Ask HN: Should we eliminate downvoting on HN?

Re:Ask HN: Should we eliminate downvoting on HN? by ocdtrekkie on Thursday December 31, 2020 @02:07PM (#25595936)

While people always seem to "want to know why they were downvoted", a comment requirement would likely just encourage a low quality comment to receive more low quality responses. Especially since every person who potentially wanted to downvote something had to write a response to it.

(Imagine the opposite, if everyone who upvoted your comment had to reply "I agree" or something similarly useless.)

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Re:Ask HN: Should we eliminate downvoting on HN? by Normille on Thursday December 31, 2020 @02:16PM (#25596054)

  >a comment requirement would likely just encourage a low quality comment to receive more low quality responses

  >Imagine the opposite, if everyone who upvoted your comment had to reply "I agree" or something similarly useless.)

I suppose it could be done Slashdot style where [AFAIK. I've not been on there for years] you don't have to write a reason for an up- or downvote. You just select from a series of icons representing; "insightful", "funny"... etc.

A system like that wouldn't add much overhead to voting on a submission, but would give an indication as to why the voting had gone that way.

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Re:Ask HN: Should we eliminate downvoting on HN? by antisthenes on Thursday December 31, 2020 @03:21PM (#25596707)

I think that's a good idea. Adding an extra step would give people pause before downvoting and perhaps make them think about the OPs perspective for a second.

In theory it should reduce the number of knee-jerk reactionary downvotes.

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