But that would still happen in an upvote-only system. The 'good' comments would float to the top and the 'bad' ones would stay low in the threads and sub-threads.

To be honest, I feel the most damaging in the HN voting system is the greying out of comments. It often leads to bandwagoning where if a comment even goed to 0, some people just blindly ram the downvote button because someone already (visually) decided for them that that particular comment is 'bad'. No consideration required!

True, the greying out does tend to have this effect, then again, sometimes I see a greyed comment I agree with that I think was downvoted unfairly and upvote it where I likely would have just read their comment and not upvoted had it not been grey. I forget sometimes when I'm just scrolling through to be honest.

But, I do agree, systems with upvotes only works sometimes, it seems to depend though. On one forum I post on, they only have upvote equivalents, but it tends to lead to fairly quality conversation a bit like hn, though memes and jokes tend to get upvoted far more than here....or maybe without downvotes you actually get to see the upvotes on jokes, I dunno, I've made a few of those one liner joke comments hn frowns upon and watched it go up and down over and over until it settles between -1 and 2 depending I guess on whether more people found it funny or annoying.

But...with upvote only systems, you also get horrendous trash like Facebook.

Then again, with upvote/downvote systems you get decent places like hn and horrendous trash like reddit and SO(an over exaggeration to allow me to keep this paragraph similar in structure and phrasing to the last) so who knows what's best really?

I think in the end it always comes down to the community and the mods.

It doesn't matter what kind of point system you have, what matters is the people who are most involved in the community, the rules of the community and how the mods act.

There's a temporal dimension to downvoting too.

I notice sometimes a comment goes negative quickly. If it sinks to -3 then it is probably doomed, but if it only goes to -2 or less it can rise up again, if it has some form of logic that enough people can see, and isn't just a dumb or offensive comment.

Presumably the first two downvotes of a nuanced but serious comment sometimes lead to mindless followers taking it down to -2, which is a quick pile-on, but by then, it has reached enough views that it may be counterbalanced by people of the opposite view upvoting.

I have occasionally seen comments go back to positive from -3 too, although it is rare. These are invariably comments which state an uncommon position, which look like an unpopular trope, but which can be decoded by knowledgeable people who think it through and upvote.

I haven't used it for a while, but imgur's old voting system was quite nice, I think. There was no downvote on the post itself, but instead you could upvote any number of tags on the post. So, for example, if I felt your post was factually incorrectly, I could add a "factually incorrect" tag (or add my +1 if the tag already existed). This was only for posts though, not comments.

Most of the time I see downvotes with no replies it means the person generally disagrees. I upvoted you by the way :)

I think sites would benefit from having more rich voting options, for example: agree but weak-argument, disagree but well-stated, changed my view, etc.

Would yield some more interesting ways to sort and rank comments.

So basically, like Facebook Reactions and those post ratings plugins you can get for various forum scripts now.

Yeah, I think that would work. Especially if 'disagree' is a neutral reaction rather than a negative one, so downvoting for disagreement stops being a thing.

Very good idea. I wish I could mark your post as such. Then Dang could just filter by "good idea posts" and easily see how to improve site or world.

Build it and they will come.