Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cryptoz 3877 days ago
You can't 'heart' this but you can 'upvote' it. Which I think it quite an interesting thing; we have 'likes', 'favourites', 'upvotes' and more, across different sites and they serve different purposes. But often, users conflate them and use them incorrectly. A good example of this would be the 'upvote' and 'downvote' on reddit and HN. Many users will use these buttons to express agreement or disagreement, even though that is explicitly wrong as defined by the owners of the site.

It's a journey, I think, that developers and users are taking right now. We're both searching for the right language to express ourselves, a language that we can use to our advantage. Are we converging on a common language between startup owners and users? No I don't think we are - but perhaps we should be.
2 comments
npizzolato 3877 days ago
> Many users will use these buttons to express agreement or disagreement, even though that is explicitly wrong as defined by the owners of the site.

Interestingly enough, downvoting to express disagreement is not against the hacker news guidelines[1].

A few subreddits I visit pop up a message right next to the comment when you downvote it, saying you should only do so when it does not contribute to the discussion. I think that's a pretty good solution for educating users about the intended purpose of downvoting. I also think HN's idea of only letting older users downvote is a healthy idea.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

link
rm_-rf_slash 3877 days ago
Maybe, and I don't claim to have a design in mind for this, but maybe we could start to see the functions of different social networks integrated with every piece of content on the Internet. We don't have to immediately post or share the piece (even if an article has Facebook share buttons I copy and paste the link anyway).

An upvote and a like and a favorite (heart?) all serve different needs across networks, but they generally mean the same thing within a network.

I think for a system like this to make sense, there should be some amount of conditioning. On HN, for example, I abhor downvotes without context, especially when it's clear that the downvote is more an expression of disagreement rather than an indication that the comment detrimented the conversation.

link