
Ask HN: Is there a better way for HN comment voting to work? - microcolonel
I really enjoy the conversations I see and engage with on Hacker News. However, the way that downvoting works seems to miss an opportunity for more productive discussion.<p>I often find that something I&#x27;ve said is downvoted, and I have no idea what objection they could have (e.g. I am sharing a personal experience without a value judgement or opinion).<p>One potential solution I&#x27;ve thought of is to require users to either upvote a reply, or write their own, before they may downvote a post.<p>I&#x27;m interested to see what other solutions could be considered for this issue. Maybe some people are abusing the feature as a form of &quot;double upvote&quot;, and maybe solving that some other way would be less heavy-handed.
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paulpauper
I think down-votes should count half as much as up-votes. Often for
controversial topics posts that go against the consensus will get more down-
votes than up-votes

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karmakaze
Despite being geometrically opposite, a down-vote is not the opposite of an
up-vote. An upvote is for agreement or whatever else you choose it to mean.

Read the comments section of the guidelines[0]. Which says that disagreement
should be commented on in a clear, direct, polite manner.

A down-vote is for flagging an improper comment. Regardless of how much you
disagree, if the comment could have merit from another viewpoint it doesn't
warrent a downvote.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

