Hacker News Reader

"I am confident that if a user could see who downvotes his stories, there will be a lot less of that. If you are doing something you would not do if you knew your identity will be made public, then there is "integrity" in question here."

This, to me, is the most interest assertion in his whole prognosis. How would people use downvote if they knew all could see who had done it?

View on HN

It seems that downvotes would definitely decrease - I would bet that a large portion of them would not have been made in public. If nothing else it might increase the number of replies to a post - It would be slightly embarrassing to see your name as one of the downvoters if you didn't also reply to the post.

Enabling downvotes on submissions could also be interesting - maybe to downvote a submission you have to comment about it or about why you downvoted it. Revealing voting could add an additional feature to the site - if we see that someone who likes the same stuff voted something up, then we'll probably read it.

I think the general attitude here, is to provide the functionality to a) disagree and to b) bury bad content.

In those separate issues, transparency becomes an issue, particularly with the downvote. I'm definitely in favor of promoting transparency in order to disagree or bury bad content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com