[spiffytech]

Tildes.net tries something interesting here: there is no downvote, but users can flag comments with one of the provided negative attributes (offtopic, noise, malice)[0]. This discourages "downvote to disagree", and provides enough signal to e.g., sink an off-topic comment, but summon a moderator for malicious comments.

[0] https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#la...

[chansiky]

Thanks for sharing, this is a really interesting thought and its very close to one I had based on this thread, with the one difference being that instead of letting others decide what kind of comment one makes, we should really lean into thinking of commenting as a sort of game and let the user decides what kind of comment they are making, by letting them choose to attack/defend/support a position.

We've seen how the upvote/downvote w/ranking systems play, I'm not a big fan of what reddit has become lately, and I wonder where HN would be without great moderators. At the very least it would be refreshing to see how alternative mechanics lead to different communities.

Sort of related is this thought, Wikipedia is an MMORPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...