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Comment by sesqu | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. If you're not getting downvoted, that could just as easily mean you're not unconvincing.

Downvotes are ideally for low-value content. If your viewpoint is contrary to popular opinion, the onus is on you to explain your reasoning persuasively enough to not come off as a simple contrarian.

Downvotes are not a reward for thinking independently. They are a penalty for sloppy thinking or overly presumptious output. They are also the only way I can think of for fighting populist, short-circuit comments that troll for upvotes - by encouraging actual argumentation.

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Ideally, and in practice, are not the same thing here... People downvote things they disagree with, including unconventional views, all the time.

The behavior of a group and the behavior of individuals in that group aren't necessarily the same.

It's quite possible for the majority of people to vote based on agreement, and yet have the overall score of the comment be determined by those who vote by quality. Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out. The remaining comment score is made up of those who voted because it was a well-reasoned argument.

Reddit has the "Controversial" tab for this, though HN unfortunately doesn't make a distinction between a comment with 50 upvotes and 40 downvotes vs. one with 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.

> Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out.

It's possible for this to happen, but I don't think there are that many hot-button issues where the two sides are exactly balanced. More commonly there will be at least a slight skew in one direction or another, which gets magnified in absolute score the more people there are who vote based on agreement. For example, if there's a 60/40 opinion skew among people who vote based on agreement on a particular topic, and 20 people vote that way, you already have an 8-point rating gap between the popular and unpopular comments (+12/-8 versus +8/-12). On really high-traffic topics, where 100 people might up/downvote based on agreement, you only need a tiny skew from 50/50 for the votes to pile up in one direction or another.

I think in practice that often swamps the quality-based voting, especially on high-traffic articles: you sometimes see extremely short and not particularly insightful comments that express a popular sentiment up at +40 or more.

Right. I attempted to argue that this was because the comment they disagreed with failed to make them stop and think about why disagreement exists, and re-evaluate their position. That is, downvotes are generally a sign of failure.

Certainly, some people stop, think, disagree, and downvote. I believe that this is the case when the original comment is sloppy, and generally warrants a reply. In some cases, especially various kinds of politics, the replies are omitted presumably because of fatigue. Such people have already replied to the argument enough times in their life to not want to do it again. That could be interpreted as a failure of domain research on the part of the original commenter, but I don't like to blame people for not being "well-read".

Voting based on agreement/disagreement, rather than based on quality and relevance is thuggery. It's also human nature; we're passionate, lazy animals. The question is whether or not the problem is widespread enough to threaten the overall value of HN.

Granting that it's human nature to want to send a 1-click agree/disagree signal, and that signal can then be noise which hides another valuable/punishable signal we want to collect, I'd like to see HN or another site like it try a two-axis voting system:

up-promote vs. down-demote: affecting order-of-presentation and karma

left-agree vs. right-disagress: a mini-poll per comment, with no censorious effect on presentation or numerical-reputational effect on karma

Don't worry, I'm not downvoting you because your views are unpopular. I'm downvoting you because you're trolling.

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