The only time I downvote is if something is extremely inappropriate, negative, trolling, or is degrading (IMO) to the quality of this community.

I never downvote when I disagree. If I disagree, I reply with my disagreement. I wish others would too. Not much to learn from downvotes. Lots to learn from discussion and healthy debate.

I upvote often, to anything that I think adds value.

My goal in voting is always to improve the experience for the next reader. That means that I vote up what I think is the most interesting or important information, and vote down distractions and annoyances of all kinds: not just trolling, but also poorly thought out arguments, boring observations, rambling, point-missing, and anything else that consumes space without providing value.

You can look at that as being mean to people who posted comments that were merely not top-notch, but I think of it as being kind to the probably much larger number of people who are skimming the comments looking for something worthwhile.

This is quite a debatable flaw in your argument. Worth a downmod? Hardly. I am pointing out the obvious to some (or many), but to others, and those who share your viewpoint, this might be a blind spot, or simply preposterous.

I think a community like this (HN, that is) is better off just getting into the habit of good discussion, such that it becomes implicit in the culture (which kind of is already). Just make sure the SNR is naturally high. That's quite a feat.

Although I would further add that I often take a particular pleasure from upvoting a comment that I disagree with, if it is suitably thought-provoking, challenging, and constructive.

If you sink the incorrect comment that previously had a high score, those who walked away with the misinformation have a higher chance of having their misconceptions persist.

Upvote = "I'd like to see more comments like this".

Downvote = "I'd like to see fewer comments like this".

I don't think that people having different reasons for wanting more or less of a particular type of comment is a problem.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208748

To quote:

It is not ridiculous, since people aren't downmodding to express a difference of opinion about what the person said. They are downmodding to assert they do not want to hear any political opinion on Hacker News, because--as has been said--there are countless other venues for hackers to express and debate political opinion; Hacker News is not one of them.

Notice therefore we see something interesting regarding the HN system. In essence, this is exactly what pg had in mind. Karma is taken away for comments and not just submissions, so that users will adapt to the Hacker News atmosphere. As we have seen from this thread, politics (even "news" like the first ever black general election presidential candidate) is simply not something people are interested in seeing on HN, and if people keep discussing it, they will be downmodded into oblivion, effectively maintaining the current HN mindset (since, presumably, people with negative, or quickly decreasing karma, will not want to continue posting on HN).

The only thing that could break such a system is a vast shift in the mentality of the community (which is not a bad thing since it would still keep the community happy, although it's very unlikely to happen), or a massive influx of new people into the community (which is why pg wants to keep the number of new signups per day low).

Upvote = "I'd like to see more comments like this" || "I agree with this".

Downvote = "I'd like to see fewer comments like this".

I think it would be better to just factor in agreement as part of whether you'd like to see more. Maybe you agree with something, but the sentiment has been expressed so many times that it's getting tiresome.

Upvote = "I'd like to see more comments like this" || "I agree with this".

Downvote = "I'd like to see fewer comments like this" || "I disagree with this".

I think downvoting should not be. It is an unnecessary evil. A "dichotomy". Fighting for Peace using nuclear power. The best way to fight comments/posts that add no value is to Remain Silent. If you hit someone, there are very likely to hit you back, but if you ignore them they are more likely to take their rants and stories to Digg or somewhere else.

No use adding flame infinitum.

I would suggest limits on the number of karma points we can use each week or day (with no rollover) and eliminate the downvote feature.

In the case a comment or story is inappropriate, it can be flagged.

Your voting habits don't influence what you see at all, so it really has no personal effect; you're voting things for other people.

1. distinguishing multiple metrics for comment evaluation, and

2. declaring that up/down voting should not be used for some of these metrics

are doomed to failure, so long as

1. there is only one dimension on which to express anything, and

2. the interface for voting lacks any obvious affordances/constraints on how it should be used, even if those affordances/constraints are merely rhetorical (e.g., a JavaScript popup that asks you to confirm your up/down vote only if complies with some set of criteria).

I suspect PG is unlikely to complicate the voting interface to map to multiple metrics until some threshold of community deterioration has been reached, so a lot of this debate is pretty pointless. The only way to enforce norms about how generic up/down voting should be used, that are not implied by the interface itself, is to constantly comment on uses of voting that are suspected to be illegitimate and to start threads like this one.

After seeing several such threads, I suspect that, at best, you will only be able to convince a fraction of the community to conform to whatever norms you think are best. Everyone else will simply use the up/down arrows as a catchall for any positive or negative sentiment they feel like expressing. Total conversion is pretty much impossible, partly because some people will disagree with those norms, and newcomers will be oblivious to them.

In my opinion, there are much bigger problems here than how up/down votes are used. Constant submission and upvoting of news that's utterly irrelevant to hacker-entrepreneurs is one.

Personally I think the upvote/downvote should be for indicating quality but there should be a separate counter for agreement that would not affect the overall ordering. A separate agreement counter would also allow for some interesting options such as showing the comments of people who tend to strongly agree or disagree with someone.

Then I realized, it just doesn't matter. This isn't a contest, it's a community. All this measures is the general vibe of the comment. Higher numbers = better vibe. A fuzzy value at best.

More useful I think would be to see the total score, but also be able to mouse over the score to see how many down-votes and how many up-votes something received. But that would very likely require a big change by PG to maintain three scores, not one.

I saw this a lot on slashdot when I used to frequent that site. Comments that were at 3 or 4 got pushed to 5, but comments at 2 or less got ignored. But on that site, there was a hard upper limit of 5 points.

As far as my voting practices: I upvote select comments I think are particularly lucid and have not been voted up "significantly"

I downvote what I think are innapropriate comments such as hateful, vulgar, insulting (see this site's guidelines) "excessively" whiny or demanding or just plain babble (rarely, usually I just ignore babble).

I do NOT downvote opinions I disagree with. I either ignore them or reply.

Overall, though, I think the lack of hard and fast rules to voting adds more than detracts. If we all vote in different ways, then that makes the site more dynamic.

Same deal as with Google Adwords and the reason advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for spots 1-4(ish). They're more visible, so they get more action.

You have to bear in mind that by design the top is that space where eyes fall first. So it stands to reason those comments at the top of the page are the ones that get the most action. Not saying "agreeing because others agree" doesn't go on... I just think it's effect is dwarfed in comparison to the effect visibility has on a comment's votes.

I don't see any way around the problem -- if it's a problem at all -- without altering the presentation of comments. I just don't think it's worth that.

If a downvote means "I'd like to see fewer comments like this" -- then, why? What is wrong? Is it off-topic, rude, you disgaree, it used words you don't like, it ran on too long. What, what, what is the problem?!?! A downvote gives you nothing but some vague feeling that you broke some kind of social rule or norm somewhere _without actually explaining what it was you did_

Downvotes are mostly non-useful and promote "safe" comments, which have a tendency to be boring.

Downmod: Incoherency, trolling, ad hominems, and spam. Also anything factually inaccurate, but only if it is currently +1 or higher.

Downvote trolling and upvote opinions and posts you like. But dont downvote wellargumented posts that you disagree with.

Instead of clicking up or down, you click the positive or negative attribute you use to categorize the comment.

What with clicking the drop-down, it's a two click system instead of a one-click system, but heck, to me it makes a lot more sense.

As a commenter, you have the responsibility to raise the level of the discussion. As a moderator (with the down arrow), you have the responsibility to be generous with where others are taking the discussion.

Slashdot does meta-moderating, but it works because downvotes and upvotes have categories that it's possible for a relatively neutral observer to agree and disagree with. Here, there's a lot of ambiguity when you upvote or downvote.

If the situation gets really dire, perhaps he'll notice.

"Worth reading" means "worth reading and appropriate to Hacker News". No doubt what I, or anyone, considers worth reading has some correlation with agreeing, but not 100%.

I'll upvote for two reasons:

1. More HN readers need to see this. 2. Excellent point.

If someone says something I don't agree with, but says it reasonably and with some sort of support, I'll reply instead of downvoting.

Many times, a comment is so inane that the only time-efficient way to express disagreement is to vote against it.

Any active forum is going to have a tiny bit of brass buried in a large pile of muck. If we spend all of our time apologizing to the muck-makers, there's very little time to find the brass.

Only legit things I would downvote would be trolls.

You should read the FAQ here: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

So, the positive thing about voting is: stupid or nonsense comments can be marked as such.

But the negative thing remains: sometimes the truth (read: reality) is not popular at all, and seems to be wrong for the majority of audience. And since such comments are always voted down, you end up building your opinion only on a democratic base -- but:

Democratic Opinion Dictatorship Is Evil.

so for example if i make a comment that doesn't make sense then nobody will up-vote me (and nobody can down-vote me either as there is no option to do that either) and i will end-up having lowest score (which is 1) compare to others. also down-vote de-motivates more than no-vote... so why de-motivate someone.

i hope i explained in simplistic way...

Who cares about Karma? Vote me down, please. I got 325 Karma. Vote them down, I don't care at all. Why should you?

So if something is already -2 it doesn't need to get downvoted to -10(ok this rarely happens and of course something racist or similar might deserve it).

And sometimes it seems posts get downvoted because of the opinion and not the quality of the post.

I upvote posts that I like because of the opinion but I don't downvote posts I disagree with if they motivate their opinions well.

I only downvote if it is a slandering post with no argumentation.