People who don't agree with something should have a way of expressing their views. Why is it acceptable to have a +1 button but not a -1 button? Why can people agree without giving any reason for their agreement but they can't disagree without giving any reason for their agreement? It's crazy that society works in this way and that people have such an irrational response to disagreement.
Because when you agree, that means the argument has already been presented - specifically, it's the argument that you are agreeing with. That is not the case for disagreement, where a counter-argument must exist, but has not been voiced yet.
Agreement and disagreement aren't superficial opposites like you're presenting them to be.
The reason why Github added these votes in the first place is so that people can give a signal of how welcome or not a certain change is to the project. If you only provide the signal for agreement but remove the signaling for disagreement and make it costly, then you'll get more people voting one way than the other. If it costs more to disagree then you're already rigging the game towards agreement.
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If I left the above with no further explanation, it doesn't give you any signal as to why I disagreed with you. One the other hand, if we were having this conversation on GitHub, people who agreed with my counter-point could react with a +1, giving you a much stronger signal about what exactly the disagreement is about.
And once someone provides a valuable counter-argument, it's no longer "rigged toward agreement."
Compared to an explanation with several +1's, a drive-by -1 adds virtually nothing to the discussion because they carry so little information.
On GitHub? They absolutely do. It's a platform for collaboration, not idle chatter. If you do not wish to support your disagreement, you probably shouldn't be posting anything there to begin with.
EDIT: I've also already explained to you why 'agreement' and 'disagreement' are held to different standards. I'm not sure why you keep repeating this point.
Because your distinction is wrong.
A drive-by -1 is in no way different from a drive-by +1.
Both are equally useful. Both indicate how many people agree or disagree. Neither explains why someone agrees or disagrees.
If the explanation for +1 is in the post you are upvoting, then the explanation for -1 is just as well in the post you are downvoting.
They absolutely do.
Here's an example: Alice posts a feature request on the issue tracker for Project Awesome saying that the project's mascot should be changed to a unicorn. Bob downvotes it. Neither person has provided an argument for their position.
According to you, Bob is required to explain why he doesn't want a unicorn mascot, but Alice doesn't have to explain why she wants one.
You are assuming that a positive argument will always be made in support of an assertion, and that therefore a negative argument must be made against it rather than merely a contrary assertion.
But it often happens that the pro side of an issue makes unsupported assertions and unreasonable claims, then the con side makes reasoned arguments, and the pro side proceeds to ignore the points raised by their opponents.
The real problem is anonymous voting. Anonymous votes are not very useful, because for all you know, the person voting doesn't even use the software in question. Voting within a team of collaborators could certainly be useful, even without substantiation, but "drive-by" votes by random Internet people are the problem.
EDIT: Ironically, this downvoting of moe's and my comments proves our points and demonstrates why anonymous downvoting is a problem. "We should only have reasoned arguments!" they say. But when reasoned arguments are presented in opposition to their claims, they merely downvote rather than making a reasoned counterargument. They do not do as they say.
And since the cost (in time and effort) of their anonymous downvote is far less than the cost of writing a rational counterargument, the level of discourse is driven further and further down as those who are willing and able to argue their positions rationally are discouraged from doing so. Why waste your time arguing with people who do so in bad faith?
Also, as others have mentioned, it only takes one person to write a negative comment, then others could +1 that.
That's not to say that I wouldn't like that bias resolved, but it's a bias that exists precisely because of the difference between 'agreement' and 'disagreement' that I described, and I'm not sure it can be solved in a technical manner.
Someone shouldn't have to expect to come up with an alternative just to voice the idea that something sucks.
This idea leaves you vulnerable to the "something must be done, this is something, therefore we do it" problem by unfairly biasing positive votes rather than negative ones. Yes, I read your rationale. I don't agree with it.
I'm not nearly as adamantly opposed to a downvote button, but I can understand the argument.
Sometimes people make silly claims or requests or demands. In such cases, one shouldn't be required to write a reasoned counterargument. A simple "nope" should suffice.
"This is why we can't have nice things." People assume the status quo is bad or wrong and that change is necessarily progress. It begins to take more effort to keep the good things that have been achieved than it does to break them and replace them with regressions. It requires more time and effort to defend them against the onslaught of unreasoned demands because of irrational bias against the status quo.
This is true not only in software but in politics and society. But for a simple example in the software world, just look at the Metro UI: it's awful for a million reasons, a regression even from Windows 95's UI--but to some people, it's change, therefore it must be progress, therefore it must be done.
What about a comment? Once someone elaborates why they disagree, others can trivially +1 it to show support of a specific disagreement.
On the other hand, you can disagree with both the original comment and someone's disagreement, prompting an additional "disagreement" reply.
Note that -1's don't carry as much information as you'd think. It could mean any one of these:
- Someone disagrees with you
- Someone doesn't like you
- Someone is angry or having a bad day
- Someone is retaliating or holding a grudge
Without any rationale, there's absolutely no way to tell the difference between a useful disagreement and juvenile aggression.
-Someone agrees with you
-Someone likes you
-Someone is happy or having a good day
-Someone is repaying a favor or maintaining a friendship.
Negation is different because it's entirely ambiguous. You can dish them out freely and retroactively rationalize your intention. -1's are way more susceptible to knee-jerk emotional reactions than +1's.
A relevant example. Think of the political candidate you like the most. If someone you really like asks you to +1 a persuasive argument about their competitor, would you? On the other hand, if they asked you to -1 someone, you probably would. Even if you knew very little about them.
Nobody really cares if you +1 something crazy, maybe you were just feeling agreeable that day, or you misunderstood the comment. But if you -1 sensible things you're going to get a bad reputation pretty quickly.
That's because people don't tend to write "-1", but rather disagree with a comment explaining why. GitHub is full of disagreement. We'd be in a much worse place if that was all expressed through downvotes instead of comments (unless of course, an issue is explicitly opting in to a vote).
> people will +1 something that they 90% disagree with because of who's saying it, don't kid yourself otherwise.
Ok yeah, you're right about the politics. Bad example. But in open source, I've seen much more comment-based pushback regardless of author.
That's like 90% of the PR's I look at.
Nevertheless, some people find them useful.
I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes. I’d say that downvotes need to be implemented in conjunction with a bunch of other features and active moderation policies to work well. I don’t know if HN has done so, or if GitHub has done so. But... I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.
(FWIW, I follow this policy: I either downvote, or reply, but never both. In this case, I disagree with you, but think the conversation is useful, so I reply. Other comments might be wildly off-topic or deeply non-constructive, and those I down-vote. But to each their own.)
As for "I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes," perhaps. There's still probably better ways to flag inappropriate comments though. Like a flag button. Downvotes are far too general and ambiguous in comparison.
Thank you for that insight, never thought about it that way (alas, I'm not allowed to downvote). That approach seems very reasonable.
Reminds me of the rule in programming with exceptions, either handle and log or rethrow.
Yes. And if I was a HN developer, which I am not, I would immediately remove that functionality - but even then, my argument doesn't really apply here, because HN isn't really meant to be a constructive platform to begin with.
> I don’t think it’s 100% clear-cut that you should never ever implement downvotes.
For constructive platforms: absolutely, 100%. It's well understood what kind of behaviour is driven by the availability of a semi-anonymous "disagree" button. There's not really any gray area here.
> Other comments might be wildly off-topic or deeply non-constructive, and those I down-vote. But to each their own.
On a constructive platform, that is a matter for moderation, not opinion. The problem of downvotes is that it combines the two, even though they are fundamentally different concepts.
Those downvotes would soon be corrected by other people reading the thread, and we wouldn't have to read bad tempered bickering.
Downvote for disagreement has been on HN for longer than you've had your account.
If you actually wanted a discussion of political philosophy or to discuss other less popular candidates, there's other places for that.
But I guess it's a size and topic thing. If your site has a mature userbase, a limited topic or is mostly a pretty tight knit community, adding a downvote button tends to be a decent enough thing to do. Same if you have to acquire the privilege to use it.
On Reddit, downvoting just encourages group-think as you will get downvoted for voicing an unpopular opinion.
It seems ironic you'd post this on a platform that has a downvote button.
That seems like an odd assertion. Are you looking for the worst content then, or...? I can see an argument that voting would not highlight the best content, at least in some cases; I don't understand an argument that we aren't looking for the best content.
Conversely, HNews is intended as a constructive platform. Should the tools we use here not be designed to foster collaboration and constructive debate?
Disclaimer: I'm skeptical of voting both here and on Github. But I feel like the argument that the differences between the platforms are major and fundamental needs a lot more fleshing out.
We are not just using the system, we use the system here to improve the system itself that's why people call it constructive community.
This will (indirectly and directly) lead to populism, where unpopular opinions get dismissed out of hand without even considering them.
Seriously, GitHub, this is rule one of designing constructive social platforms: you never ever ever implement a downvote button of any kind.