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Comment by jobigoud | Hacker News Reader

They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total.

YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted, but I feel it's still an improvement.

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I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.

Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.

That's a very interesting idea. Force constructive feedback.

To downvote, please tell us what you don't like about this comment > asdfasdfasdf

Make it multiple choice not free text. Limit to a few basic reasons. Make that thing pop up for every downvote and watch downvotes reduce over time. Also, maybe assign weights to how often one downvotes. So say you are someone who disagrees often, your downvotes become less and less potent the longer you are in session.

Honestly my post was mostly a joke, but I don't think mandating a rationale is a good idea, and I give a rationale for ~85% of my downvotes. Probably a third of those don't deserve rationale--I'm responding to someone who is pretty overtly trolling or otherwise trying to incent a flamewar. Beyond that, I will occassionally not leave an explanation because

1. I don't have time to type out an appropriately nuanced comment, and an un-nuanced comment is hardly better qualified than a driveby downvote.

2. No matter the quality of my explanatory comment, it will only be a target for partisan downvoters. I don't care much for my karma, but I do care for my time and I don't want to waste it so trolls can give my view an air of illegitimacy.

Besides, while it is annoying to be downvoted anonymously, no one owes me an explanation. It's a courtesy at best, and any attempt to regulate it will be defeated by insincere feedback.

I think that could be resolved by downvotes losing their power if they themselves get downvoted.

Maybe, but this seems far more likely to only amplify the majority voice. Especially on a platform like Twitter, this would inevitably be used to suppress a dissenting minority more than it is used to encourage thoughtful explanations. Not trying to shoot down suggestions; moderation is hard.

I somehow doubt it would end up being constructive.

Slashdot had, 20 years ago, different types of upvote and downvote, so you could say things were "insightful" or "off topic". You could even alter the weightings attached to them so "Funny" would be negative rather than positive.

Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...

Slashdots comments these days seem on par with YouTube.

Based on all the people commenting “f” on Facebook to subscribe, I don’t think this would actually change anything.

Surely "f" means "pay respect to", or is that a different meme?

Different - they mean “follow”. Facebook will send you notifications from threads you’ve commented on.

I don't understand why facebook isn't better at determining the intent of the message: hide messages with "following" "f" or whatever and just subscribe the user to notifications—which they could have done otherwise if the option was made more obvious.

Maybe I don't use FB enough but I hadn't heard of this "f" thing (beyond 'F' being a Call of Duty meme). I imagine it's an unexpected usecase for Facebook and one that would better be served by making a prominent "subscribe to notification" feature, rather than coming up with a machine learning solution. What if the parent comment is a quiz type question for which there are answers A through F? Admittedly it's an edge case but it's an example of how diverse the strange ways people use FB for commenting and discussing.

Careful - the rules say you're not allowed to complain about downvoting. I've made this suggestion myself on a number of occasions in the past, probably different accounts. The quickest approach to problem fixing - the hn approach - have a rule saying don't complain about the problem.

lobste.rs makes you select a reason, visible by the author, for downwoting a comment.

I think this stems from downvotes being abused. If a comment is well written and constructive, you should not downvote it just because you disagree with it. The real intent of downvotes is to flush away off topic and low effort comments.

> There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

It happens when you've struck a nerve but nobody wants to try and refute you because engaging in debate comes with a risk of you actually being right and them actually being wrong and some part of their ideology hinges on the correctness of whatever you're challenging.

I'm still not entirely convinced this vote based filtering is really more effective than the basic old chronological threading it 'improved' upon. It opens itself up to extreme gaming and the threaded nature often results in what are, more or less, the exact same conversation chains happening multiple times in different places in a topic. Threaded + votes also results in a very artificial selection of top posts. Posts that are more viewed, and aren't awful, are more likely to get more votes further reinforcing their prioritization.

And maybe the most important thing of all. The vast majority of people do not check out new threads. So you get a very artificial selection of topics that end up making it onto the front page, since it's selected by the tiny minority that do view and vote upon the new topics.

try it out now: https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/

This is awesome and I like your logic. Metrics should be off for every social network by default. All metrics do is breed heard mentality.

For HN, I think up-votes and down-votes counts should be shown individually. The comments with no up-votes and lots of downvotes would go grey - universally considered bad. The comments with lots of up-votes and down-votes, but with net down, indicates controversial opinion but with some support/validity.

basically use it as a squishy toy

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