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Comment by acheron | Hacker News Reader

Slashdot tried this, without much success. All the -1 mods were treated pretty interchangeably (can you distinguish between "-1, Flamebait" and "-1, Troll"? Is your distinction going to be the same as the next modder? And much of the time they were really being used as "-1, I Disagree" anyway).

As were the +1 mods, for that matter, save "+1, Funny".

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I think slashdot intentionally(?) picked silly voting reasons.

Spam, Mean/Abusive/Rude, Incorrect would cover the vast majority of reasonable downvotes, I think, and are fairly distinct and intuitive. There are some gray areas about downvoting (something which is interesting but offtopic: is that spam?), but I don't think those gray areas usually are between two of these categories.

I loved when /. introduced the vote-categories, if for no other reason than it finally solved the internet humor problem for me. Some people like the joke/comedy comments that occur in discussion threads. Nine out of ten times I find them uninspired and formulaic. /.'s voting system meant that I did not have to see the "funny" comments and all of the "comedy fans" were able to get their laughs in without my downvotes.

slashdot user id = #8912

I actually thought Slashdot's way of doing it was quite effective, especially the idea of rolling moderators.

The only thing that matters is separating agree/disagree from constructive/unconstructive. (The latter is used for raising comments to the top of the thread. The former is mostly to force people to make the distinction, and maybe for getting a sense of the crowd's opinion.) None of the other distinctions are really useful for action.

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