

Ask HN:  Is voting on social news sites rude?  It would be in real life. - amichail

In real life, if people were to vote anonymously in real-time as to how interesting someone's comments are, it would be considered rude.<p>So why is this practice acceptable online?
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mooism2
Voting is not the point. The point is to bring to people's attention things
they will be interested in. HN/Reddit/etc do this through voting. Twitter does
it through retweeting, which is similar to how it happens offline.

So, it's acceptable because it's part of the medium.

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kakaylor
We implicitly "vote" in real life through our verbal and nonverbal reactions
to the comments of others.

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trustfundbaby
Its a different medium from real life hence the different mental model (You
don't go around poking people in real life but there it is on facebook right?)

Think of it as a public discussion about the article and when someone 'likes'
a comment, they're just nodding in approval ... which does actually happen in
real life.

Lots of head nods just means you're winning over the crowd.

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Mz
In real life, you are very unlikely to be interacting with your 60k closest
friends. Things that work in a setting of 5, 10 or 20 people don't work so
well on a very high traffic website like this one. This level of interaction
is basically unprecedented, so the world is still kind of fumbling around
trying to figure out how best to manage it. If you come up with some brilliant
alternative that works better, fabulous! Otherwise, I see no reason to
dismantle it and no reason to try to compare it to "IRL" interactions. It's
just not the same.

Peace.

