[doublerabbit]

The freedom to downvote. A downvote should force the downvotee to give a reason why.

A reason seperates the signal from the noise. The original poster can dispute the downvote given; which Reddit and HN, slashdot are all prone to. Karma points only encouragesusers to vote negative without thought if the output is already negative. As the same with positive.

-- Edit: My current downvote is a good example. I'm at 0.

I have been downvoted. I do not know why. Has some brigade decided to target my post? Downvoted because of my username? Unhappy with the idea? Does someone a personal vendetta agaisn't me?

An explanation to why would provide civil discussion and seperate the bots/power-trippers from those who do want to contrbute civily. The conversation was on point, contributing civily. Nothing unconstructive was within my text, yet it leaves me baffled to why I was downvoted. Was it soley because I clash with someones view and they don't want to challenge it? I like to earn my "internet points" in a solitude fashion but it only takes one bad actor to screw the show.

Forcing the user to give a reason to why, well that would be a different story. Users further down the line could then decide if that downvote was the worth. If that user is a being a bad actor. For now, it's marked as 0 and you can watch the trend.

[metalliqaz]

For a long time I thought HN was free of the kinds of bad faith, intellectually dishonest interactions that you find in other popular forums. I was wrong, it's just a different crowd (one that isn't so clearly left or right). There is a vague "orthodoxy" and the downvotes will flow if you speak outside it. Recently, my account has apparently been flagged such that I'm only allowed to post a few comments per hour. I'm also suspecting that some users employ some kind of black list or tagging system to punish accounts that have demonstrated wrongthink. shrug It's still better than Ars Technica.

[musicale]

> It's still better than Ars Technica.

"Disagree" is actually a suggested downvote reason at Ars, with predictable results. Then they published a number of articles that turned out to be perfect bait for flame wars, trolling, and upvote/downvote wars. Comments dripping with twitter-style vitriol and outrage. Engagement up, quality down.

Perhaps they did it on purpose to watch the trash fires burn and the ad impressions roll in, but it really destroyed the comment section SNR and stank the whole place up. I've mostly quit reading Ars except via HN.

[mypastself]

I’ve never used it, but the way others do, here and on Reddit, I think of it as the “disagree” button, rather than “downvote”.

It can be frustrating when people use it in lieu of a comment, though. It means that, of all the arguments at their disposal, the person decided to expend only the minimal effort required to produce something that still qualifies as a reply. The communication via binary responses is a great illustration of the decay of modern discourse, if you believe in that sort of thing.

[u801e]

Before comment karma was a thing, certain forums and usenet newsgroups didn't really contain constructive arguments or disagreements.

[doublerabbit]

Forums have envolved in to social lands known as Reddit,HN, Twitter and the such. The only element that's shifted is how the way the content is presented.

Twitter is a glorified SMS/MMS message

Reddit is a glorified PHPBB forum

HN is glorified usenet.

Specific forums hold specific coversations which the above platforms are the same. HN is targetted towards the tech edge, reddit is targetted towards the average casual indiviual and Twitter/TikTok for the teenages but you still get the same output on all three.

As reddit to HN, The "downvote/upvote" mechanism is old, broken and blatent. Reddit introduced fuzzing to hide the real numbers and as a method to hide abuse. HN had the upper edge of only allowing selected users to downvote after a threshold but that itself feels bias. How many engineers read HN, and how many colleagues know each other with the power to conspire? They all have a problems of their own. HN for example has an problem that if you comment calling on a "fanboy" group, whether it's Elon, Apple, Google in discussion you end up getting lynched for it.

The karma-idealogy has been done and it worked when the internet was growing, however the internet has grown immaturely and we've never shifted away. We still live in an "upvote/downvote" generation where to the point now that folk are paid to farm for internet points. Controversial opinon, but it's civil.

[kar5pt]

Yeah HN down votes seem totally random to me. On reddit I can usually guess why I was down voted (advocating a viewpoint that goes against that subreddit's bias), but on HN I have no idea. I've been upvoted on things I would expect to get downvoted on and vice versa. It's so random I just ignore it as noise.