
Ask HN: Could downvoting work better if a reason had to be entered? - j45
The ability to provide meaningful and respectful feedback is as important as someone who may provoke or try to stir trouble.<p>I&#x27;m curious if YC has toyed with the idea of increasing the right to downvote to have to include a comment, explanation, or reasoning that is not a few characters.
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austincheney
I used to challenge people with this on Reddit and the results were sometimes
silly ridiculous. In an echo chamber like environment people sometimes
downvote because they are compelled by the gravity of Reddit’s visible vote
count and sometimes because they are willfully using a downvote as a blunt
weapon to suppress a challenging opinion. Yet when you compel people to put
that into words the results are clearly a form of cognitive complexity with
people twisting themselves into knots to describe their own behavior in a
meaningful way. That absurdity aside I would notice that the challenge of
asking people to qualify their downvote would slow or halt the pace of the
echo chamber foolishness.

HN is not Reddit though. The maximum downvote count is 5 reducing a comment to
a score of -4 and aside from the color fading of negativity scored comments
vote counts are not published. The majority of users and discussions are also
generally superior to those of Reddit as well.

Even with that said problematic discussions do happen on HN even if far more
rarely. The reason for the problematic behavior, as many people clearly
identify, is people looking for agreement more than discussion or insight. In
this case people on HN engaging conversations only for agreement are generally
eager to advertise their censoring foolishness and insecurity.

Aside from contrived political discussions downvotes are generally reserved
for comments that are far off topic or impose violating behavior.

Either way the biggest change this would result is visibly associating a user
to their down vote. Otherwise, I don’t see this having a dramatic impact on
HN. This would have a huge impact at Reddit though.

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j45
Thanks for your detailed reply!

Echo chambers are exactly the thing to avoid, both up and downvoting.

We know that downvoting will suppress activity more than upvoting.

The downvoting limit to -4 is a new to me so thanks for sharing that.

Perhaps the downvote reason could be published anonymously to the original
poster and doesn't have to be public... or that could be optional.

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grzm
An extensive explanation from 'dang, 10 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864278)

An excerpt:

> _The counterargument is that, just as with downvote-reason-giving, downvote-
> reason-reviewing would be dominated by the same forces as downvoting in the
> first place. You wouldn 't get more signal, just more complexity, plus a lot
> more work—both because of the reviewing itself, and because of meta-quarrels
> about reasons and reason-reviews._

There's been a lot of comments and other Ask HNs on this and related topics in
the past. The search box can at the bottom of the page can help you find some
of this.

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j45
Sweet, thanks!

Part of me wonders if it would be an expensive temporary experiment instead of
trying to imagine it.

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gtirloni
Downvotes are a valuable signal. Adding that kind of friction means most
people won't bother.

Maybe it could work if there were pre-determined answers one could select (so
it's faster) but I don't see how the simple UI could display that.

Food for thought: should upvotes require a reason too?

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j45
Food for the food for thought: Is more learnt from disagreeing, or agreeing?

I don't think people mind being wrong.

Or maybe people like pointing out others are wrong more than sticking around
for the conversation.

We do know the quality and diversity of opinion and conversation doesn't
suffer from upvoting, but it can be suppressd by downvoting.

If downvoting had a requirement of a one sentence input, that was maybe
anonymized or made only visible to the OP... maybe there's something there.

How many downvotes wouldn't happen if it wasn't quite bad enough to articulate
into one sentence?

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wolco
The quality can be affected by poor upvoting. I've seen too many examples
where the first comment is incorrect technically.

Adding a reason wouldn't help.

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j45
Maybe providing a reason over a certain number of upvotes might be a good
idea.

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Legogris
I think a large part of the problem is the ambiguity and subjectivity of what
upvote/downvote is supposed to represent. Upvoting can signify intent to
promote visibility (intended meaning on HN, I think), agreement with opinions,
amusement, compassion, relevance.

Oftentimes these are in conflict. Do I upvote a comment that IMO presents
dangerous thoughts built on false assumptions and flawed reasoning, but that
has a solid dismissal and spawns a great and honest conversation subthread?
When we see highly voted and opinionated comments, I think we all generally
believe this is because most voters agreed with the sentiment. I have no
issues downvoting useless comments I disagree with, but these are tricky.
There are other situations when the mixing signals become an issue.

I've been brooding on how a more multi-faceted voting system would work - how
many dimensions are there, how are they presented and how do they affect
thread rendering? What's the right balance and how specific should it be for
different communities (think subreddits)? My hunch is that 1 (status quo) is
too little and 5 too many.

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sjg007
Slashdot did a version of this or maybe still does. It’s time consuming. Also
people tend to vote ideologically and down vote if they disagree even if you
have something interesting to say.

There are a lot of topics that people passionately argue in which they are not
expert and it’s disheartening. It’s News for Nerds but we can be a fickle
bunch. I think the posts that are tech go better than others.

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gentleman11
I think it might do even more good to leave the system as-is, but add a short
pop up whenever you upvote or downvote (clickthrough, lasts 1 second) that
says “this made me think” or “this doesn’t promote discussion.” That sort of
cue would subtly encourage good culture on a forum and it’s the sort of thing
I plan to include in my own systems one day (if it comes up)

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beamatronic
Love this idea!

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beamatronic
Curious why the downvotes.

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j45
Maybe someone trying to be epic, or funny

