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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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’s a great idea! Or something like it.

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.

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

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