I don't think zero feedback is a good goal. Even with voting, forums exhibit a level of trolling and asshattery you'd never find if you had to watch people's live reactions to your statements. And not that much grandstanding, compared to, say, politicians in the media.
That said, should HN add an option in your profile to hide comment scores? You could always get around it with some effort, but maybe not seeing the score right there would encourage you to comment for truth, beauty, and posterity, rather than upvotes.
That's the problem IMO, it's not just mild, it's nothing, yet weight is attached to it. In the real world, when you make a good argument and someone just rolls their eyes disapprovingly and grunts, you can go "What? What's your problem with what I just said?", and they can't possibly just pretend they're not there or didn't roll their eyes -- like people who downvote without reply often do, which gives them the false impression of having said something.
When we don't like something, yet can't find any solid argument against it, that should do something with us, maybe teach us something, and votes are like the most optimized form of memes and other ways to not have to actually think, distilling it to the minimal essence, just a click. I'm not saying nobody thinks when voting, but the only requirement is an account and an input device, not actually thinking. Not so for "using one's words".
Why not just remove the vote altogether? So commenters have to say something about why they agree/disagree/feel the need to comment.
And then maybe allow interest groups to form naturally. With a standardised protocol for exchanging messages, so there was no centralised owner of all data. And everyone pays for it implicitly through their ISP fees, like they do for other basic services like email or DNS. Instead of having their data milked, processed and fed back like some grotesque combination of Orwellian fiction and mad cow disease.
That sounds like a much more civilised way to Use the Net. Maybe we could call it something like, I dunno, Usenet....?
I'm mostly at peace with net scores on my replies, though I feel a bit confused when the scores down without explanation. I think it is healthy to some extent to seek validation, but in order for it to be productive, I think we ought to know why people feel the way they do about what we say.
"+1 funny" "-1 Reeee"
stuff, and that'd just add noise to the thread, but not add to the discussion.
I'd probably participate in some discussions if I couldn't see and wasn't involved in the likes, up/downvotes, brownie point scramble. If I just saw similarly inclined people there would be a different kind of discussion.
If there are only 5 participants in a thread though it is different. Traditional forums would be read like this, but were almost always at a much lower scale.
Yes, and at too large scales communication becomes less meaningful, you can't scale it to millions of people without getting something else. Even in large cities or at giant festivals, people tend to mingle in smaller groups, there's just more of those groups the larger the city or festival is, it's not like people stand around in ever larger circles, shouting louder and louder. Groups that get too big break up into smaller ones naturally because they start to noticeably suck.
A downvote takes the place of tiresome rebuttals to tedious arguments. If somebody posts "vaccines do cause autism" in a discussion about health care costs, I can just downvote and move on. Without downvotes, people are tempted to make the diversion worse by posting retorts ranging from "go away, troll" to several paragraphs of carefully cited rebuttal. Or if everyone manages to refrain from Feeding the Troll, then the bad comment appears to be just as worthy as every other comment that wasn't rebutted.
From what I've seen of relatives who get sucked into lengthy arguments on Facebook, they can't break away because there is no downvote, and letting bad arguments sit otherwise-unchallenged looks like a (weak) endorsement from other participants.
The problem is people have substituted their own critical thinking for a metric of varying quality (upvotes)