Poll: What are the up and down arrows for?

2 points by jessriedel ↗ HN
There still seems to be some disagreement over what the arrows are supposed to be used for, and the FAQ is silent.

The topic came up (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760056) in yesterday's Red Hat article. reitzensteinm submitted the topic as an AskHN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275), but it didn't gain much traction. I thought a poll might be more illuminating.

Maybe the FAQ is a purposely ambiguous, but I think it would be helpful if the community came to a consensus.

So, which description is closest to what you think the arrows should be used for?

3 comments

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I was pretty surprised to learn that pg (partially?) endorsed the agree/disagree meaning, at least 5 years ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I strongly disagree with him. I tend to think "More/less of this content on HN" is more appropriate than "This is constructive/non-constructive" because the latter seems to support the up-voting of all constructive but off-topic comments. In my opinion, sprawling off-topic discussions of well-trodden issues is a problem for many articles.

I only get an up-arrow.
From the FAQ:

>Why don't I see down arrows?

>There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.