Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

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You're assuming that down-votes are used to assess the quality of the post, and not agreement with the content.

I would suggest that both appear here. Personally I would prefer votes to be on quality of post rather than popularity of position as that leads to the possibility of examining an issue from multiple viewpoints.

(When responding to a post that has been thought out, but down voted, I feel the need to point out that although I disagree, I'm not the one downvoting.)

I do think that voting improves the quality overall. But a better system might be separate options for 'agree/disagree' vs 'quality / pithy' posts. (I also thinkbthis would be horrible UI, so meh)

Yep exactly. I’d argue they create echo chambers far more than we’d like to admit. It’s also not simply voting but also algorithmic of sorting content by likes, and implicitly excluding anything under a certain threshold.

I’ve felt this way for nearly twenty years now, coinciding with the rise of reddit, twitter, and facebook alongside the decline of forums, blogs, and rss.

On any topic with even slight amount of contention, you very quickly see people aligning toward the one-true-belief because they observe and react to the crowd supporting that opinion.

> I would suggest that both appear here.

They do. It's not a perfect mechanism.

> But a better system might be

Yeah we've had 20 years or more of sites trying to find a good formula now. Slashdot's ratings and meta-ratings back in the day, where you rated something as Insightful/Informative etc, and then every so often you were asked to review other user's ratings so their future ratings could be weighted ... technically interesting but really cumbersome.

I like HN's choice not to display ratings on other people's posts, and I like the simple UI. I think it's better with up and down votes than without... I don't think we're going to find a perfect scheme but that doesn't mean we should abandon the imperfect ones.

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