Ask HN: Are we downvoting comments because we disagree?

Not everyone is interested in arguing on the internet. Choosing not to comment is not lazy.

Well said. This irrationality cuts both ways. It's very common for people to jump to "I suspect people are downvoting simply because they disagree", but I think there are fewer people doing this irrationally on HN than one might be tempted to believe, especially if one's own comment is downvoted, and especially if one is acquainted with the rest of the internet. I think most people here downvote because they reasonably believe a comment is low value, written in bad faith, or contains misinformation, even if that is informed by bias. Bias is unavoidable and natural, but I think on HN it tends to be less severe and less poisonous/tribal.

This is all pretty subjective, but in the end I think downvoting is broadly useful in most communities. If I find myself being downvoted a lot in some community, I probably don't fit in there. That's fine - there are so many communities, and they all deserve to exist, and they can't all be for everybody, and when they have no capacity for self-moderation, their content inevitably becomes very low value (though potentially high in humor). The biggest problem with downvoting is that it tends to push people toward this oppressed, self-pitying, underdog mentality where people will start to act superior for the simple fact of having been downvoted, and attempt to rally others to identify with them and take their side against the "thought-policing elites".

> Two things: firstly, I did not know that was the etiquette and secondly, it is very easy to imagine something you disagree with is poorly reasoned.

> When someone says something you agree with (say, we need testing) then you automatically think of all the reasons you believe it and fill in the gaps in reasoning. If someone says something you do not agree with (we need more testing), you automatically summon the counter arguments to each point the person has laid out, and you roll your virtual eyes at this person for not thinking through "basic" things you feel you know.

> In short, none of our intuitions on what constitutes reasonable or reasoned are innocent.

I find an additional issue related to this is when attempting a meta-discussion on controversial topics are down-voting heavily. In the rare event that a reply is left, it usually suggests a belief that the purpose of the meta-discussion is to favor one of the positions in the topic. As if the purpose of having a meta-discussion can only be to cleverly sew seeds of doubt against or in favor a position, as if analyzing the question of "why are we asking this question" is never relevant.

The HN from 2009 really is different from the one today.

For one, the downvote was only available for users with Karma > 250, which was a really high number at the time. Also, I think this discussion you linked to was PG's being descriptive and not normative: people do that, but it doesn't mean they should.

On the other hand, having zero community-driven moderation also results in a place that's unfriendly to discussion.

It's only for certain users

Ironic that your comment is the very first that got negative on this thread.

But just so you know: your comment is being downvoted (at least by me) not only because you created a strawman and made an excellent display of an authoritarian/totalitarian mind, it is because your comment does not improve the quality of the conversation.

This would be great. Also there are often duplicate arguments within posts. If users could use an HN function to create a 'Discussion Topology' (like on kialo?),we'd get alot of the position definitions out of the way. If you cared just a little about the subject you would just identify your position. If you had something actually new to say, you would argue for your position, or you could argue about which topology is best suited for the argument.

I don't agree with flagging, but if I could downvote posts I'd downvote this one because it begins an old discussion but not from a new vantage point. Old discussions with blocks need blockbusters. As an exaggeration, I might offer P ≠ NP as a seed for discussion -- does it matter if I'm right?

No doubt because it's off-topic. This is a meta topic that has been repeated countless times, and will balloon into voluminous size if allowed to, yet there is nothing new to say or hear about it.

You can't judge this by upvotes alone. Upvotes are an important part of the system but only a part. Flagging is also important.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

These Paul Graham references are 12 years old, hasn't HN evolved a bit since then? Hasn't the world evolved a bit since then?

I think "downvoting for disagreement" generally works on discussion related to non-sensitive topics, but starts to break down once discussion enters the political realm. It turns into a numbers game. Since the dev community tends to lean to the left, the "downvote" numbers are skewed in that direction. It leads to non-left users getting frustrated and possibly no longer visiting the site (including myself), creating an echo chamber and eroding the overall quality of HN.

Why not set a max of 3 downvotes a day? Or subtract 5 karma points IF you don't include a reply with your downvote? There's gotta be a way to improve this.