
Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.  - rokhayakebe
What is the point of downvoting someone?<p>I apologize to anyone who may take offense to the following, but I find it very barbaric.<p>Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion. I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them.<p>Maybe web communities are still primitive, or maybe there is a real flaw in current commenting/rating systems.<p>If there were some consequences to downvoting, i.e. we knew who downvoted whom, what do you think would be the result?
======
shrughes
I downvote the following kinds of comments:

\- comments that have a high excitement to information ratio, such as brief
comments that include profanity or attitude, and of course garbage one-liner
humor comments. But not good one-line comments (such as the best comeback of
all time), and usually not the kind that are nested two or more levels deep in
the tree.

\- most comments made in reply to an article that definitely should be
flagged.

\- comments that deliberately ignore standard English in a bad direction. For
example, those with sentences that end with the word "lol". On the other hand,
saying that you "... vote (up|down) to manipulate ..." is ignoring standard
English in a non-bad direction.

\- comments that show an inability to appreciate rational discussion or
approach things with a sufficient level of detachment. This often results a
chain of replies between persons A and B, with person B getting several
downvotes (by people voting for similar reasons) on every post and person A
getting upvotes. Sometimes both A and B both get downvoted. I think that when
people complain about being downvoted, usually it's because they were
downvoted for this reason and begin to feel persecuted.

\- certain types of self-indulgent comments. I suppose everybody writes
comments because they want to share _their_ opinion, but some are indulging
the poster's desire to tell others about his worldview without being written
in a way that could influence other people's worldviews. There were a lot of
these, if you want examples, in the justin.tv suicide thread.

\- comments that blandly recite a reader's opinion or reaction about an
article, that don't add information, especially when there's a long tail of
them and they're all the same. These are the less exciting kind of self-
indulgent comments.

Basically, with that formula, I vote with the intent of making this site
boring and unwelcoming with a high signal:noise ratio.

~~~
araneae
And yet, my only comments that actually get upvoted are garbage one-liner
humor comments.

EDIT: I believe this is what we call irony:
<http://i588.photobucket.com/albums/ss323/araneae/hn.png>

~~~
NathanKP
I upvoted you for the rather ironic screenshot. As for the best way to get
upvoted: "Agree with the rest of the crowd." HN is a very "Go with the flow"
crowd. In my observation it doesn't usually pay to have a difference of
opinion, which is slightly ironic since this site is aimed at hackers, who,
you would hope, should have unique viewpoints.

~~~
evgen
Every community has a set of shared assumptions and a particular viewpoint,
this is pretty much axiomatic given the definition of the term. Most forum
systems on the net are unable to deliver much nuance in terms of expressing
this viewpoint, so it is easy to perceive "groupthink" when the bulk of the
community disagrees with you. Where things get interesting/contentious is when
people who share community view A assume everyone else agrees with B and get
indignant or defensive when they discover that this view is not shared. There
is nothing about "hackers" or startups or other standard topics of this
community that necessitates a unique viewpoint, so why assume the rest of the
community is going to tolerate large divergence from a standardized norm? Too
much input from "unique" viewpoints usually leads to chaos, and that seems to
be one thing of which the community has a low tolerance.

------
bendotc
I always find opinions like these to be illuminating whenever people claim
that people don't care about karma, as it's obviously just a silly number in
some computer running this website. As it turns out, some people find losing
just 1 point to be indistinguishable from throwing a rock at the person.

For what it's worth, the downvote is for the comment, not the poster. It
influences a sorting algorithm that shapes the way people read as well as
serves as a signal for how the community feels about a given post. The value
of this signal is debatable, but that's the point.

When I personally down-vote your comment, it's because I think you're wrong or
your post is of zero or negative value (spam, noise, etc), and it really has
nothing to do with your worth as a person (or any desire to hurt you).

~~~
chrischen
Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of
negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions
being robbed.

The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button.

I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you
personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if
they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and contribute > 0 should be
upvoted.

~~~
viraptor
So what action do you propose for a situation where some person writes an
incorrect post and is then corrected, but the whole thread doesn't deserve to
be upvoted?

If you just upvote the correction, you mark it as significant in some way. But
if it's only correcting a flamebait, why would you? It seems to be better to
leave the correction there (so that people who read it get more information),
but force the whole thread to go down by downvoting the first incorrect post.
I think it's a good protection against flamewars which may contain a lot of
"correct" posts, but you may want to push them down anyways.

The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about
it.

~~~
chrischen
> The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about
> it.

Exactly. So rather than try to determine "correctness" because sometimes it is
subjective, just try to determine what's clearly "better."

Up voting better comments will have the side effect of pushing down comments
that are not as deserving.

~~~
Semiapies
If you can't judge a comment for a degree of "correctness", you can't judge
one comment as "better" than another.

~~~
chrischen
Yes you're right. We each have our own definition of "better," as we do have
for "correct." But it's less detrimental/errpr to just have you judge "better"
than to have you judge both "better" and "worse" which is what happens when we
allow judgements of "correct."

~~~
Semiapies
Why?

Really, please explain.

~~~
chrischen
Because we can still sort comment by just up voting. But removing down voting
would slow down the sorting process, therefore less power is there to disrupt
the organization of comments.

I'll agree this may be viewed as one disadvantage of the system, but it also
means there is less power in the individual to to push down the comment. It
would require a bunch of up votes _all_ the other comments in order to push
down a comment.

That's why letting people to only up vote is less capable of silencing an
opposition or unpopular view.

------
tokenadult
_I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another
person just because they do not agree with them._

You don't think there is any difference between throwing a rock at someone and
reducing their overall vote count by one vote in an electronic voting system?
If someone downvotes me, I have a reason to look again at what I posted and
whether or not it fit the discussion. If someone throws a rock at me, I have a
reason to report a case of assault to the police.

~~~
unalone
Both, however, are instances of expressing disapproval without in turn adding
something valuable. It was a ridiculous simile, but I understood his feeling
because it's one I have also. When I take time and effort to argue something
and get voted down, the message I'm given in liu of an actual counterpoint is
that my effort in a community has not been appreciated. It's not as drastic as
my being hit by a rock, but it's still something that engenders an emotional
response on my part.

Of course, I then go on to contribute to the pool of negativity by downvoting
people without responding to them, so it's not like I'm blaming everybody
who's ever downvoted. But I do understand where he's coming from.

~~~
borism
You're taking it too personally.

How do you know the reasons your post got downvoted?

And why do you revenge against community after that?

Community has it's moods too, if it annoys you too much at some particular
time you're always free to leave. That's what I do, but I know there's some
value in this community so I return. But revenge is simply immature.

------
auston
I vote (up|down) to manipulate the way a thread is displayed.

~~~
emmett
More generally, downvotes exist to provide negative feedback into the system.
It's a useful and well understood engineering principle that negative feedback
is a useful tool for molding the output of a system.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback>

------
robotrout
"What if we knew who downvoted whom, what would be the result?"

I love that idea, but extend it also to upvoting, and use it to create a
killer social network and/or dating site.

If you and I love the same ideas and hate the same ideas, than we should meet.
We may not enrich each others worldview, but that's what HN is for. You and I,
in such a scenario would probably get along really well and be great friends.
A great way to find that out is a "similarity heuristic" in voting patterns on
a site such as this one.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Then we would care [a little?] more about the person commenting and less about
the content of the comments. Perhaps content would still win but people would
be influenced with decisions like "he downvoted me" or "she believes Y" (where
Y is orthogonal to the issue) or dimiss salient point based on past arguments.

Which is fine if that's what you're after.

~~~
robotrout
The data would be pretty confusing, without analysis. I'm also assuming people
with enough of a life that they wouldn't try.

Instead of (or in addition to) raw upvote/downvote data, you get a
"compatibility score", where 100 means you're soul mates, and -100 means
you're mortal enemies!

------
crux
I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been
said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste. This is,
granted, a pretty wide area, but when somebody writes something egregiously
distasteful—whether it's a terrible sense of humor, or a misinformed
righteousness, or craven pandering to the self-important 'social media' upper
crust, or indeed the myopic, worthless blather of said upper crust—I am
aesthetically offended by that sort of thing. It offends my sense of decency,
my sense of wit and interestingness. I suffer in the same way as I do when I
witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed
when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with
someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual,
aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to
exorcise my pain.

Maybe that would be the easiest rule of thumb, then. If you say something
which would, if I were chatting with you at a cocktail party, make me
fearfully look for some excuse to go refill my drink, I will downvote you.

~~~
shiranaihito
> I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has
> been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste.

> I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on
> television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into
> a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in
> good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and
> therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.

Are you for real? I guess I should downvote you for deeply offending me by
needing to get over yourself.

But I won't, because I agree with the OP.

------
10ren
I've noticed that sometimes interesting answers get downvoted, and
irrelevant/badly thought-out answers get upvoted. So I don't take downvotes so
seriously now. However, there's a backlash: if I get a bunch of upvotes, I'll
now think that it's probably just a bunch of those idiot voters. Which in a
way is a good thing, because it means I have to fall back on my own judgment,
instead of being guided by karma. (I do listen to intelligent rebuttals and
counter view-points, as they have actual content, unlike a downvote).

For a long time, I didn't down-vote anyone. Now I'll sometimes downvote, to
put comments in the order of insightfulness; and very occasionally for
irrelevance/childishness. For really obnoxious comments, I'll downvote to grey
them, and also flag them. But my usual response is to reply "please elaborate"
(for a content-free comment), which offers the human behind the comment an
opportunity to grow into the community; or an impartial recital of the facts
(for a mistaken, inappropriate or irrelevant comment).

------
warp
_Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's
opinion._

If they do, they're doing it wrong. Downvote someone for not contributing to
the discussion.

~~~
fnid
_One_ of the problems is that people don't down vote for the same reasons.
Some down because they disagree, others to resort topics, others because they
don't like the person's comment, tone, bias, etc...

Without a consistent use of the down vote, the effect is undesired by most.

~~~
Semiapies
"the effect is undesired by most"

Says _who?_

~~~
fnid
says whoever upvoted me.

~~~
Semiapies
One person upvoted you, at the time of my writing this.

One person is not "most". Everyone commenting in this topic is not "most".
Everyone who's ever started a thread against down-voting is not "most", as
best as I can tell.

------
camccann
There's an interesting argument in favor of downvoting here:
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/>

For context, the author is someone who posts on HN and was (at the time)
trying to launch a new community.

------
jrockway
Ask the submitter: Why don't you get a blog?

Edit: OK, I will answer the question. People downmod to get people to convince
themselves to go away. Imagine I don't like your viewpoint, and you place
value on imaginary points I can take from you. I take those points, you get
upset, and you stop posting stuff I disagree with.

That's all there is to it; reinforcing groupthink.

Similarly upmods encourage people to keep submitting. Knowing that people like
your work encourages you to make more.

~~~
unalone
This is a very HN-focused point. No reason he can't just post it directly, in
this case.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
If someone posts something that is negative, detracts from the discussion, or
is generally of negative value, the way to provide feedback is to downmod. If
there is value to be had from doing so, a followup comment is indicated.

Many people downmod simply because they disagree, and I think that's wrong.
But that's my opinion. Personally, if a comment is of positive value I'll
upmod it, even if I don't agree with it.

------
anigbrowl
I don't think that most people downmod for just disagreement, but rather for
stupidity, noise, trolling. Sure, some people vote a comment down to express
disagreement, but their votes are often cancelled out. And it's not so unusual
to see two HN'ers having an argument and both gaining karma from it if their
arguments are well-formed, respectful, and informative.

On the other hand, comments such as 'more like CLOWNvote, amirite???' don't
really improve the quality of the discussion, do they?

------
DanielBMarkham
I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth
commenting on.

Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community
has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has
changed, and quite a bit.

The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment
was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his
position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting
upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.

Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a
pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down
scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce
community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to
conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor
quality" message?

I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and
actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to
do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me.
Probably also the time of the week and time of day.

In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.

~~~
Semiapies
Maybe responding to single comments out-of-context is a questionable
methodology.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I understand what you're saying, but my initial reaction is WTF! Now I need a
freaking methodology to surf the net?

I like to think of users as always being right, even when they do things I do
not expect or would not approve of. So in this case, even if it weren't me we
were talking about, I'd have to take the side of the user poking around at the
system, trying to get it to work as well as he can.

~~~
Semiapies
"Now I need a freaking methodology"

Sorry, I was trying to be less blunt than ending that sentence with "is a bad
idea."

"I like to think of users as always being right"

Here's the problem - you weren't a user being resisted by software in that
context. You were a person interacting with other people. You weren't poking
at a system, you were having a conversation.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes. Of course you are correct. I made the mistake of not being fully informed
about the conversation before responding.

But I still think overall this process works fine. I just need to take some
time to check out the entire thread first.

I view the board more like IRC -- a conversation can start one place and end
up somewhere else. So as long as you have 2-3 parents in mind when commenting,
you're free to go in a slightly new direction. Some folks, I imagine, view the
topics more hierarchically. The site design encourages both views, actually.

------
ax0n
I've never seen an option to downvote. It could be because I don't have enough
"points" in this game (130 as of the time I'm posting this) or it may be
because I haven't been around long enough. Once, I did try to downvote
something by kludging the "dir" variable. I was told I couldn't make that
vote. What parameters must be met for a person to get downvoting ability?

Enough with the goofy meta-talk, though. Since I don't have downvoting
ability, I didn't even know it existed until I saw comments with zero or
negative scores. Coming at it from my neophytic perspective, I am torn. At
first blush, "not upvoting" and "downvoting" seem like they would serve
similar functions: floating better content to the top. My only guess is that
downvoting is a catalyst that makes it happen faster.

The only things I've wanted to downvote if I could were trolling, spam, and
tangents. To that end, I think "not relevant or contributing to the
discussion" is probably the most popular reason.

------
jlees
It's just behavioural reinforcement. Upvote the positive but on the few
occasions someone acts out of line with the spirit of the community, there's
got to be a way to deal with them. Imagine a troll running rampant on HN with
no downvoting; it'd be hard to get them to stop, since there is no consequence
for their actions.

As it is, behaviour that acts out of the norm - lame jokes, empty-but-
offensive remarks and entirely pointless trivia - all tends to be rewarded
negatively, reinforcing the community values nicely. If you get downvoted,
it's usually simple enough to figure out why - and if it really is a
disagreement of opinion then the downvoters are doing it wrong, _or_ there's
also something about the way you express your opinion that is repellant.

~~~
aichcon
I agree that it enforces the spirit of the community. One of my first comments
was a joke and it was down-modded hard
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684509>). This quickly taught me the
community's expectations in terms of quality of comments.

------
iamelgringo
The possibility of downvotes creates an element of risk in posting a comment.
Without that element of risk the only deterrent to trolling or violating
community standards is deleting or banning by the moderators. Moderating a
site like this is an awful lot of work. The down vote arrow allows the
community to police itself.

It's certainly not perfect, people have been down voted to oblivion. Pg has
put in safeguards so people can only get down voted 5-10 points. I think that
it's helped keep the community on track.

People take their karma very seriously for some reason. Notice the amount of
angry posts when someone gets downvoted. :)

~~~
SlyShy
Respectfully, I doubt downvoting is a deterrent to any troll. Trolls are
already determined to anger the community. Downvoting is more of a deterrent
to people who care what the community thinks of them--they might refrain from
posting their contrary opinions as a result.

That said, I still think downvoting is a useful function, because the point is
to filter discussion.

~~~
Semiapies
I personally like that trolling comments tend to rapidly vanish into light-
gray text.

~~~
SlyShy
Yes, that's what I'm saying about the filtering, is that it serves to hide
trolling comments. That doesn't necessarily mean that it reduces the number of
trolls, as suggested by the parent.

------
onoj
I sort of agree with you, but I would only up vote to show that the topic /
comment was interesting, even if I did not agree with it . Up/down voting
because i agree or disagree is arrogant. If it makes people feel better, bully
for them. The danger is that a group of people will upvote a perspective and
alienate alternative points of view from a thread. This creates a narrow
minded culture and prevents interesting discussions. Ideally there is no point
posing to a thread you agree with if you have no content to add.

------
jeremyw
I'm impressed by the shifting voting trends when a new, dissenting
(sub)opinion is attached to a comment. A string of upvotes now is
halted/reversed. And the polarity change can happen several times. An
articulated position unleashes the silent thinker or is this a characteristic
of mob rule? (When it happens to me, it's mob rule. :)

I'm also terribly sad when someone is downvoted in an opinion-thread (e.g.
what is your favorite X). I wish one could mark a post as opinion or even
upvote-only.

~~~
Semiapies
Someone can be off-topic or troll in opinion threads. "What's your favorite
X?" is not the place for "Stop using different types of Xs and start using Ys,
noobs.", for example.

~~~
chrischen
As much as someone could type that, someone could also downvote because they
were _thinking_ that.

~~~
Semiapies
Indeed. And yet, while trolls get downvoted to pale gray happens, entire
threads getting their comments downvoted as far doesn't.

~~~
chrischen
Unpopular opinions can be down voted. And this does happen. While often it
doesn't matter that an unpopular opinion is down voted because it may in fact
be wrong, there will be certain cases where an unpopular but universally right
comment will be down voted. It will be grayed out. But with a system that
promotes and allows silencing unpopular comments, such a rare event will
almost always result in a down vote will not just marginalize it, but actually
suppress it.

------
Mathnerd314
It might be interesting to keep every vote for each comment and use something
like the Netflix prize algorithm to calculate whether you'd like the comment.
Hiding comments would then be based on personal preferences, rather than the
community at large. If nobody at all likes the comment, (i.e., it's spam or
something), then it can get removed automatically. Of course, this takes a lot
of work to implement, and it might require HN to have a longer privacy
policy...

------
marze
This all brings to mind Churchill's quote (paraphrased):

"Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all other
forms of government."

~~~
billswift
You might find Hoppe's book, [http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-
Politics-Monarchy-...](http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics-
Monarchy-
Natural/dp/0765808684/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257033804&sr=1-1) ,
interesting. He claims democracy is the worst form of government, period. (The
book is not easy reading and is pretty repetitive, but interesting.)

------
amalcon
Turn it around: why upvote someone? A downvote is equal and opposite to an
upvote; what makes the former "bad" and not the latter?

------
InclinedPlane
Downvoting has two aspects: reducing the visibility of a post and discouraging
the poster from making similar posts in the future. This can be used
maliciously (though to limited effect) against viewpoints you merely disagree
with. But it does have a legitimate use as well, when harmful or unhelpfully
disruptive information is posted.

A few examples to clarify these guidelines:

Spam and inappropriate material (this isn't 4chan).

Advice that is well known to be wrong and/or is very likely to be harmful if
followed, such as advising someone to embed raw SQL query strings in web
application parameters or to exclusively use javascript for client side input
sanitation (both of which would open up anyone to huge security
vulnerabilities).

Unnecessary or unfunny jokes (live by the sword, die by the sword, jokes
rarely improve discussion).

Completely off-topic material.

------
kyro
Voting is probably the easiest way to quickly express your (dis/ap)proval with
little effort, especially when the comment is so obviously insightful or
stupid.

Your analogy is a bit extreme, and I wouldn't mind people knowing whom I
up/downvoted.

------
brtzsnr
I usually downvote intentional bad or wrong answers (of course, I don't think
others opinion are wrong answers). It's more to inform the poster that he/she
generated 'noise'.

------
Mz
Of course, I dislike being downvoted. If I think it was because I was
misunderstood or misinterpreted, I will post in response to the downvote.
Clarification sometimes gets the original post upvoted, as well as the
clarification. If it's a case of "Yeah, I was trying to avoid getting into
that because I just knew it would go over badly and now I've been downvoted,
confirming what I thought" or a case of me just not saying something well
because I was having a bad day, I generally leave it alone. No point in
pouring gasoline on the fire, so to speak (which is generally what's going to
happen if I am already sticking my feet in my mouth because I don't feel well
and now I am all defensive and trying to "clarify"....downward spiral ensues).

On the one hand, I often do wish people would converse with me and tell me
what they "heard" that they think it's a bad comment. In many cases, it turns
out be a misunderstanding. The vast majority of meaning in face-to-face
communication comes from facial expression, body language, voice tone and
context. The actual words are a very small part of the meaning conveyed. But
on the 'Net, the words are about all we have. If two people come from very
different backgrounds, misunderstandings are practically guaranteed.

On the other hand, an Iranian friend once told me that there is a saying in
Iran: "Silence is the only good answer to stupid people." I would modify that
slightly to "Silence is the only good answer to something stupid." We all do
stupid stuff at times. It isn't proof we are generally stupid. It's just part
of the human condition. An anonymous downvote, though it may be upsetting to
the receiver, is probably a lot less destructive to the community than being
able to put a name to the criticism and having to try to express the criticism
in words. Running battles between two members who just don't ever agree on
anything can be very destructive to a forum. I think the capacity to downvote
helps avoid such outcomes.

I am still getting a feel for how HN works. But so far I am finding that the
system here seems to do a better job of minimizing some of the negative social
crapola you find everywhere. Conflict of interest will never go away.
Interpersonal friction between some members is inevitable. Spammers and all
kinds of other undesirable stuff is also a fact of life. There has to be a
means to address that. Warm-fuzzy 'let's only upvote people' solutions won't
work. It has no teeth.

------
mooism2
Downvoting is there to bury spam, swearing, bad behaviour, objectively false
information, etc.

Some people downvote to bury opinions they disagree with, which isn't good, I
agree.

~~~
jrockway
People downmod swearing? That's fucking stupid.

~~~
jodrellblank
Here I agree with the sentiment (swearing is OK and not what the downvote
button should be used for) but dislike the comment (a one line personal
attack).

Which is why there should be "agree/disagree" and "good/bad contribution"
buttons.

~~~
mquander
What's the utility of an agree/disagree button? I don't think I would want to
see that even if it was available to me.

I downvoted the parent comment because it's a crappy one-liner. It adds
nothing except to express that some people are cool with swearing, which is
not a very novel sentiment, and it does so in a way intended as flamebait.

~~~
chrischen
That's your opinion. To me, I thought it was a good one liner. See our
differing opinions? Down voting/flagging should be reserved for those comments
people mutually agree on as bad.

What's the difference between discouraging by threat of jail time and
discouraging vs social disapproval? Both are threats against you for certain
behaviors. While these threats may be justified for stuff people all agree on
are bad like racism, I do not think it's a good idea for subjective opinions.
It will lead to socially induced censorship and society as a whole will become
single-minded, afraid of thinking against the crowd.

I think HN should _foster_ the environment for unique thinking and
controversial comments. Sure there isn't official discouragement of certain
opinions, but if we allow the mob to do it it's practically the same thing.

~~~
mquander
I guess it boils down to this: I have absolutely no interest in reading a
website with comments like that. If a large proportion of comments were one-
line opinions and purely argumentative back-and-forths, I would just not
bother reading the HN comment sections. So I downvote it.

Now, I understand that you feel the opposite way. The only objective argument
I can make for my position is that there are a great number of general-
interest sites on the Internet with a huge amount of discussion which is on
par with "That's fucking stupid," but only a handful with discussion that is
consistently free of such comments and the associated derailing of the
conversation that they frequently bring. (Historically, it seems like the only
realistic way to weed them out is by keeping a community small or having heavy
active moderation.) I'd like to encourage more of the latter.

I don't really like your analogies between physical intimidation and violence
and downvoting, because the consequences of physical threats are so much more
serious. I can't understand how it's a serious harm to anyone to tell them
"you can't express viewpoints X, Y, or Z on Hacker News." It's a shame, but
it's one of the very smallest shames that can possibly be inflicted upon a
person.

I understand that you're concerned in an idealistic sense about the ethics of
using simple majority rule to tell someone "you can't say that," but I just
don't think it's a big concern in this context, when the whole Internet is an
ultimate egalitarian arena full of people saying anything and everything. The
much bigger problem, to me, is having so much content that you can't read the
really high-quality things because they are swamped with noise that adds
nothing, or almost nothing. (By high-quality things I mean ideas and arguments
that are novel, useful, and well-informed.)

~~~
chrischen
That's essentially what up voting is for. It is a one way distillation that
would also avoid any possible majority silencing of unpopular views.

We don't punish people for being dumb, we reward people who are smart.

Jail time is physical intimidation, but it is just one example of
intimidation. My point is that such physical intimidation is no different from
social intimidation upheld by the majority view in society. And such social
intimidation is _no different_ from down voting. Just as you were probably
taught by someone at some point in your life to _respect_ other's viewpoints,
we should foster that here too. Down voting because of differences in
viewpoint is _not_ a sign of respect.

And you can fully respect someone while still getting your share of the
"better" comments because there is still an up vote mechanism. Without down
vote simply means you can't disrespect comments that while are not overly
additive to the conversation, are also not overly disruptive either.

~~~
Semiapies
Meh. I've never had a problem with throwing out a dissident opinion on forums
with up/down moderation. I've often been surprised how fast I've gotten modded
_up_ when I've done that. People do react well to interesting, thought-
provoking arguments, and many will avoid down-modding them even when they
strongly disagree.

People do _not_ react well to complaints that people who disagree with them
are repressed or afraid, especially when the dissenter's expressed fear is
that they will be down-modded. (The same goes for the "This will get me down-
modded, but..." tactic.)

~~~
chrischen
There will always be many who will downvote simply to supress dissident
opinions.

Dissident opinions do not show up as much as mainstream ones, for obvious
reasons. So the opportunity for a good dissident response to be disregarded is
less. But when it does happen, it's much greater a loss to the overall
community.

------
BigZaphod
Your assumption that downvotes occur mostly as a result of disagreement may be
flawed. (I don't know myself, obviously, but it's not how I personally tend to
use the feature.)

The rest of your question/opinion is based on your perceived truth of your
initial assumption. I think we cannot proceed with any of that until we know
the first answer.

------
chrischen
I completely agree. And I suggested that the down vote be removed and replaced
with something like a flag. Flagging would be reserved for inappropriate
comments. Upvoting can be used to sort and rank the "better" comments.

Frankly if you disagree with a comment, reply, don't down vote.

------
derefr
Because the informationally-equivalent action of upvoting every comment
_other_ than yours is not only tedious, but leaves you without the ability to
upvote any other comment on its own merit.

------
prabodh
Can HN experiment with this...show the users who have downvoted one particular
comment or ..make the commenter name invisible until you up/down vote a
comment in a particular thread...

------
scott_s
My downmodding protocol (I rarely downvote):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361390>

------
Raphael_Amiard
>I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another
person just because they do not agree with them.

Can you really not see the difference ?

------
techiferous
The interface should provide two ways to vote: one for relevance (value) and
the other for agreement/disagreement.

------
quellhorst
I like how when you flag on craigslist you have to say why. If multiple people
flag, the post is removed.

------
Keyframe
Why not introduce a cost to both upvote and downvote of 1 karma point?

------
frou
On a similar topic, the primary use of "ignore lists" on forums appears to be
the opportunity to smugly announce that someone has been added to yours.

------
eli_s
It's just quality control.

For some reason people value karma. The possibility of a down vote makes you
think twice about posting rubbish.

From that perspective the system is working as intended :)

------
araneae
I downvote people who downvoted me before I could downvote. Karma's a bitch.

------
basdog22
The worst part is downvoting someone without expressing why you did it. For
example :

This is spam. Downvoted.

Most of the time people seem to just don't care about how someone else feels
when gets downvoted. In the case of an article this gets more frustrating
because there was effort to do it, document it and other things too. Even if
the article is not what you think of "cool" it doesn't mean that it doesn't
deserve an explanation on why it was downvoted. Some might say: This is the
internet, democracy etc... Democracy is also getting annoyed when someone
thinks of you like a "nothing". Other times, someone might post something that
he doesn't like, only to see if others feel the same too.

~~~
ax0n
I've had comments and submissions of mine downvoted before, and I didn't take
offense. The article or my comment was simply "unliked" rather than enjoyed
(upvoted) or met with indifference (left alone). Reading anything more into it
is kind of silly.

You certainly can't please everyone all the time.

~~~
chrischen
I think it's actually natural for people to feel offended, because down voting
is an active engagement.

There are actually 3 choices. Ignore, up vote, and down vote. Down vote is
taking the time and effort to click and purposely bury something. If it was
unliked it would have probably simply been ignored. I seriously doubt most
people read through each title and only either down vote or up vote. Most
would probably be ignored, with the particularly hated ones being more likely
down voted.

