[RhodaLs]

I agree with you. HN should get rid of the downvotes. They don't really serve a useful purpose. It just adds needless friction and anxiety, puts a certain amount of negativity at the center of the discussion, and reinforces a certain level of groupthink. If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on. Downvotes also encourage some pointless noise in the conversation involving the downvotes themselves.

I could see keeping the upvotes as a way of helping to keep things positive (pun probably intended), but I'm not attached to them.

[metafunctor]

Is there a consensus on when to downvote? There are now quite a few people with enough karma to downvote, but from what I've seen there seems to be no clear guideline on when it's appropriate.

Should you downvote factual errors? Should you downvote hateful comments that don't contribute to the discussion? Should you downvote comments you don't agree with? Should you downvote for bad English? Should you downvote a comment like this one which is completely meta and not anymore relevant to the original post?

You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at “that level” should already know to how to use them.

I have the karma, but I'm not quite sure how downvotes should be used. For this reason, I almost never use them. A grand total of one of my own comments has received enough downvotes to get a total negative score, and I can understand why, but it's not enough for me to build a cohesive understanding on what the community means when it downvotes.

[dahart]

I don't know if there's a consensus, but I doubt it.

One way to think about downvotes is to keep them symmetric with upvotes. When I first came to HN, I expected downvotes to be asymmetrically reserved for people being wildly factually incorrect, or wildly negative. But, maybe if you upvote something on a whim because you lightly agree with it, it should be equally acceptable to downvote something because you lightly disagree with it. I don't do that, but I don't have any compelling reasons not to, aside from I don't like getting downvoted, it still feels more serious than upvotes.

When do you upvote things? I upvote for a number of different reasons including but not limited to when someone says something funny, contributes something valuable or different than others, posts data or relevant links worth bookmarking, says something that I agree with, shows a high level of nerdery and/or expertise in a weird subject matter, has a great attitude or meaningfully positive spin on something, etc. And as long as it's tastefully done, I'll even upvote the occasional correction or sarcastic comment.

I also tend to upvote people who engage with me, and respond to things I've said. Lately, it has been especially important for me personally to upvote people who are being critical or disagreeing with me, even if they're pushing my buttons. If my goal is for the conversation I start to bubble upward, then upvoting the thread is better than downvoting.

So, I'm only one person and I don't even have a consensus myself about when to upvote. ;) I don't personally expect consensus on when to downvote, other than a general wish that people use it judiciously - and I have to say that by and large, that is what I see going on. It's uncommon that I see or experience unfair or unreasonable downvoting.

> You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at "that level" should already know to how to use them.

I can only speak from my own experience and say that my ideas about how to vote changed between when I first started here and when I finally earned the ability to downvote. Not having the ability to downvote for a while did help me learn how to say more things that contributed rather than get stuck in the eddies of Internet arguments. If I'd had the ability to downvote from day 1, I would have used it a lot. Since I didn't have it, by the time I got there, I now don't see the need to use it, and so I don't.

[philh]

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

I try to downvote poor conversation norms: a common one is replying to an argument that someone didn't make. (Especially when it begins "oh, so you think...") I'd be okay with flagging such things if we agreed that that was an acceptable thing to flag for. In the meantime, I think it's good to downvote such things.

Plus, it seems arrogant to say, but some people are simply clueless. Pointing out their errors is exhausting, and doesn't make them less clueless. They're not actually trolls, but they might as well be. I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.

[DHMO]

> I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.

It may save your time, but a downvote doesn't explain why you think someone is clueless. Even link a link to something they could read to enlighten them to your point of thinking or a book title might be adequate in making your argument and would take maybe 30 seconds more, at most.

[r_smart]

I've lurked on this site for maybe 4 years and only recently created an account. I find that I'm okay with downvotes on particular comments, but what kills me is having my score right there at the top of the page all the time. Just reminding me of how well I'm doing. It makes it harder to be sanguine about paying the price for an unpopular comment.

That said, getting past valuing fake internet points is a great exercise. I use reddit a fair amount and some of the subs I'm on are far more capricious than HN with the downvotes, often using it as an echo chamber reinforcement tool. I consider it good to acclimate yourself to paying the price for voicing unpopular opinions (without being a jerk obviously).

[pjc50]

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

That depends on how wrong they are. There's plenty of fringe lunacy that's wrong but you could spend all your life uselessly rebutting. Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

In this context, downvote is basically an eyeroll.

[philh]

> Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

Here we see one problem with downvoting lunacy: some people notice it where it doesn't exist, and others fail to see it where it does.

I'm not ancap myself, but I think the movement deserves respect; for example, I've not read The Machinery of Freedom, but I've heard good things about it, and I don't think you can dismiss it as fringe lunacy.

Chemtrails, though? Obviously dumb.

[pjc50]

"Lunacy" more as a modality of discussion than a property of the ideas themselves. Usually involving taking the ideas as dogma and failing to think about practical application or relevance to the particular subject under discussion.

Another example: Marx wrote a lot of reasonable analysis of the mid-19th-century economic condition (and some bad analysis). Marxists tend to be tremendously irritating write-only dogmatists. It doesn't have to be that way. The right has a similar bunch of people who are Friedman dogmatists.

[niftich]

Although I agree with this point, I wonder if the removal of downvotes would alter the usage of 'flag' by a measurable amount, and flag be used by some as a proxy for when they would have used a downvote instead.

[r_smart]

I think this is what dang means when he talks about building the technology to make the site YC wants. Users will use the features to get the results they want, often against the intentions of the site creators. reddit and the ongoing battle against 'downvote isn't for disagreement' in every sub is a good example of this. What mods want it used for is different from what users want to use it for, and obviously the users win.

Taking away the downvote button might seem like it would fix the problem, but as you point out, it would probably just shift the site behavior so that people use different features (flagging) to achieve the same result.

[Bahamut]

My guess is that the downvote system is an intentional encouragement of laziness in order to drown unpopular comments for whatever reason (sometimes valid such as noise, sometimes to intentionally suppress challenging viewpoints) while avoiding the heavy burden of moderation.

Just like Reddit's system, it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here.

[deathanatos]

Having used things like Facebook, however, I don't think a single upvote is a better system; a bad post from somewhere or someone with enough momentum gets enough upvotes to perhaps go viral — even if completely factually incorrect. You need the -1 to balance it out, sometimes.

I don't tend to downvote if I disagree (and I'd argue, I think, that one shouldn't — if you disagree, comment); I typically only downvote if the post is extremely factually incorrect, not adding to the discussion (for example, repeating an earlier point or asking a question that is answered in an ancestor comment — i.e., not reading), or is rude. (I reserve flag for extremely bad posts — and often HN has beaten me to it.)

Not saying a +1/-1 system like Reddit or HN is perfect, nor is it the only alternative to a just-+1 system. One could imagine, for example, giving experts in various topic areas more sway in their vote, if you knew the topic of a given article (they should know what they're talking about); but that could just as easily backfire if a newcomer has a completely valid — if unconventional — idea.

[dang]

> it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here

I don't have that impression, and would be interested to see examples of HN's mechanisms being "easily gamed".