> e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell.
I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be different if to downvote you had to respond to a post.
Also, I think that replies accompanying down-votes should be displayed directly next to the comment as a sort of tag (i.e. you can’t click a down-arrow alone, you have to type out something like “not accurate” or “flame” or “I don’t like his hair” or whatever the reason is) and then the comment appears as: foobar_user 1 hour ago | -1:“not accurate” -1:“flame” -1:“I don’t like his hair”.
"Not accurate" may be useful feedback even if it's false. For example, perhaps several such responses in a row would prompt the author to link to supporting data, or reword their comment to be clearer. The real question though isn't whether it's always helpful, but whether on average it's more useful than just a bare downvote. While some of the responses will be "not accurate", others will be an extremely actionable "link broken" or "missing word".
I think the real issue of requiring comments on downvotes is that it would either disallow anonymous downvotes, or encourage anonymous comments. Perhaps de-anonymizing downvotes without requiring a comment might be a better first step: if you aren't brave enough to have your name associated with the downvote, then maybe you shouldn't be downvoting. I'm sure this would cause its own problems, but I suspect it would be a net positive. At times I think it might even be good to have all voting and flagging actions on HN to be public record.
If I add a comment I jnow will be downvoted I simply move on with my day, not bothering to see the responses generated. This is because, even though I work hard to only put forth constructive criticism and in a manner such that my logic / reasoning is plainly spelled out,,,
On HN, unpopular comments are, often, still voted down despite the facts and despite the presentation.
I usually reserve these instances for when I know more than a little on the topic, generally professionally speaking, and often first hand. But, if it is unpopular, it doesn't matter. It's predictable.
A hypothetical social-discussion model I've been meaning to build an MVP of:
1. there are replies and up-voting, but no down-voting;
2. you can classify a comment reply, at time of posting, as a "rebuttal";
3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent;
4. the aggregate score of a subthread is calculated as a Euclidean distance, with all the positively-scored comments as dimensions. Thus, if you've got one great comment made in response to a bad comment, the thread will stay un-collapsed; if you've got two equally-great comments, the thread will rise, etc. (Likewise, if you've got good discussion happening in response to a really bad post, the discussion's value will still propel the post to the hot page.)
> 3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent;
I often upvote both a comment and its rebuttal, because in many debates I have no dog in the race and I often find that people on both sides have valuable or otherwise interesting insights. Even if I don't agree with them completely, I sometimes find that I'm able to view an issue from another perspective that I hadn't considered before.
Not to mention, many debates really just don't have a clear answer, and to pit commentors against each other like that is to enable one of them to be declared "winner", which I think would be misleading in many cases.
Not every reply would be a rebuttal. Not even every reply challenging the premises of the parent comment would be a rebuttal. Maybe "rebuttal" is the wrong word.
In a discussion being had in good faith, a thread will frequently go into a pseudo-debate mode to "find the truth" of a statement someone offered. Kind of like we're doing here. We all add anecdotes and counterfactuals and so forth, and see where the inductive process takes us. None of these comments would/should be tagged as rebuttals.
But there's a very specific situation where, I think, this feature is an important addition: when the original comment (or the post-link heading the discussion!) just doesn't know what it's talking about, and the reply outlines why this is so.
The concept is less like "this post disagrees with its parent, and so up-voting (agreeing) with it should mean down-voting (disagreeing) with its parent", and more like "this post is a petition to flag/retract its parent, and up-voting it is signing that petition."
This is why I had point 4 in the above, which might otherwise seem an unrelated feature: negatively-scored posts are not "disagreed with", but rather "flagged dead." But negatively-scored posts must still stay visible, in order to give requisite context to their positively-scored rebuttal-comments. And, in fact, a thread containing a negatively-scored top-comment might even still be the top-sorted thread, if its replies are considered valuable enough.
(One might still want to add some visual effect to remind those reading the post that the community considers it "retracted." Perhaps adding a strikethrough that disappears on hover, or a background of faint red Xes. You don't want to make the post illegible—it's still necessary context for its subthread, unlike the current HN/Reddit system where the post "fades" to nothing, and then the whole subthread gets considered a lost cause and collapsed.)
Why remove downvoting directly? I'm not against the idea, I just want to understand the thinking.
I wonder if the problem is the binary nature of so many things. 5 star/1 star reviews are the most common, we have up and down votes, but no real context for that. I wonder if the problem that needs to be solved isn't context, rather than directional.
This is me spitballing, so feel free to IGNORE everything below.
Anyway, the idea is that we all get X votes, and we can vote more on some things, e.g. if we REALLY want marijuana legal, I can vote 4 votes. The twist is that the cost of extra votes is the square of the number of votes, 2 costs 4, 3 costs 9 (we all get maths works).
The theory is this lets people vote on what they care about, much less than simply voting equally.
I was wondering there isn't some way to create a system where you earn votes, that you can spend in some similar way, e.g. you "earn" upvotes from others, and can spend them elsewhere. If everyone got a single vote, but you earned extra votes you could spend in interesting ways at increasing cost, e.g. you could heavily downvote an idea at an exponential rate, it might make people less a victim of common denominator views, give fringe views more airtime, and make people consider a vote more deeply. Not just yes/no but how much do I hate/love this idea? Enough to blow 100 points on 10 down/up votes?
Another social-discussion voting system I wanted to try out was one where:
1. both of the 'unit-weight' up- and down-votes were only done through implicit/passive actions (basically a piece of Javascript running in a browser extension, that tracks whether you read the whole article/comment—i.e. scrolled through it at a reasonable reading speed—before scrolling away/closing/going back/beginning to reply)
2. there are above-'unit-weight' up- and down-vote mechanisms that are explicit, but require something humans consider very-slightly onerous: solving a CAPTCHA, paying a tenth of a cent of pre-paid credit, etc.
In my conception, the small votes would be named "OK" and "Meh", and the large votes "Love" and "Hate", with about a 10x difference between their power. The site, of course, would be called "Mehddit." ;)
That is the single most compelling reason, why I find most people (on|off)line disturbing. They just want to drown out dissent without helping other people argumentatively to understand the opposing view.
OK, that is probably, because they oftentimes do not have real arguments and haven't rationalized their position at all.
Maybe the past paragraph is just me being a misanthrope. Or maybe the internet is just too big - as bigger discourses tend to deteriorate.
Fixing "disagree without teaching" is tough when you have to do the teaching to thousands of people across as many or more places. I bet people just get burnt out after awhile.
Whenever I find that happening on a comment, I comment on it to call people out. That seems to slow the decline (and judging from my points, people seem to appreciate it.)
It's never clear what the downvote even means.. at least with an upvote or "Like" it doesn't matter too much if you misinterpret the result, but the downvote on certain sites is too coarse-grained to be useful.
I totally agree, I wish there was a requirement to reply when downvoting.
But I don't think you need subcomments on comments, I think it's just overcomplicated. If the reply with downvote is nonsensical, it can be downvoted as well. Or it can be even flagged.
But sometimes the point of downvoting is to bury a comment so that it doesn't dominate the discussion. If downvoting required a reply it would achieve the opposite effect.
Only if the replies were visible on a buried comment, or perhaps instead of hiding or automatically collapsing, they could be "moved" to the user's Threads page.
In the end that is really all that internet discussions boil down to, so why fight it? I could write a long rebuttal, backed up with anecdotes from my own worldview and cherry picked stats and facts I googled theory seconds ago to confirm my prior worldview and it's superiority to yours, but what is the point? No one has their minds changed by HN comment threads or witty political commentary on Facebook. This site caters to people who think that a few hours bouncing through Wikipedia and some Google searching for supporting articles makes them an expert on just about any subject. Expecting meaningful debate and reasoned discussion in such a forum is a fool's errand. On anything beyond narrow technical topics it is better to accept it for the shallow bar chatter that it is and not take it too seriously.
I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be different if to downvote you had to respond to a post.