[dotancohen]

Why?

Most such comments are actually informative, and the honesty about asking an AI is an important detail. This particular one was heavily downvoted, as it should have been, because it was wrong. It was still a human writing, trying to be helpful.

[dsr_]

You shouldn't downvote entries that are wrong, you should present evidence against them. People shouldn't feel penalized for being wrong, just not rewarded for it.

However, you should downvote for doing things that hurt the community -- and "I asked ChatGPT" hurts the community almost as much as "I googled this for you" does.

[aspenmayer]

Downvoted for disagreement and for mentioning voting, but I'm telling you why because you think I ought to say something if I disagree, which I'm able to do in this case.

It's fine to downvote things that you believe are wrong or simply disagree with, and I have read mods on HN say that downvoting for disagreement is okay. Asking or insisting for more from an HN user is presumptuous, and discussion of voting is largely considered off-topic and therefore not really what the guidelines suggests we should do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560543

> Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

More to the upthread point, generated comments are against guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

> HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either!

These are quotes from dang, not my own. I'm just a HN user, which is why I found the quotes to help everyone make up their own mind what the guidelines say.

[dsr_]

I note that the body of your comment implicitly agrees with me that providing evidence is a good thing :)

The character of a community is formed by what it does more than what it says it does.

[aspenmayer]

I would tend to agree that it usually does benefit the discussion to say why one disagrees instead of a simple drive-by downvote, but when folks have already agreed to disagree or are in the process of reaching such agreement, more rabble-rousing inclined folks tend to jump into the fraying thread to sow discord, so I understand why it’s not in the guidelines that we must specify why we downvote or flag instead of just doing so.

More from dang on this topic here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12334384

The whole comment is worth a read, so here’s just a taste:

> Our goal is to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity, which requires a higher signal/noise ratio. Downvotes dampen low-value comments. I know downvotes do bad things too, but that's the good thing they do, and it's big. Taking that away and/or increasing the noise with a flood of people disagreeing about their disagreements would not be an optimization.