For handling individual comments, I think the better system would be to have two-dimensional comment rating. One dimension, upvote/downvote, is "valuable contribution/not-valuable contribution". A second dimension, agree/disagree, allows expressing support or dissent without the connotation of reward/censure that upvote/downvote has.
Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference -- there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with, nor penalty for saying unpopular things.
Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does. Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong; repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted comments as much as 'flags'.)
Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range score can be shown.)
The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched a nerve.
I dislike agree/disagree voting overall. We all dislike groupthink, and we all appreciate constructive informative posts, and we all like differing viewpoints. So why have a moderation system that records or values agreement/disagreement at all?
I think gojomo is 100% right that people should be rewarded for constructive informative civil contributions, rather than because the moderator happens to agree with you.
An agree/disagree arrow could be left simply as a honeypot, so that people don't use the other descriptive ratings as a substitute for agreement/disagreement.
My theory is that a separate agree/disagree fights groupthink because it moves popularity/agreement out of the reward/penalty dimension.
People want to register their opinion -- and sometimes that opinion is just yes/no. It's good for a site to offer a low-effort, low-visual-pollution way to capture that -- single click votes/favorites/likes work well for that. (It's better than lots of 'me too' or 'I disagree' or 'my thoughts exactly' micro-comments.)
But, if those signals are mixed with a sense of righteousness/transgression -- which is inevitable with leaderboards and display rules whereby 'high-rated' comments move up, and 'low-rated' comments fade from view -- then people may withhold unpopular but important viewpoints, or be tempted to race to be the first to post a banal but crowd-pleasing viewpoint.
My theory could be wrong. Some people might care so much about agreement that they obsess over that score, and knowing exactly how many people agree/disagree would then cause even more synchronization-of-publicly-expressed-views. But I think this crowd is sophisticated enough to draw (and make use of) the distinction between a bad comment and a controversial minority viewpoint.
And I would like to be in a place where someone who advances a controversial minority viewpoint, but does so in an articulate, thought-provoking, civil manner, could be on the leaderboard even if every individual post of theirs has more net disagreement than agreement.
(Which brings up a related point: it would be interesting to report an agree/disagree axis as two totals, not just the net difference. '101 agree, 100 disagree' is more meaningful than a net score of '+1'. A sparkline bar graph or tick-series could work really well for this, though it might not need to appear on every comment, or appear until requested.)
Ranking +101/-100 comments higher than +1/-0 comments is something that they implemented at reddit a couple months ago. They use an algorithm called a "Wilson Score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter."
Agreed. I saw I got minimally downvoted for what I thought was a comment that really added to the conversation. It's disheartening to be downvoted simply because somebody doesn't agree with you.
That happens all the time. Don't fret about it, just ignore it and apply your votes the way you think things should work.
Over time those few downvotes are almost always balanced by the rest of HN.
Except for 'controversial' subjects, there anything can happen.
If you want to avoid being downvoted completely the easiest way is to avoid such subjects, specifically anything mentioning Ayn Rand, the glory of Capitalism, religion and emacs ;)
How about the voting staying as it is, but a facebook-esque "Like" thing put on the comments. This way, people can "like" a comment without having to resort to voting. Their intepretation of voting stays the same.
People are familiar with the "like" concept, so such a move would be intuitive to a lot of users. It would also ease the difficulty in understanding the voting system.
I don't think of 'like' and 'agree' as synonyms -- in fact to me 'like' more closely means 'informative contribution that should be highlighted' than 'agree'. So I support the idea of 1-click expressions but think they need to be labeled/presented carefully to encourage desired meanings.
Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference -- there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with, nor penalty for saying unpopular things.
Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does. Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong; repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted comments as much as 'flags'.)
(Previous comment, with more backlinks, on this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853 )
Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range score can be shown.)
The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched a nerve.