HN should have a downvote justification section | Hacker News Reader

HN should have a downvote justification section

10 pointspotato-peeler25 comments

If HN provides a downvote button to only certain users, they should justify their downvote. Otherwise it’s just brigading.

You don’t like what I say, how will I know why? You downvote because others are downvoting or you are too lazy to come up with a counter argument.

So I propose, if you downvote, then HN should open up a text box asking you to justify. So people will know if it make’s sense. If others downvote that, they should justify that too. So downvote and justify all the way.

Make it so tedious, nobody downvotes.

View on HN

Comes with the cost of putting yourself out there. Not everyone is going to like it, and you won’t agree with the reasons.

Shouting “brigading” doesn’t do much to change that.

It also ignores the impact of upvotes, which can be used to the same effect, yet doesn’t receive the same request.

> Comes with the cost of putting yourself out there. Not everyone is going to like it, and you won’t agree with the reasons.

Even someone downvoting a post is expressing their opinion. Current Issue is, person downvoting is anonymous, provides no reason and can’t be held liable for their own action. This is ironic, if they also put themselves out there.

Inadvertently, down voters have a larger say in shaping a discussion even though their level of participation is minimal instead of someone who takes the effort to provide a well structured opinion.

This balance of power is skewed.

If downvoting means to disagree, one should know why.

No, if downvoting means to disagree, one wants to know why.

If one wants to provide why, there are replies for that.

It’s a qualitative instrument, making it quantitative will change the use. Meanwhile, abuse always finds a way.

Which is what I am saying, if you choose to downvote then you have to mandatorily provide reason. The qualitative reason matches the quantitative instrument. Have you not come across a post/comment and feel odd to see many upvotes/downvotes but little justification about the votes?

shrug not really. There's lots of people, and lots of reasons why they individually might agree or disagree. Whereas I think I'm generally right on a lot of things, I'm not so arrogant as to believe I'm universally right, or that others might hold opposing views for completely valid reasons.

Downvoting is simply that, IMHO, nothing more and nothing less than "I disagree with you".

> Downvoting is simply that, IMHO, nothing more and nothing less than "I disagree with you".

So why is it tied to a quality of a post? You can simply reply you don’t agree. But that takes effort, so you downvote. But if you reply, that has no measurable value to tie to the quality of a post, even though words carry more meaning.

So somewhere your disagreement to something is perceived differently if you reply vs if you just downvote.

  Downvoting is not simply downvoting, friend.

Replying and disagreeing aren’t the same. Disagreeing and downvoting aren’t the same.

Force someone to justify a downvote and you'll get some useful feedback. You'll also likely get a 'because your mom' bunch, unless you annotate the downvote with the username downvoting, and that's a big leap and would discourage downvotes.

Downvotes are a useful tool. If you can only ever upvote something, that is when the site-value is vulnerable to brigading - HN is probably not interested in lowering the signal-to-noise if farming accounts to upvote (and only upvote) is an option.

Also, a lot of downvoting on the internet is just "I disagree with you", or "I don't like what you're saying". It can be personal, and not necessarily useful to the original poster.

In other words, I disagree with you. Though I won't downvote (flag, I guess on posts) you. This time :)

[aside: I'm not some apologist for HN. I'd love to post my own pet-project [1] but I've linked to it too often in posts where I though it was relevant, and now HN won't accept any post with that URL. Caught by my own ignorance and actions, but it's still their right to run their site as they see fit]

1: (I'm assuming that HN-links are ok :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151036#50151160

> Also, a lot of downvoting on the internet is just "I disagree with you", or "I don't like what you're saying". It can be personal, and not necessarily useful to the original poster.

They will reduce or be discarded. If a system recognises that you don’t add value, then either such users will be forced to put in effort or simply be discouraged to pollute any post.

Platforms like Reddit suffer because you can coordinate with many users to push an agenda, since their is no accountability from users who only upvote or downvote. That’s why bot farm and coordinated campaigns thrive.

Why will they reduce ? Are you suggesting that "I don't agree with this" shouldn't be a perfectly valid reason to downvote it ?

Unless someone is policing the downvote reasons and holding them to some academically or some other rigorous standard, "I think you're wrong" is ... just fine as a reason.

> "I think you're wrong" is ... just fine as a reason

I don’t agree with this.

——

I could have ended there but If I don’t expand on “I don’t agree with this” and simply end it with a full stop, does it tell you anything? Neither it tells someone else anything. For such cases, you don’t engage.

Or you do, and you downvote.

There are a wide variety of people in this world, and they don't all operate along your own norms, or mine, or <insert random cohort>. People can do as they please. Seems to work out mostly fine.

> Though I won't downvote (flag, I guess on posts) you. This time :)

I did get a laugh to see the irony in the end :)

There’s a missed opportunity here hidden in this drawback: while the site will likely never share downvote reasons with users (any more that it would share flag reasons with us, once those ship), the users who downvote with useless filler reasons could then be labeled as ‘bad faith voters’ by the mods (not for disagreeing but for having an absence of opinion expressed in the downvote reason) so that the ranking algorithm ignores their actions — both downs and ups. It would be an excellent form of penalty, because there’s no way for them to know if it’s applied or not without being in a (prohibited) voting ring, and it would waste dramatically more of their time for each useless downvote, and it would let us see what HN looks like when upvotes exclude those who openly disregard for the community and site’s health. That could be viewed as a win-win scenario!

People will just flag content that is compliant with the guidelines if you take away their downvote option, and flag reasons are already inbound someday. I rarely downvote and asking me to provide reasons (which would only be visible to the mods, same as flag reasons and in alignment with the ‘no accusations in public’ guidelines) would drive me to downvote more, since it would invest more weight into my opinion. Typing “This is a generic copy-paste of a rabble-rouse / talking-point that is unconnected to the post it was pasted into, and should be detached from the top thread and downweighted to the bottom of the discussion just above the blatantly-offtopic replies” is infinitely more attractive a downvote to submit than just clicking an arrow. I feel I can say with some certainty that the outcome would not be what you desire, but instead would result in a sea of downvoting that helps the mods identify and target uninteresting and bad faith participation (that often earns upvotes for also being popular or witty!) while leaving legitimate controversy alone. Though, I suppose, after a year of that, sitewide downvoting would decrease as users earn algorithmic quashes for their valuelessness. One can dream.

People would still downvote. It's just that it would be limited to the people who are really intent on it -- that is, the brigaders. It's not like they're going to have any trouble coming up with an excuse.

So you have excluded the people who are casually reading the site and wish to filter out poor-quality comment. But the people who you wished to exclude won't be slowed one iota.

(I wouldn't usually say this but... I will greatly enjoy the irony if this comment gets voted down.)

I would rather remove the downvote button altogether. If the comment violates the rules, flag it. Otherwise it's just an offer for misuse. As is apparently flagging, why else would someone flag this post?

Downvotes and flags are a vital part of the immune system of any community that wants to to hold back the tide of Eternal September. As the community grows and the average intellectual and technical level regresses to the mean of Reddit level inanity, if anything we need more downvotes more often to hold back the entropy. If 80% of the content on this entire forum vanished into oblivion, little of value would be lost.

Upvotes don't help either, they're basically meaningless. If anything they need to remove upvotes so the effect of downvoting is even stronger.

Lobste.rs (and some others) is living well without downvotes, so the feature is barely vital. It's rather a cheap means to remove work from admins and delegate it to pseudo random actors. Your view on upvotes is backwards. Mathematically it doesn't matter if you only have upvotes; it simply encourages a different, more positive behavior.

Reddit is mostly an example for what happens when rules and moderators are bad.

If lobste.rs wasn't invite only and didn't have the invitation tree so that a single infraction banned everyone responsible for vouching for that individual up to the root, it would need downvotes as well. HN has open public membership so it needs some filter to keep the culture intact or else it would just degenerate into chaos.

Unfortunately it isn't the 1990s anymore. The internet is a sewer of bots and slop and rancid toxicity. You can't expect people to be civil anymore, or even sane. Just the baseline of common decency requires aggressive gatekeeping and moderation, and preferably keeping a community small and hostile to outsiders. I kind of hate it, it's elitist, but the alternative is everything turning into 4chan.

> You can't expect people to be civil anymore, or even sane

Why would you then trust them with a downvote or flagging button?

> If lobste.rs wasn't invite only and didn't have the invitation tree

Maybe, maybe not. We don't have the evidence. Anyway, it's easy to get an invitation.

>Why would you then trust them with a downvote or flagging button?

Because at least a downvote is silent. Without a downvote that energy just bleeds into more argumentative and off-topic discussion.

The problem is people complaining about downvotes. People need to just accept them as the cost of doing business here and move on. Complaining is only going to get you downvoted more.

> Without a downvote that energy just bleeds into more argumentative and off-topic discussion

That will happen anyway.

> People need to just accept them as the cost of doing business here and move on

As they apparently must accept comments, but the latter at least have a clear author, even if hidden behind a pseudonym in most cases. By the end of the day, the quality of the forum seems to depend on the quality and presence of the moderators.

If you have to explain downvotes, upvotes should also require an explanation. "Brigading" can go both ways.

Obviously. But HN does not install threshold for someone to start upvoting. Which in itself does not represent quality. The entire voting system does not makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com