Ask HN: Anyone think downvoting is starting to get out of control?

I started on HN four and a half years ago. My impression was that, in those days, HN had higher quality discussion. More of it was technical, but even the nontechnical discussion (political, say) was discussed differently. There was more fact- and evidence-based discussion, and less dogmatic assertion of positions. There was more real thought and less reflexive spewing of pre-canned viewpoints.

HN has become a lesser place - more filled with dogmatists (of various flavors), and less with people who can actually change their minds if given real evidence. As a result, the discussion has become less about evidence and data, and more full of strident statements of dogmatic positions, made by people who will happily talk but won't listen.

In that environment, of course you're going to get downvotes from the dogmatists when you question (or worse, contradict) someone's dogma. But is the strident stating of dogma by someone who won't listen itself worthy of downvoting? I'm not sure the answer is no - that's not the kind of "discussion" we want here. On the other hand, it may be reinforcing bad behavior on the part of others, and some of those "others" may be salvageable...

Personally, I do not ever downvote, preferring to reply instead, or just ignore.

I probably use downvoting similar to flagging. Swearing, cursing, being rude, etc get downvoted.

I once did an experiment. Where I took one of the bottom comments and copied his post word for word minus the part that could be considered rude (with his permission) to see how much one sentence could throw off a comment. It is one of my higher rated comments. I'll have to go back and look it up.

My copy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395162

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395046

This site is becoming more and more like Reddit every day, and it's super sad to me. I don't come here for repeated political arguments and discussion. This is Hacker News, not r/politics.

In fact, I've started searching out gray-text posts because often those seem to be of higher quality than normal black posts. That's a bad sign.

People will upvote comments they agree with and nobody seems to have a problem with that. The opposite action - downvoting to express disagreement - feels pretty natural.

Slashdot found a reasonable solution to this problem a decade ago and it surprises me that more tech-oriented sites haven't borrowed some of their innovations.

The implemented incentive to downvote is to fade comments, not address them; this gives power to any few with strict and similar morality, which this post will prove

downvote if you agree

Talking about certain people and their decisions in tech is not possible also.

I don't think downvotes are useful inputs, personally. It's far too easy to farm votes and use the accounts for essentially manipulation, it doesn't actually contribute to the dialogue, even when they're down voting something like an overly obvious question or dumb comment, a down vote doesn't really change anything.

I think accounts under 5000 karma shouldn't have dowvoting capability at all. Additionally, once a down vote has been cast on a comment, that post's score should be hidden to discourage multiple downvotes.

Unless someone is spamming or posting something actually harmful or illegal, ie not just an opinion, there's no benefit in discouraging that person from contributing in the site.

These are my thoughts. I've seen HN go from a bastion of intelligent hackers and scholars mature enough to discuss nearly anything to a collection of mostly childish people bickering about nothing. Over the years and different accounts and seeing the wrong people rewarded and the wrong people blasted out for minor errors. It's crazy.

Downvotes are just one angle, but I agree that it needs attention.

Edit: this post now serves to prove the point I'm making.

But since people are dumb as shit and hoping that they will change is futile, why can't we have a setting that keeps down voted comments black? Since I'm reading HN on my phone, solving that problem with a user style doesn't work. If there was a karma opt-out setting entirely disabling the karma system for comments and all its effects I definitely would turn it on. I'd rather suffer some spammy comments now and then than partaking in Hacker News' dumb karma chasing game.

IMHO, it seems like there are some political activists on HN. It's really discouraging to see smart comments downvoted (into grey) because they offer a political opinion that doesn't sit well with the activists.

HN can be so much better.

I've had one or two vigorously up-voted comments manually pushed beneath grayed-out ones. I have heard others suspect/complain that the points awarded to their posts/comments have not always been one-to-one. Manual moderation is a powerful (and not always transparent) force here.

And as long as everyone knows what the game is, I have no complaints about that. It's YC's board. They can do what they want with it.

META: An alternative to this might be to add a meta-moderation system but that has its own share of problems which could be fixed by adding a meta-meta-moderation system; GOTO META

Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that downvoting supposedly was meant to be used to indicate dissent while discussing downvotes is explicitly frowned upon. While I agree with the latter I assume the former is incorrect. If the downvote button actually was meant to indicate dissent it might as well be relabelled as the 'Nomenklatura button' as it has the same stifling effect on the community: voicing a dissenting opinion can get you silenced without a chance to discuss.

I don't think downvoting is getting out of control, but my memory makes it seem like the the ratio of

downvoting for disagreement : downvoting for quality of discussion

has increased over time.

When I crossed the karma threshold for being able to downvote, I mostly adhered to downvoting as an indicator of off topic, irrelevant and trolling content, because I thought that's what HN was about. Then I read Paul Graham's old comment that it's ok and acceptable on HN to downvote as a sign of disagreement, and so I changed my behavior to use it for that purpose too.

I try to lift what look like unnecessarily downvoted comments by upvoting them. I try not to downvote as a knee jerk reaction on things I disagree with, but I don't follow it all the time.

One must also realize that these actions at an individual level don't matter much since karma points on HN are as unpredictable as airline ticket prices (actually, we're getting better at predicting the latter). One downvote is not always -1 karma, just like one upvote is not always +1 karma. My guess is that the graying of downvoted comments (which I dislike for UX reasons) depends on some kind of calculation based on number of downvotes, who downvoted the comment, the recency of the downvotes, and other factors. So one single person should not be able to game the system (even with multiple accounts) — that's the theory. It doesn't look like it works well in practice.

I can't do much about i), but everyone can do something about ii) by upvoting gray comments if those comments are making a contribution to the conversation.

A few people have got the ability to downvote, but many more people have got the ability to upvote. Those people should start using their upvotes.

What you're noticing isn't new. There have been complaints about downvotes for many years on HN.

I observe that there is a tendency that people are more and more unable to discuss a topic and have a real conversation. People are less openminded and even a "eat more greens since that is good for you" is enough to make them deaf for what you have to say.