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Suggest HN: Downvote button should prompt for a comment

5 points by overgard ↗ HN
The idea is pretty simple: if you go to downvote a comment, the system should prompt for a comment of your own as to why you're doing so.

I have a few reasons why I think this would be a good idea:

A) Downvoting someone without a comment doesn't give the user context for /why/ it was downvoted, leaving them in a confused state. Did someone merely disagree, or did the comment violate an unspoken community rule?

In essence, a teaching moment is lost. A downvote with a comment lets people know what the community expects, which helps us to maintain what hacker news is about. When new users see a marginalized comment, they'll know why that happened.

B) It's well known in psychology that people tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. A score of -4 is a lot worse feeling than a score of +4 is positive feeling. This has a subtle effect on user incentives.

In the current system, I think it incentivizes people to post something that they know will be popular but that doesn't add much to the discussion, rather than something interesting but perhaps more nuanced and easily misunderstood. By adding slightly more friction to the down voting process, I think it will make people more thoughtful as to why they're doing it. I think this will also add more civility to the discussions.

7 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 29.4 ms ] thread
ColinWright
Better yet, remove the downvote entirely. People are using it unthinkingly in drive-bys to say they disagree, rather than it's original intended purpose of "This is inappropriate for HN." Soliciting a comment won't make them comment - they'll ignore it, or insert something inane.

You can't change people's behavior, and I think the "down vote" should disappear. Let us work on reinforcing rather than punishing.

Things that genuinely don't belong should be flagged. Further, things that are flagged should be raised in the rankings, not lowered, until they get to the point where they have enough flags to be deleted. This would mean that genuinely inappropriate items/submissions/comments would become more visible, so they get more flags more quickly and get deleted more quickly than happens now.

overgard
I think you have some good points, although I don't know that the downvote should always be viewed as a punishment. For instance, if I see a snarky comment and I downvote it, it's not so much that I want to "punish" the snarky commenter (I might even find the comment enjoyable), rather it's just a piece of feedback that I don't think this is the appropriate place for snark. So in that usage I think the downvote is fine, I just want people to know why that vote was made. Plus then, I think you sort of need the downvote to balance out the upvotes of people that upvoted the snarky comment because they enjoyed it without thinking of the larger ramifications it has to the site as a whole.
lukesandberg
maybe we should use the stackoverflow flag concept? that way you could flag an item for being:

* off topic * inappropriate/offensive * low quality or 'noise' * other (which would require a comment)

then down votes could be removed entirely (or at least deprecated) and if an item was flagged enough the item could be removed.

overgard
That could also work. I think the advantage of a more personalized message is it's a bit more human. If I'm downvoted for something I'm more inclined to take the message to heart and not be offended if someone took the time to explain something rather than just attach a label on it. I do think what you describe has the advantage of being easier to understand though, and accomplishes many of the same goals.
mooism2
The stackoverflow insistence that downvoting something requires burning some of your own karma is also good.
mooism2
If I knew that flagging something would make it more visible, I don't think I'd flag stuff any more.
ColinWright
The idea is to flag it to make it visible so more people will flag it so it gets deleted sooner. Currently people flag things, it gets pushed down, no one else sees it and it never gets deleted.

Inappropriate items (spam, etc) should not simply be invisible, it should be deleted. Making flagged items more visible will make that happen, and they would only be more visible for a very short time.