
The default form of disagreement - rbanffy
Ask HN: Has modding down become the default way of disagreeing with a post? What happened to "I disagree with you because of X, Y and Z"? Why so many people prefer to mod down instead of engaging in a discussion?
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pg
IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have
always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score
has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has
a sufficiently negative score.

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noodle
seems like we have this discussion like once a week. i have several comments
in similar threads that are all now under dead submissions.

i think the better point to be made is that people downvote opinions that they
don't agree with (as opposed to downvoting something factually inaccurate or
bad in some other way). its good to have different points of view, and if
people get punished for expressing the unpopular one, fewer people will
express them.

