[avalaunch]

Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say. A simple solution which I doubt will ever be enacted would be to increase the options from 2 (3 if you count clicking the time stamp then flagging) to 5: useful, not useful, agree, disagree, flag. Then those votes could be used more intelligently to determine the best display order for comments.

[stephenr]

Something modelled after the /. mod system would be best frankly - up/down with generic reasons, and limited to +5:-1.

[dragonwriter]

> Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say.

If you wish to say something more than up/down votes, that's what the "reply" function is for.

[avalaunch]

No, the reply function is for when you have something meaningful to add. If all you have to say is "I agree/disagree" or "your comment was useful/not useful", the reply function is not the right function to use. But unfortunately, the up/down functionality isn't quite right either because you can't determine why the vote was cast.

[DanBC]

But then we'd have endless threads complainig about people misusing those buttons too. People who currently have a single downvote for disagree would have two downvotes.

[avalaunch]

Yes but at least everyone, for the most part, would be in agreement to what constitutes proper use and misuse of the buttons, which we don't have now.

More importantly, the votes could be used differently in calculating the comment display order. People could still feel they have an outlet to easily disagree without replying while not having their votes bury useful comments.