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Ask HN: Does minimum karma downvoting encourage elitism?

1 points by rm_-rf_slash ↗ HN
When I started on HN a while back I had just assumed the visible lack of downvoting arrows meant that feature simply didn't exist. I preferred it, since to me it meant that quality comments would bubble to the top, while poor arguments would be ignored.

Then I hit the 500 karma mark and realized it was a privileged action. From time to time I'll post a comment that gets downvoted without explanation, and I have to wonder what is being accomplished by signaling disagreement without standing up for anything.

I would like to hear your opinions, as I believe what happens is that when people are designated as part of a privileged class, they will think themselves to be smarter representatives of the community, such that it acts as a justification to downvote and stifle discussion without having added anything to it.

I'm not interested in gaining imaginary internet points, so I have to wonder what the purpose for downvoting is in the first place. If the comment is inflammatory, off topic, abusive, and so on, we have flagging mechanisms for that. So in that case, why bother downvoting?

(Yes, I realize a major reason to have minimum karma requirements is to prevent trolls and bots)

3 comments

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dudul
I haven't been on HN for a long time, and I don't even have enough points to downvote comments, but as far as I can tell there's always been this uncertainty about what downvoting really means.

Some think that one should only downvote poor quality comments regardless of if they agree with the point being made or not, others think that downvoting is "anti-endorsement".

I don't really agree with the latter to be honest. It tends to generate this echo-chamber environment. And it makes disagreeing very "cheap": as you said, people will just downvote without bothering to explain why.

Your idea of only offering upvoting seems pretty good to me.

joshschreuder
It's not exclusive to HN, pretty much any site with a negative voting system gets used purely for disagreement rather than 'this is bad content'.

It's especially prevalent on Reddit, where you will quite often see words to the effect of "downvotes are not meant for comments you disagree with"

The only-allow-upvoting thing is something that Facebook has been doing forever. Now that they're added a dislike button, they will almost certainly fall into the same traps as other sites like HN and Reddit.

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