I have almost a conditioned reflex for upvoting grey posts at this point. The people who downvote are a weird crew that don't seem to judge by Reddit's "contributes to the discussion" standard.
Reddit's standard seems to contribute more directly to quality discussion than the haphazard result of pg's opinion, authoritative though it may be.
When voting is applied with no real guidelines or standards, it ceases to be an effective filter for anything but the immediate emotional zeitgeist, and this goes against HN's stated purpose of bias towards quality.
Pretty much all of HN is the "haphazard result of pg's opinion", no? That is an interesting way to describe creating something. I see no reason to mess with how HN has always worked, at least not where there's no obvious problem.
I know people have strong feelings about downvotes, but those feelings are rooted in something other than discussion quality. Everything I think I know about how to keep HN from deteriorating too badly tells me that the downvotes here serve a critical purpose—even though they're a crude weapon with a lot of downside.
>I know people have strong feelings about downvoting, but those feelings are rooted in something other than discussion quality.
How do you know? People have different opinions about what constitutes and contributes to quality. From what I've seen, a lot of people assume Reddit's standard should apply here, and they seem surprised to learn that it doesn't. Those people do seem to be concerned about discussion quality.
>Everything I think I know about how to keep HN from deteriorating too badly tells me that the downvotes here serve a critical purpose—even though they're a crude and imprecise weapon, with a lot of downside.
Fine... but why is it wrong to have a standard for downvotes?
The argument being made here is that arbitrary and excessive downvotes are a symptom of deterioration.
Weird is better than Reddit, which tends to downvote for political and groupthink reasons, but it's still weird. I usually can't tell why the downvoters are downvoting. Their downvoting doesn't match the comments, so I just see them as weird and apart from the general users.