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> Edit: if you are going to downvote, at least don’t be a coward and provide feedback

I know downvotes can be frustrating, but please don't give in to the temptation to add things like that last bit. It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) because, as they say, it never does any good and makes for boring reading. It also just attracts more downvotes.

Have you ever thought about a rule, that you can only downvote a comment if it has at least one reply (by anybody, not necessarily the downvoter)? That would discourage the demoralising situation where someone gets downvoted but is left guessing why.

Of course, there will be some comments which do not merit a reply (non-substantive contributions or blatant trolling) - but, those comments should be flagged anyway. Maybe count flags as downvotes (if they aren’t already), so you could still downvote reply-less comments by flagging them.

That would discourage the demoralising situation where someone gets downvoted but is left guessing why.

It encourages replying to bad comments which is already a bigger problem than the sting of an unexpounded-upon downvote. 'No receipts required for downvotes' makes HN better.

Strongly disagree. Maybe most people don’t receive feedback. But I believe there is at least a minority that does and can be influenced by feedback. Similar to US politics.

Edit: Notice how I upvoted you rather than downvoted out of disagreement

He doesn't notice that, because votes at the margin are random, and 4 times out of 5 people complaining about voting can just wait and whatever's bothering them will be rectified organically.

The downvoted commenter would still have no way to tell whether the downvote was related to the reply, since those would most often be coming from different users.

That’s a great idea! Or something like it.

Agreed. Thank you, just frustrating. I will remove “coward” ;)

I don't get why people are downvoting you either so here's an upvote to counteract

Thanks buddy. I didn’t even say much. It’s very weird.

do you ever pause and wonder why that number is of so importance? I noticed my eyes were constantly zooming up and to the right to read the number and after unpacking this I have since removed it from view using a firefox plugin.

Downvote me all you want, it won't silence my thoughts.

I don’t care so much about the upper right total (at least not that I have now achieved everything there is to be had by it). But I do sometimes notice individual comments when active in the discourse.

For reference for anyone that wants to do this, you can use uBlock Matrix or whatever it's called now to block individual elements on certain websites.

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