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My opinion is downvotes should require a reason for downvote. Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Getting

My opinion is downvotes should require a reason for downvote. Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Getting in the weeds here, but then if others agree with the downvote rationale, they can upvote the downvote which can be used as some metric. This already happens on HN and reddit - people downvote all the time then provide a reason, but not all people provide a reason for their disagreement, allowing for useless downvotes that dont help the community in any way - for example an "ad hominem" downvote. What this means is that disagreeing opinions are allowed attacks without any risk of retaliation, and in what game is that ever fair?

iaml 5y ago
Yeah, I agree it would be interesting. Very often I'd like to be able to reply to everyone who brigade-downvotes things on reddit when for example they don't have some context or something counterintuitive is actually true according to reputable source.
ddingus 5y ago
The downside of that is increased meta. And the reason is simple: They did not agree and or lack shared perspective before the down vote and that being true after the downvote starts another disagreeable discussion. It all gets worse when people know who downvoted them...
- chansiky 5y ago
  Only the initial downvoting commenter would have to reveal his name. Then others can just bolster the downvote which harms the rating of the original comment, sort of like a "let him without sin be the first to throw the stone" situation. Then others can join in if they agree. And that might hurt if they're throwing stones at us but at least we get to see where the stones are coming from. Currently we dont, we just get stoned and dont know why.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    First, As soon as we introduce who, then we introduce meta about them. And doing that ends up a discussion that all of us will be impacted by. There aren't easy answers. Pretty much everything in this whole discussion has been done, impacts easy for anyone who wants to look to see. And I have. This is a topic of great interest to me. I have moderated in the past, and found it difficult and challenging. I've learned more here than anywhere else. ( I did three, now four, replies here, partially because I'm using voice dictation, and partially because there are three major, potential points of discussion.)
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Secondly, being told why doesn't help as much as you would think. That itself is another meta discussion. People won't take the why as given. They will want to argue it, challenge the qualifications of others, and you can go down the list. It all happens. People I see taking that feedback to contemplate is rare. The number one reason why people want to be told why so they can argue their case. And that's what's going to trigger The Meta. On Quora this problem happened and a bunch of us created a court where someone could appeal downvotes, and sort of argue their case. That discussion would involve feedback to the person who got downvoted, and if it all didn't warrant being downvoted, a whole bunch of people would up vote, basically correcting a wrong. It was a super interesting exercise in the genuine ambiguity text communication has. The fact is we really can't determine intent from text. People can, and we'll take things all sorts of interesting and crazy ways. And whether they are correct in doing that or not, the discussion to sort it out is laborious and time-consuming. Now I will tell you, a bunch of people working hard on this problem and sort out a disagreement or downvote that shouldn't have happened. And maybe a third of those were worthy exercises in that the person who initiated the process took away something that genuinely help them to improve. Another big percentage, were just fixing bad down votes. But it cost a lot to do that. The rest were fairly painful meta discussions. Unproductive. No the reason that all made some sense on Quora was the downvotes had Fairly severe consequences and fairly rapidly. Here, it's not such a big deal. Anyone who makes more good decisions about what they say and not will gain karma. That's all that's required. So rather than Stones, it's more like little Pebbles. Frankly, the easiest way to get past this here is to just not worry about it, and try to be a good human. In a lot of cases, people who get some downvotes here probably weren't trying their best to be good human. If they try harder they get less downvotes. Good As It Gets.
spiffytech 5y ago
Tildes.net tries something interesting here: there is no downvote, but users can flag comments with one of the provided negative attributes (offtopic, noise, malice)[0]. This discourages "downvote to disagree", and provides enough signal to e.g., sink an off-topic comment, but summon a moderator for malicious comments. [0] https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#la...
- chansiky 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing, this is a really interesting thought and its very close to one I had based on this thread, with the one difference being that instead of letting others decide what kind of comment one makes, we should really lean into thinking of commenting as a sort of game and let the user decides what kind of comment they are making, by letting them choose to attack/defend/support a position. We've seen how the upvote/downvote w/ranking systems play, I'm not a big fan of what reddit has become lately, and I wonder where HN would be without great moderators. At the very least it would be refreshing to see how alternative mechanics lead to different communities. Sort of related is this thought, Wikipedia is an MMORPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...
randomdata 5y ago
> Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Agreement isn't useful feedback. An upvote implies that the comment is funny, a virtual laugh if you will, which is useful feedback to allow you to hone the entertainment value of your comments. I suspect the next person will have a different take, though. Which ultimately means that the votes mean nothing at all beyond that someone, assuming no bots are at play, pressed a button. Therefore, votes are just a poor man's analytics system. They give some vague feedback that someone was near your comment and nothing more. Which button was pressed makes no difference.

iaml 5y ago

Yeah, I agree it would be interesting. Very often I'd like to be able to reply to everyone who brigade-downvotes things on reddit when for example they don't have some context or something counterintuitive is actually true according to reputable source.

ddingus 5y ago

The downside of that is increased meta. And the reason is simple: They did not agree and or lack shared perspective before the down vote and that being true after the downvote starts another disagreeable discussion. It all gets worse when people know who downvoted them...

chansiky 5y ago
Only the initial downvoting commenter would have to reveal his name. Then others can just bolster the downvote which harms the rating of the original comment, sort of like a "let him without sin be the first to throw the stone" situation. Then others can join in if they agree. And that might hurt if they're throwing stones at us but at least we get to see where the stones are coming from. Currently we dont, we just get stoned and dont know why.
- ddingus 5y ago
  First, As soon as we introduce who, then we introduce meta about them. And doing that ends up a discussion that all of us will be impacted by. There aren't easy answers. Pretty much everything in this whole discussion has been done, impacts easy for anyone who wants to look to see. And I have. This is a topic of great interest to me. I have moderated in the past, and found it difficult and challenging. I've learned more here than anywhere else. ( I did three, now four, replies here, partially because I'm using voice dictation, and partially because there are three major, potential points of discussion.)
- ddingus 5y ago
  Secondly, being told why doesn't help as much as you would think. That itself is another meta discussion. People won't take the why as given. They will want to argue it, challenge the qualifications of others, and you can go down the list. It all happens. People I see taking that feedback to contemplate is rare. The number one reason why people want to be told why so they can argue their case. And that's what's going to trigger The Meta. On Quora this problem happened and a bunch of us created a court where someone could appeal downvotes, and sort of argue their case. That discussion would involve feedback to the person who got downvoted, and if it all didn't warrant being downvoted, a whole bunch of people would up vote, basically correcting a wrong. It was a super interesting exercise in the genuine ambiguity text communication has. The fact is we really can't determine intent from text. People can, and we'll take things all sorts of interesting and crazy ways. And whether they are correct in doing that or not, the discussion to sort it out is laborious and time-consuming. Now I will tell you, a bunch of people working hard on this problem and sort out a disagreement or downvote that shouldn't have happened. And maybe a third of those were worthy exercises in that the person who initiated the process took away something that genuinely help them to improve. Another big percentage, were just fixing bad down votes. But it cost a lot to do that. The rest were fairly painful meta discussions. Unproductive. No the reason that all made some sense on Quora was the downvotes had Fairly severe consequences and fairly rapidly. Here, it's not such a big deal. Anyone who makes more good decisions about what they say and not will gain karma. That's all that's required. So rather than Stones, it's more like little Pebbles. Frankly, the easiest way to get past this here is to just not worry about it, and try to be a good human. In a lot of cases, people who get some downvotes here probably weren't trying their best to be good human. If they try harder they get less downvotes. Good As It Gets.

spiffytech 5y ago

Tildes.net tries something interesting here: there is no downvote, but users can flag comments with one of the provided negative attributes (offtopic, noise, malice)[0]. This discourages "downvote to disagree", and provides enough signal to e.g., sink an off-topic comment, but summon a moderator for malicious comments. [0] https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#la...

chansiky 5y ago
Thanks for sharing, this is a really interesting thought and its very close to one I had based on this thread, with the one difference being that instead of letting others decide what kind of comment one makes, we should really lean into thinking of commenting as a sort of game and let the user decides what kind of comment they are making, by letting them choose to attack/defend/support a position. We've seen how the upvote/downvote w/ranking systems play, I'm not a big fan of what reddit has become lately, and I wonder where HN would be without great moderators. At the very least it would be refreshing to see how alternative mechanics lead to different communities. Sort of related is this thought, Wikipedia is an MMORPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...

randomdata 5y ago

> Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Agreement isn't useful feedback. An upvote implies that the comment is funny, a virtual laugh if you will, which is useful feedback to allow you to hone the entertainment value of your comments. I suspect the next person will have a different take, though. Which ultimately means that the votes mean nothing at all beyond that someone, assuming no bots are at play, pressed a button. Therefore, votes are just a poor man's analytics system. They give some vague feedback that someone was near your comment and nothing more. Which button was pressed makes no difference.