
Tell HN: Downvotes and Upvotes - socmag
Just a suggestion, but it strikes me, votes in general should be disallowed.<p>Simply make your points and counterpoints.<p>I vote that the Earth is not flat.  I don&#x27;t want to hear down votes or up votes, I want to hear coherent and concise theories why I am right or wrong.<p>Down votes are cowardly without comments at the very least.<p>This place should be a venue for peer revue, not an exercise in US politics.<p>Just a thought.
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narrowrail
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188859)
"Downvotes", 7 years ago, 94 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987201)
"Hacker News, now with downvotes", 6 years ago, 45 comments

"Ask HN: What is your method for up/down votes?", 721 days ago, 68 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214398)
"Ask PG: Are people getting more liberal with their downvotes?", 3107 days
ago, 62 comments

You can see more previous discussions in this query:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downvotes&sort=byPopularity&pr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downvotes&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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bikamonki
While no system is perfect, I disagree. Mainly b/c I find it too limiting to
bubble up a link based on comments count alone; and secondly, a down-vote with
no explanation will teach new users _group etiquette_ more effectively. On
down-votes some false positives will happen but overall the system works and
HN has avoided the fate of many other forums filled with flames and trash.

~~~
dvdhnt
I like your response.

Do you think there's any value in ordering by read count? Or by randomly
pushing a new or unread comment to the top? I'm wondering if we're ever
missing a good comment or thought because it's late to the party.

~~~
bikamonki
Maybe read/click count is hackable (bots?) and there is plenty of motivation
to taint the system (new products would love to make it to the top of HN).
Humans up/down voting seems fairer, no?

~~~
dvdhnt
You're absolutely right. I was thinking about that while posting my original
comment. I wonder if you can ensure that "read/click" is only incremented if
the appropriate cookie is present.

That, too, I'm assuming is hackable. Then again, up/down seems as hackable. I
mean, the link click is just calling a handler:

<a id="up_13164626" onclick="return vote(event, this, &quot;up&quot;)"
href="vote?id=13164626&amp;how=up&amp;auth=08cc6438787bda18f8904afcf50af38e31d34824&amp;goto=reply%3Fgoto%3Dthreads%3Fid%3Ddvdhnt%2313164626%26id%3D13164626#13164626"><div
class="votearrow" title="upvote"></div></a>

Perhaps the auth attribute is a random CSRF token, while the end of the href
appears to be this comments URL. It seems like we could use the same idea,
hijacking the navigation event on the link itself, applying a CSRF/auth token,
and incrementing the read/click count. Seems like this would basically be the
kind of granular auth allowed by service like Google Docs.

Just spitballing.

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CalChris
Down votes are a good thing. When I get them, and I do, I wonder why I got
them. Sometimes I'm OK with that. Sometimes I wonder if I've been
misunderstood and could have written it better. Either which way, it's blunt,
simple and useful feedback.

~~~
lh7
> Sometimes I'm OK with that. Sometimes I wonder if I've been misunderstood
> and could have written it better.

And if you had an actual reply telling you what "wrong" with your post,
wouldn't that be more useful? Sometimes people downvote simply because they
misunderstood/misread your post.

> Either which way, it's blunt, simple and useful feedback.

I'll give you "simple" out of those three. What is "blunt" about it? And for
useful, see above.

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Mz
_This place should be a venue for peer revue_

Upvotes and downvotes are part of the peer review here. It helps signal who
tends to say something of value consistently.

I have been here a while. This issue gets brought up over and over, presumably
by new-ish people who didn't see the last zillion discussions.

They used to show vote count next to comments. It caused nasty discussions as
people vied for the most validation for their side of the argument. This got
the then mod dragged into a lot of things, a thing he didn't appreciate. So he
hid the counts and saw a steep drop in how much he got dragged into such
messes. So he was not inclined to go back to showing them when this caused a
stink from the user base as people felt that knowing the score for each
comment was useful information...blah blah blah.

Social stuff is inevitably a messy affair. HN does it far better than average.
I respectfully suggest you consider the possibility that what you consider to
be a bug is really a feature and part of why things run as relatively well as
they do here, in spite of being a space where (large numbers of disparate)
people come together.

Best.

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krapp
I prefer to be replied to rather than downvoted - the discussion here is of
greater value to me than blind attempts at operant conditioning without
context, and some of the best conversations I've had here have been with
people who disagree with me.

Unfortunately, downvoting without comment has been baked into HN culture since
the beginning, and as long as it's not explicitly against the guidelines,
people are free to do so without consequence.

However, given how diverse the userbase seems to be here, in terms of age,
locale, income, political alignment, etc, expecting a single definition of
what HN "should be" seems destined to fail, because there are multiple groups
with multiple, contradictory ideals. Just look at the reaction to dang's
attempt at banning political articles for a week to see an example of this in
action.

What would be more likely, that requiring comments for downvotes would result
in deeper engagement and higher quality discussion, or more flamebaiting and
divisiveness? In comment threads that are already volatile (and garner a
number of downvotes) I'm not certain the better angels of our nature would win
out. It would just result in more noise and more downvoting, as people began
to argue about the reasons provided for their downvotes.

Then again, I think HN should get rid of voting and karma altogether, so I'm
even more of an outlier than many here. Simply ignoring a comment with which
you disagree, but have no coherent or intelligent response for, is always an
option, and this community would be a better place if more people considered
it.

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bbcbasic
Upvotes help get great comments near the top of the page. It is not perfect
but better than simply being in time order and a great comment getting lost in
the middle.

Downvotes mean you can get bad comments towards the bottom. So that is good
too. But if you people reply instead of downvote, then trolls know they will
get lots of free troll food when they comment, so that will encourage them to
post more.

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lh7
Agree. Actually, just posted a related question a while ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13171928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13171928)).

And if you're going to have votes, at the very least those should be public,
as they are in some forums that I've come across and in some bug trackers.

Upvotes: the only point of those seems to be to serve as a form of "reward",
like "badges" and the like, to entice those with an insecurity problem to seek
some validation. The only ones benefiting from it are the site admins though,
as people tend to generate more content in order to collect "upvotes". Note I
said "more", not better quality. See Stackoverflow for example.

------
severine
Are there any published stats about voting in HN? Like daily/monthly number of
upvotes/downvotes, etc.

~~~
grzm
I think you might be able to get at some of that through one of the HN APIs,
but it would be aggregate in the sense that you would get the total score of a
story, not the votes that comprise it.

\- [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

\- [https://hn.algolia.com/api](https://hn.algolia.com/api)

