Sometimes I wish downvotes required a mandatory reply.

Downvoted because I don't agree

(I did not really downvote but you get my point)

Ah yes and then downvoting them might be hell. If only there was a good way to determine when to force someone to reply when downvoting.

They do require a certain karma threshold which is supposed to prevent people without sufficient context in the HN community from downvoting a bunch of stuff. I also think if you downvote beyond a certain threshold in a certain period of time it stops counting them (to prevent flame threads from devolving into everyone destroying everyone else's Internet Points perhaps).

Perhaps the karma threshold needs to be increased.

I don't think the threshold is cutting it anymore - I've noticed a lot of reddit-like behavior with people downvoting things they don't like or agree with rather than things that don't contribute to the conversation; this is balanced out by other people but it's not something that I saw happen 1-5 years ago.

So only people who can downvote are those that agree with each other? Surely a cursory examination of unintended side-effects was done - it is HN, right?

A mandatory comment as to why someone -1'ed a post should be mandatory. Unless someone is intentionally being abusive/troll, then perhaps we should engage in the lesser popular viewpoints. Not doing so creates one hell of an echo chamber.

EDIT: currently at -1. You're only proving my point, buddy.

You can't downvote replies to your comments. So you are at -1 with no influence on my part. :)

I'm not sure mandatory comments would solve the problem. We'd get plenty of the "I disagree." comments. Could those then be downvoted? Does downvoting those upvote the parent? Could I downvote both. Etc.

I don't know the current threshold but increasing it doesn't create an echo chamber. Look at any thread about gun control in the US and you will a lot downvoted comments on both sides and presumably a lot of highly upvoted comments on both sides as well. Not only that but you can only downvote comments until they reach a certain age. You can upvote them much longer (perhaps forever?). This creates a bias toward increasing votes which itself is a good reason to occasionally adjust the thresholds.

How about stats, similar to serverfault and stackexchange, where you can see how many times the person has upvoted and downvoted?