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Comment by imdsm | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see the downvote culture come here. Downvoting is meant for removing contributions that don't add much to a discussion, not for indicating whether someone agrees or disagrees with you. It seems to be a norm that is spreading though, sadly.

It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around here.

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That's not true. Downvoting for disagreement has been ok on HN from the beginning.

I realize people have strong feelings about it, but that's because of the psychological intensity of the mechanism. There's no way HN would survive without downvotes, despite the fact that not all downvotes are fair. It's a critical part of the immune system.

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

I also always thought that downvoting should be reserved for low quality comments, but I had been corrected and even dang said:

Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN.[1]

I don't really like it, but it has always been the case on HN. The question is if the community voting behavior has actually changed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666145

Downvoting for disagreement is okay? That is new to me. Well okay then. I will proceed accordingly.

Thanks.

From somewhere in the warren of links to dang posts I traced out from there:

> I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN.

That one gets me, because I had previously assumed that downvoting for disagreement would be a standard Reddit thing, but that HN's community is supposed to strive toward a more "we're all mature adults here" kind of community standard.

> It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring.

I don't have an opinion on what "correct" downvoting culture would be, one way or the other, but - if you say "contributions that don't add much to a discussion" should be downvoted, then isn't a "boring" comment precisely one that _should_ be downvoted?

The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag. If downvote is opposed with upvote and upvote is understood to mean "I agree" or "this is informative" then downvote would be expected to mean "I disagree" or "this is bunk". It's semantically misleading.

> The downvote button should be replaced with an "off topic" flag.

I hope not. Some of the most informative, useful comments I've seen on Hacker News have taken the form of wild tangents.

I do see where you're going, though, that if "I agree" is sufficient cause for an upvote, then it's only reasonable that a vote in the opposite direction should be allowed to carry the opposite semantics.

It's just that, from a purely social standpoint, that's not actually how human beings typically think, feel, and react. Perhaps it could be that simple on the Vulcan version of Hacker News.

Oh for sure—wild tangents are fine as long as they're unpredictable, which is what makes them interesting. The offtopicness we try to avoid are generic tangents, the kind where people get sucked into the same argument about some topic that they always get sucked into. Those are the black holes of internet forums—it's best to steer clear.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

To be clear, "off topic" here's just an example. My main point was the semantic implication of a downvote - I've seen the argument of "downvotes are not meant for disagreement" expressed here previously.

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