
Ask HN: What intention are upvotes and downvotes meant to signal on HN? - tareqak
The guidelines and the FAQ don&#x27;t have anything about it [0][1]. I remember reading comments from way back when that an upvote means something along the lines of &quot;this comment adds constructively to the conversation&quot;. In that case, the downvote button would just be the negation, right? If that is truly the intended use, then I think this use differs substantially from the agree&#x2F;like and disagree&#x2F;dislike semantics that other sites use such that it merits some documentation.<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsfaq.html
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elefantastisch
Perhaps it is instructive to note what votes _do_. Voting something up
incentives the person submitting / commenting to do so more often in the way
they did when they earned the upvote and it also makes the content visible to
more users. Voting something down does the opposite. It disincentives
contributing more in the same fashion and it makes the content visible to
fewer users.

So...

upvote == more of this please / more people should see this

downvote == less of this please / no one needs to see this

(And incidentally, flag == this is vastly inappropriate and not even worthy of
a vote)

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bitxbitxbitcoin
I wonder if HN would release stats on how often people downvote AND flag.
Anecdata - I do both while it seems you only do one or the other. What about
others?

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masonic
I only use comment _flags_ to signal that this comment _warrants the attention
of mods_ regardless of whether I disagree with whatever opinion it includes.

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oldmancoyote
Thinking back about the down votes I have received, they seemed more about
disagreeing than wether the comment contributed.

When I am down voted, I am strongly inclined not to contribute anything (of
any sort) again. It takes a while before I recover my intention to contribute,
however there is a cumulative effect that will eventually cause me to
permanently disengage from HN.

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tlb
Upvote and downvote are defined by their operational semantics. There are no
formally defined denotational semantics as you're asking for.

The operational semantics are simply that comments are sorted by (upvotes -
downvotes), and grayed out if that goes negative. (It's slightly more
complicated, but that's the dominant factor.)

Most people read comments starting at the top, and give up when the comments
devolve into crap. So the important thing is to upvote comments worth reading.

I upvote things I disagree with if they make an interesting and coherent
argument. Perhaps most people would say the same, although people have widely
varying inclinations to find things they disagree with interesting.

