's the way that HN actually behaves:

Voting is used to bubble good content up and bad content down.

That is to say, your comments don't fall under the umbrellas of "dumb", "abusive", or "inciteful", but they might be a distraction from the main thread, or they might not be carefully enough considered -- it's not just that voters disagree, but also that they don't think the comments belong near the top of the threads.

It doesn't look like the score went below maybe -2 ... that's really not that severe, and usually indicates a gentle "this isn't a good quality comment" signal.

Wouldn't it be more useful for someone to come along and say, "Hey this comment seems to be fairly low quality, do you mind editing it to clarify your opinion so it's easier to understand?"

I've actually had this happen to me on HN before and I was able to take a breath, take some time and improve the content of my comment, which helped improve HN as a whole on a very small level.

If we use gentle downvoting to indicate bad quality comments it's much harder to separate that from disagreement / negative comments. It might be time for HN to adopt a technical solution to keep the quality it has always had present. (I.E. private messages, or comments that aren't about content but directly to OP, or flags to indicate that a comment could use editing/rephrasing/deletion sent to the OP (along with a count of these flags))

This would everyone know what is wrong with their comment rather then having to speculate on what they did wrong, so they can learn and improve in the future.

Maybe, but HN suffers quite as a bit as a forum. It's not really productive to go back and edit a comment to improve its quality. The half-life of even a popular thread on the front page is only a few hours, with a very long tail, so you might spend ten minutes editing a comment you made an hour ago all so that only three people will ever read it.

For better or worse, downvote-to-sort-by-quality is a lot more efficient, and a lot less noisy.

Read this as less of a disagreement with you and more of a criticism of HN as a place for high-quality discussions.

I think the concern is mostly having the comments overwhelmed by "Me too"/"Thank you"/"+1" comments. Appreciation is welcome, swamping interesting content in empty comments less so.

I agree. However, downvoting is not the same as not upvoting. I think it makes sense for "thank you" comments to eventually find their way to the bottom of the comment list because they don't add substantively.

But it also creates a community of enforcers of trivial rules who never contribute anything outside that. Good example of that is mathstackexchange. There are users on there whose sole existence on that site is to remove "thank-you"s from the questions.

The reason that's a problem is because mathstackexchange rewards people for moderating. HN doesn't (as far as I know) reward people for downvoting, so you're not going to get people downvoting thank-yous so they can get more internet points.

If I had had the chance to both win mathstackexchange AND the Internet.. The resultant joy would be so profoundly overwhelming that I would probably have to leave the grid and start a sustainable kale juicing company.

Several times, I've had my "Thanks" post downvoted on threads where the entirety of replies was less than a screenful. IMO courtesy is never a bad thing, particularly when someone takes the time to answer a question you asked. An upvote is (to my knowledge) anonymous.

However, "Me too" is best done with an upvote.

I think pg is wrong here. We're all fans of brevity here but a simple thank you far too often simply lacks substance or insight to upvote.

Reiterating that strong effort needs to be made to resist the possibly inevitable decline in quality - simply getting rid of one or two word comments is actually good general rule even if it results in some otherwise courteous people getting downvoted.

An upvote should mean "Thanks" - saying it is redundant.

When I've had people explicitly say "thanks", that's meant more to me than upvotes.

There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to be the default way to express approval, but it does seem valuable to have both available.

(Downvoting thank-you posts is one way to keep them available without losing their value, but I'm not sure it's the best way.)

Throwing an idea out there - I haven't received many thank-you comments, but my favourite along those lines came through my anonymous feedback form, http://sayat.me/philh. If there was a community norm of people having those, then people could easily make thank-you comments that didn't clutter the page.

(I wouldn't usually want someone using email for that, because then I'd feel obliged to respond.)

(This is kind of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I'd like them to be a norm for other reasons too. Unfortunately they can also be used for bullying, so I don't know how realistic that is.)

Maybe Hacker News could have public and private comments. Private comments would essentially be dead comments that could only be visible and active for the person being replied to.

Taking the time to write a slightly more thoughtful "thank you" comment usually does the job just fine.

"Thank you."

vs.

"Thank you for taking the time to write this, this topic has been on my mind recently and you really helped me figure this out."

The latter doesn't usually get downvoted, and sometimes even gets promoted a bit.

PG doesn't seem to say "upvote 'thanks!' posts", but "don't downvote 'thanks!' posts".

Which does more damage to the community, brief thank you comments or the tangential discussions that inevitably break out around them, when a single such comment is downvoted then the downvote is explained?

I think some allowance needs to be made for the fact that most comments lack much substance or insight, since most commenters are having conversations with one another, not engaging in formal debate or rhetoric. I personally suspect the threaded nature of the forums encourages this behavior, whether pg intended it to or not.

Perhaps a word limit could be added to the comments, but guaranteeing comments are more verbose doesn't really guarantee higher intellectual quality. If the noise caused by short comments is an issue then perhaps /newcomments could be filtered so that it only displays replies to the root post (which are most likely to be focused on the subject at hand) or doesn't display very short comments.

Given the assumption the site makes by increasing the posting timeout in deep threads (which i've come to grudgingly agree with) that incivility tends to increase the more deeply into a thread you go, this might also reduce the visibility of and engagement with toxic comments.

In a small-group conversation thank yous make sense. When there are thousands of people reading the thread, not so much (e.g. it would be weird to say thank you to a conference speaker in the middle of their talk). Upvotes serve the purpose much better - they demonstrate gratitude, they make the receiver feel appreciated, but they don't waste everyone else's time. I would rather not see comments that are just "thanks", even to myself.

I think that if you are upvoting a submission, you are already saying "thank you".

An upvote should actually be more about wanting others to read a substantial comment, a thank you is more personal to me. It means, hey this really touched me in a profound way (which I might even explain) but I want you to know who it affected by leaving this comment.

Which is why I don't think downvoting is appropriate for them.

So are you in favor that people should use the comments to thank everything that touches them? You can send an email to the author on his profile page, if you want to. This attitude is good and will not ruin the page for other people that are just interested in good information.

There are "Thanks" comments that are genuine appreciation for a correction or the revelation of a new piece of information - and then there are "Thanks" comments that are basically just a "This" in a slightly different form. The "This" pattern and anything like it should be downvoted with extreme prejudice.

I agree. But what I don't get is why your comment is being downvoted. An upvote really should be more of a"this" than a "thanks." A downvoted should be a "not this."

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