

Suggest HN: Downvote button should prompt for a comment - overgard

The idea is pretty simple: if you go to downvote a comment, the system should prompt for a comment of your own as to why you're doing so.<p>I have a few reasons why I think this would be a good idea:<p>A) Downvoting someone without a comment doesn't give the user context for /why/ it was downvoted, leaving them in a confused state. Did someone merely disagree, or did the comment violate an unspoken community rule?<p>In essence, a teaching moment is lost. A downvote with a comment lets people know what the community expects, which helps us to maintain what hacker news is about. When new users see a marginalized comment, they'll know why that happened.<p>B) It's well known in psychology that people tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. A score of -4 is a lot worse feeling than a score of +4 is positive feeling. This has a subtle effect on user incentives.<p>In the current system, I think it incentivizes people to post something that they know will be popular but that doesn't add much to the discussion, rather than something interesting but perhaps more nuanced and easily misunderstood. By adding slightly more friction to the down voting process, I think it will make people more thoughtful as to why they're doing it. I think this will also add more civility to the discussions.
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ColinWright
Better yet, remove the downvote entirely. People are using it unthinkingly in
drive-bys to say they disagree, rather than it's original intended purpose of
"This is inappropriate for HN." Soliciting a comment won't make them comment -
they'll ignore it, or insert something inane.

You can't change people's behavior, and I think the "down vote" should
disappear. Let us work on reinforcing rather than punishing.

Things that genuinely don't belong should be flagged. Further, things that are
flagged should be _raised_ in the rankings, not lowered, until they get to the
point where they have enough flags to be deleted. This would mean that
genuinely inappropriate items/submissions/comments would become more visible,
so they get more flags more quickly and get deleted more quickly than happens
now.

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lukesandberg
maybe we should use the stackoverflow flag concept? that way you could flag an
item for being:

* off topic * inappropriate/offensive * low quality or 'noise' * other (which would require a comment)

then down votes could be removed entirely (or at least deprecated) and if an
item was flagged enough the item could be removed.

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overgard
That could also work. I think the advantage of a more personalized message is
it's a bit more human. If I'm downvoted for something I'm more inclined to
take the message to heart and not be offended if someone took the time to
explain something rather than just attach a label on it. I do think what you
describe has the advantage of being easier to understand though, and
accomplishes many of the same goals.

