That's a recipe for making users scared of expressing alternative/controversial opinions, also replacing positive feedback loop with a negative one.

Really? It seems to me that downvotes are used very negatively, as they are put a strong incentive (for most people) not to express unpopular opinions, even if they are good comments. If they were used only to discourage low quality posts, it wouldn't change a lot, since the most upvoted comments would still be to the top.

He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.

I don't like downvotes because people mostly downvote what they disagree, not spam and whatnot. Having some ideas and habits contrary to what's popular, I experience this first-hand here on HN. And probably this is a reflex, most often when one sees someone disagree him, he feels a spontaneous whim and thinks that his argument is not reasonable. And only after a bunch of seconds does he understand that the other one actually poses a sound argument, criticism, etc. The HN's upvote-downvote sytem lacks undo, so unfortunately when you regret a downvote, there's nothing to do.

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." -Mark Twain

I wonder how much karma Mark Twain would have if he had a Hacker News account...

Anyway, I, too, find downvoting very distasteful. IMO it should be reserved purely for low quality comments. When the crowd downvotes unpopular opinions, the place inevitably becomes an echo chamber, which is unquestionably harmful to honest, open debate and discussion.

> I wonder how much karma Mark Twain would have if he had a Hacker News account...

My first thought was probably about as much as coldtea has. Lots of up votes and lots of down votes with the up votes winning.

Not only unpopular opinions, but since here on hn we can receive down-votes for "low quality" comments, people who are not native english speakers might shy away from expressing their views (I speak from my own perspective here). I often find that anglophones can have lengthy posts ranting about the same stuff over and over, but when non english natives comment they tend to be more concise and thoughtful. I'm actually kind off miss grammatically incorrect sentences that have a valid point, those are much more common on other forums, in those cases the person didn't had to feel pressure to be down-voted just for bad grammar.

As a non-native speaker, I've observed this, too. Lengthy, well written posts get far more upvotes and are treated more leniently with respect to downvotes regardless of their content.

Actually interesting posts are often grumpy four liners written during a short break from actual work (e.g. while waiting for a compile to finish).

It sounds like that's what he wants. A "clean" site.

Imzy actually has removed karma for users, precisely for that reason. It's usually something that ends up only being there for people to game and creates more negative consequences than the good it's intended for. You can like/upvote comments and posts, but there aren't downvotes, and how well a post does doesn't reflect on the users in any way.

That's nice. Actually the efficiency of karma in the context of online forums should be statistically studied, maybe comparing Imzy to Reddit for amounts of spam, clickbait, attention-seekers, etc., but Imzy is invite only now.

What do you (assuming you are someone from Imzy, sorry if not) do with spam, when there are no downvotes? Do you have a flagging system, automodding, spam filters, etc.?

We have a report flag on every post and comment to allow items to be escalated and reviewed. Users are required to explain why they are reporting something so that it's hopefully not just used as a downvote. (And, tbh, downvotes don't really help with catching spam since most of the time they're just to show disagreement or make sure comments that aren't worth being seen don't get seen as much.)

We have the nascent stages of algorithms that will help us with tracking spam and such, but those take time and data to become better, and we're pretty small right now. They will grow as we do. That's one of the reasons we're invite-only right now. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.

> HN is incredibly focused compared to Reddit. That's what keeps HN clean.

I'm not sure that fully explains why HN is so much better than Reddit.

Obviously HN is more focused than Reddit overall, but it's ostensibly less focused than many dedicated subreddits. Yet the quality of conversation here is invariable superior.

I don't think karma is the culprit. It exists on HN and works quite well—I put effort into my comments to ensure my ideas are clear and when a post is downvoted it makes me reconsider my writing.

I think it's more focused in the sense that you'll have many more "serious" people looking at what you write, at least some of them will be domain experts in the topics being discussed. This causes people to post much more conservatively and less frequently than they would do on reddit.

The flip side of that is that reddit will throw up discussions on things which would never in a million years show up on HN, this one today for instance I found very interesting

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4g1pgu/serious_t...

I personally don't know of another "forum" where a post like that could happen and get such interesting responses.

I think that a huge part of it is simply the amount of people here. There are some pretty unfocused subreddits that are decently small and end up with a lot less BS than you might have in HN (esp. threads about Uber, Code of Conducts, etc.)

The moderation, of course, plays a huge part too though.

>That's what keeps HN clean...

I really don't think HN is much better than reddit, these days...

See the FAQ, what you did is a capital offence :)