

Ask HN: Disable downvoting? - hartator

I feel downvoting is out of hand. People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn&#x27;t match the HN culture. Content should be about quality not conformity.
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SamReidHughes
> People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn't match
> the HN culture.

I know this affects me and suppresses my willingness to post. The result is
that I keep most of my shitty comments to myself. I behave much worse on other
discussion forums.

For example, if I have a countervailing opinion, on other forums often I'll
just post it, and the way I'll post it will be designed to make the people
that would disagree with them (prototypically, havers of idiotic European
political opinions) unhappy by making them witness opinions that they disagree
with. I do that with less frequency here -- here, I'll try to make it
palatable and relatable in a way that's not totally saturated with spergacious
obnoxiousness. I guess most of the reason is just the general expectation of
professionalism that's maintained here, not specific fear of negative karma,
but that atmosphere is not maintained by upvotes. (In fact, my most-upvoted
comments, not that I have many, are almost always pop vacuouity that I think
should have been downvoted.)

I think a lot of other people here would post a lot worse, too, without
downvotes and without the visible "fade" effect.

Edit: For example, here's a comment of mine that was rightfully downvoted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833)
My opinion is right, of course, but it could have been much better presented.
And here's a comment where I got downvoted for disagreeing with the thread-
local hivemind:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309)
So what if I got downvoted! Sometimes that's what you get when you engage with
idiots. It's not the end of the world.

------
dang
We certainly agree that HN comments should be of good quality.

What's usually lacking in these discussions about downvotes are specific
examples. I'm biased, but it seems to me that's because it's usually pretty
easy to see how downvoted comments got there. But you have to wait a while to
see the effect. Unfair downvotes happen, but the community usually corrects
them after a while. So reacting too quickly to unfair downvotes—other than by
giving them a corrective upvote—is always a mistake, as is making the thread
worse by complaining about it.

HN's voting system is flawed, but I've yet to hear of any alternative to
downvoting that wouldn't, in my view, make the quality problem worse.

~~~
krapp
Two things that might mitigate the effect of unfair downvoting (and reactions
to them), such as they are - removing the fade effect from comments until
they've reached a threshold of downvotes, and removing visible karma.

Downvoting already seems to do its job affecting the sort order of the threads
- people who want to avoid low karma threads can just not scroll down to see
them.

~~~
dang
By visible karma do you mean the point score that one sees beside one's own
comments? Taking that away would be a pretty drastic change.

The thing about sort order is that it only applies to root comments, and
plenty of downvoteable comments get attached to higher-ranking ones. So it
doesn't feel to me like sort order is sufficient.

~~~
krapp
>By visible karma do you mean the point score that one sees beside one's own
comments

Yes, not showing it at all, or maybe not showing it immediately. Initially,
downvotes don't really provide concrete feedback other than "someone disagreed
with this for reasons," since there are no real guidelines for downvoting. But
if a comment gets downvoted more than a few times and not corrected by the
community, the commenter has likely crossed some line the community in general
agrees on.

>The thing about sort order is that it only applies to root comments (...)

Fair enough, but why not sort the entire tree then?

~~~
dang
> Yes, not showing it at all, or maybe not showing it immediately

Interesting. Will think about that.

> Fair enough, but why not sort the entire tree then?

I might be misunderstanding you, but I don't think you can't do that without
giving up threaded comments (i.e. comment trees). That is, if a good comment
is at the top and a heavily downvoted comment is its only reply, the latter
will be second from the top no matter what we do. No?

~~~
krapp
What I meant is that for any node in the tree, sort the immediate children by
karma, and treat each level as a separate sort. You would still keep all of
the parent/child relationships, but the order they render in would change.

------
billconan
I strongly agree. People often downvote opposite opinions, not bad quality.

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benologist
At this point in time the top ten submissions have 355 comments, 7 of which
are grayed out, 1 of which is really grayed out. What makes you think it's out
of hand?

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fokinsean
Or allow anyone to downvote. I personally feel my opinions are oppressed by
the downvote overlords. Down with them I say!

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superobserver
Yep. I don't comment much any more. And don't forget only certain people get
to downvote as it is.

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TheLoneWolfling
I personally don't think downvoting is out of hand.

Then again, I have a script that edits the "fade" effect to still be readable
(it changes it to green instead, like new usernames).

It frustrates me that I have to use said script, however.

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MCRed
I feel the same way. I find that my comments result in three outcomes- nothing
significant, significant uproots or significant down votes. The ones with
significant down votes are not any different in quality than the ones with
significant uproots... however they are the ones that are less correlated with
what I'd call the "HN ideological positions".

I really don't like that heavily downvoted comments are invisible, it's
literally silencing the opposition in a way.

Upvotes only lets people surface the stuff they think is really good. The
upvote action is inspired by strong agreement or liking of a comment, or
respect. Down vote is almost always a negative emotion.

