

Ask HN: Downvote for disagreement in some cases? - andrewljohnson

In general, I won't downvote a comment that I don't agree with. However, if there is a comment and a reply, and both have lots of votes, I'll vote up the one I agree with, and downvote the one I disagree with.<p>Is that good etiquette?
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revorad
This comes up all the time here. Most people use downvotes for disagreement.
Gotta live with it.

More importantly, TrailBehind looks nice. How's it going?

Edit: Case in point. Someone downvoted this comment to 0. But I think it will
come back up. I think with the growing numbers of HN, a lot of rogue voters
have come along, who just like to screw around.

~~~
andrewljohnson
We actually haven't touched TrailBehind in well over a year. We switched to
developing iOS and Android apps, and we never looked back.

We do still use the TrailBehind data in our apps, and that's one of the main
things that differentiates our apps against competitors. But we pivoted
because there was no money in TrailBehind.

~~~
revorad
Were you trying to sell web subscriptions before you turned to mobile apps?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Nope, we got the site up to 1000 uniques a day. Then we put some ads up. After
determining that even if we could 10X our ad returns and 100X our traffic,
we'd still be making pretty paltry money, we switched away.

I suppose we could have tried to be more like Trails.com, but the site is
pretty much a search engine, so we didn't "own" any data besides the index. We
just linked through to the appropriate reports about places.

If I ever get some time, I'd love to revive and finish TrailBehind. It was my
first big programming project, and it was growing, but there was just no
money.

It still gets tons of visits everyday. Turn off Javascript and you'll see we
did some interesting SEO stuff.

~~~
revorad
If you mean Google ads, then that sounds like a common story. Did you try
approaching advertisers directly?

One thing I hardly see anyone do, instead of just running CPC/CPM ads, is
actually sell products related to their apps. For example, considering you've
already got a site with good traffic, you could create your own niche store of
sorts, in which you sell products of interest to your audience. That could
include your own mobile apps, other complementary apps, physical goods. You
could also sell well-thought out bundles of such products, so that you are not
competing with big discount sites which can sell single items for cheap. Offer
people good products with convenience and awesome customer service, ride the
social network craziness and you could do quite well.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Yeah, we had all of those thoughts. It's just a lot of work, and we also
wanted to be writing software, not calling people about ads. We do advertise
our mobile apps on the site now. We tried the following kinds of ads:

* AdSense

* a home-brewed system that recommended Amazon maps/books based on the map

* ads for our apps

* ads for custom topo maps of the area in view from MyTopo (These worked the best)

We really haven't been unhappy with our decision. There's a lot of money in
the mobile space, and we have even mostly pivoted away from hiking. We have
our hiking apps, but we also license our mapping platform to other companies
and collect royalties. We power everything from flying and boating, to hiking
and wine-country apps now.

My only regret is not pivoting from TrailBehind faster!

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jeffmould
Personally I don't think downvoting just because you disagree is good
etiquette. Especially if you are upvoting the other. I view a downvote
warranted only when a comment is rude, off-topic, or just unhelpful to the
conversation (such "i agree" or "i disagree" with no other information
provided). Everyone is entitled to have an opinion and just because you, or
anyone else, doesn't agree with that opinion does not mean that their comment
wasn't well thought and insightful. I have disagreed with people's comments,
but their argument and presentation was excellent that I upvoted their
comment.

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AdamGibbins
If I could downvote, which I cannot at this point in time, I think I'd only
downvote people who state false facts (not opinion) or "flamers" and those
that do not contribute to the discussion at hand.

I've no objection to people expressing their opinion in a decent manner, even
if I disagree. I upvote those that I agree with and leave those that I don't.

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oomkiller
This is something alarming I've seen recently. I cannot quote any specific
source, but as long as I've been around, you're only supposed to downvote
comments that add nothing to the discussion. Now sometimes this is a gray
area, as you are biased. I don't think this is something we can fix, you just
kind to have to deal with it. That said, if someone types up a thoughtful
comment, and you disagree with it, you should probably actually upvote it
rather than downvoting it, since it adds to the discussion. If you haven't
figured it out by now, disagreement is good for a community, because it causes
people to think about what they believe. In my experience, if you remove
disagreement, you can't have intelligent discussions.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Well, in general, I agree.

But what happens when you have two 50 point comments? I would like to signal
which person I think is winning the argument, and enshrine the best comment
with the most votes, forever on the internet.

If a comment already has tons of points, it's not going to get buried. But I
think it's positive if the crowd judges the merits of the arguments and tries
to distinguish the best comment for future readers.

Maybe it's less appropriate here where "right" and "wrong" are often unclear.
But in forums like StackOverflow, I would like people to downvote the lesser
answers, even if they don't totally suck.

~~~
oomkiller
Well, according to my method, both might deserve upvotes, because they both
add to the conversation. In my opinion, karma is for people who make
thoughtful comments, not ones that the most people agree with.

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elliottcarlson
I tried making that point in a thread earlier (which start-up inspired you
most in 2010) - I upvote threads that interest me, and I upvote comments that
add value to the thread. If I had downvote access I would use it for
flamebait, complete fallacies and and anything really offtopic. IMHO opinions,
especially in threads asking for opinions, should never be downvoted, and I
would upvote the ones I agree with.

Just because someone disagrees with opinion it doesn't make it a valid
opinion. In the thread example I gave, what if I downvoted World Lens or Quora
(not that I would - they are awesome) just because I disagreed - I think it
would take away from the threads purpose.

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te_platt
Upvote what you want more of. Downvote sparingly. I usually upvote more on
comments I agree with and reserve downvoting for rudeness or gross stupidity
(regular stupidity is better dealt with with a comment).

------
Locke1689
pg has said downmodding is ok for disagreement.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

