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by JoachimSchipper 5479 days ago
That is not a very valuable comment, though. You may have received a better score if you posted a not-so-valuable comment defending a popular position, but that doesn't mean that well-argued defences of unpopular positions receive the same treatment.

Being downvoted has a much higher emotional impact than being upvoted, but it does help with sorting comments, obviously.
1 comments
mrvc 5479 days ago
It does help in sorting, but i'd suggest it sorts by popularity, not by quality as we tend to assume.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm here to read interesting perspectives on interesting topics. I don't really care to reaffirm a popular opinion, irrespective of quality or substance.

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ColinWright 5479 days ago
In that case, why do you care about the voting? You will always get the group-think out-voting the carefully reasoned but unpopular. All you need to do is read - perhaps simply skim - all the comments. Find users whose opinion seems to be worth reading, and then seek out their comments.

Removing down-votes won't help the problem you've identified.

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JoachimSchipper 5479 days ago
That's what I increasingly find myself doing. The downside is that you get less and less exposed to new material; "old" HN would usually surface e.g. tptacek's comments, but there would also be some highly-voted and insightful comments by relative nobodies who were experts in the particular field being discussed. This still happens, but reading the highest-voted comments is becoming less and less worthwhile.
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wnight 5478 days ago
The problem is that down-votes have account consequences. They aren't the mirror opposite of an up-vote. Ten upvotes and a post is just popular, ten downvotes and you might get banned.

If moderation was a flag that some people cared about but that left everything intact then people could ignore it if they wanted.

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JoachimSchipper 5478 days ago
Do you think you get banned for the downvotes, or for the comment? I don't think anybody (here) is proposing removing the "flag" button...
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JoachimSchipper 5479 days ago
"Popularity, not quality" is the big problem of any social site. However, removing downvotes doesn't help: "anti-canonical" opinions won't gather many upvotes either. [EDIT: well, hopefully they will. But the trend is that they increasingly don't.]
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