Actually I've implemented a 4 votes discussion system:
- Like = I agree / useful / insightful
- Disagree — does not affect post sort order or karma
- Bury — for moving well-intended but boring comments, like "Thanks!" and "Me too", downwards. Without having to delete or actually downvote them.
- Unwanted — this corresponds to HN's downvote. Core members & staff can use it, if they don't want that type of comment, at the site. Reduces the commenter's karma, moves the post downwards.
Here are two demo pages: (scroll up a bit to see the "Some disagree with this" warning)
- https://beautiful.demo.ed.community/-6#post-14 - https://insightful.demo.ed.community/-7#post-3
Also it would be interesting to test adding a compulsory text field when someone downvotes to include why you down voted.
Then add votes to down-vote reasons. Over time you would develop a good database of people who add value through downvoting (vs I disagree mentality) and weight these accordingly for better auto-moderation.
What about a little tweak: To instead let people add ordinary replies = ordinary comments, to describe why they downvoted? Maybe a downvote icon, could be shown, somewhere next to the reply, and the computer would know that "this reply is an explanation about why the author downvoted the parent".
And if someone agreed with that downvote-reason, they could maybe click the Like button, for the reply. And then the system knows that "People like this reasoning about downvoting", and henceforth give slightly more trust to the downvoter's downvotes.
So you get something like:
The idea is to separate comment quality from agreement/disagreement.I'm not sure this would be a good fit for HN since we can't generally see comment scores anyway, but it might work for other sites like Reddit.