I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.

> Why would I participate in that?

This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!

But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.

And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.

What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?

I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.

Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).

IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.

[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.

OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.

Your comment says:

> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great

My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.

It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.

For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.

Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.

That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.

That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.

And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.

But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.

That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.

I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.

This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.

If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.

The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.

This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.

I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.

Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth it.

I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting this comment, haha.

The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.

Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.

With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.

A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.

(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)

Way to prove his point internet rando's.

I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.

In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.

Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.

With down votes: -60 Without: 10

Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.

With down votes: 0 Without: 10

Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.

With down votes: 9 Without: 10

Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.

With down votes: -960 without: 20

Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!

Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.

For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.

I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.

Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.

Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.

[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.

When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.

Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.

And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.

edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.

Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.

Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.

Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.

...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless it's Friday.

But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used.

If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.

Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.

Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.

(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)

If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the majority you probably won't have experienced this.

I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.

I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the comment somewhat valuable.

Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news, but the problem is the same.

The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].

[0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to get the vote.

Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed. (although plenty people think it should)

This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it, and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the conversation.

I assumed the latter, because those places tend to be places worth sticking around, and because this is definitely where HN falls in.

I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on reddit? All day every day.

Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good comment/discussion/disagreement.

On Reddit though, it’s the standard.

Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or "hateful". Or banned.

Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit accounts.

This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.

If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.

Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.

But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.

Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.

"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."

I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.

It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.

The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.

Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.

There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.

Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.

No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.

My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than just participating in it.

Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does.

Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952366

FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very basic logical flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies. Downvotes aren't just a tool to enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I intended.

I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.

But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.

Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).

Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's definitely the norm on Reddit.

My experience on HN is that it desperately hangs on the words you choose and the threads you visit. The lower the barrier to entry (social subjects for example) the more delicate and convergent things become.

In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).

> because I'm not sufficiently ideological

Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.

Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.

Maybe there should be a separate URL to view recent comments with <1 points?

/graycomments, or /controversial, or something like that.

I’d certainly use that to sprinkle some upvotes. There are often high-quality comments that get downvotes early for whatever reason. It has a discouraging effect even if it gets corrected over time with more votes.

Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.

Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.

In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.

It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.

It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/

You say that art and love aren't political, but that's only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.

That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's one of the most important distinctions in the world, and one that is lost when we insist everything is political.

You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.

Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.

Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.

I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.

Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.

There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.

I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics.

Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).

Aside from political discussion, I see that opinion (say os or console X is better than Y) also bring downvotes.

I find that asking questions and giving facts (not a wrong one) won't get downvoted and stay at 1 at worst.

Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I am against censorship and for free speech.

And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.

So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological, we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had no practice.

The platform that can handle political discourse without breaking will be the next great social media platform. We owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this is already it, whatever your platform of choice.

I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.

Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen.

Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading.

I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community.

In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't.

From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.

It's not the political threads that are a problem. There seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum, just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the comments again.)

I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent. I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a technical subject you care about.

Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make here.

Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm.

Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions

I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt.

But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.

But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.

Can you give an example?

Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

>Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...

I feel following this advice leads to better communities with more diverse and more useful conversation.

Says who? And why should anyone listen to them? There seems to be a lot of talk about how it's not being used as designed, but absolutely no one provides any evidence to support that there's "One True Way" to use voting buttons.

As for the "says who?", for example, that is Reddit's official stance on voting, which I quoted elsewhere in this thread.

Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.

If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself.

edit.

I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).

Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.

Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.

Downvotes are of even less consquence.

Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.

I think this should be true to individuals, in regards to the ownership they feel over their online account and the content they create.

But I do not think this is (or should be) true in regards to an online community. Because I think sites like Hacker News and Ars Technica have relatively healthy comment ecosystems, where the content of the comments is valuable and contributes immensely to the store of knowledge these sites contain.

(Notably, Ars Technica has a more obvious, perceivable liberal political bias which I happen to agree with, so I'm sure the value of that community is divided, whereas I think Hacker News is more politically balanced.)

This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out, heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote... that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me anyway.

Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)

The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in some situations. Why? I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment, etc.

But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you?

In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely about the mismatch between expectations and perceived subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a carefully composed response to something, to try to make a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody and then that gets down voted, it triggers that instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or that's my approximate theory anyway.

Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes?

I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of others.

Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here.

You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.

So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.

I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.

This means on these platforms downvotes are a weaponised tool wielded by someone who can destroy the effort that went into post with but a mouse click.

Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now.

[1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.

Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind.

If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him."

That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.

How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.

/snip

> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.

I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.

Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".

[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them

There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.

With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.

I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.

A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.

How does one do that? Haven't seen any option to do that.

In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the mainstream (on HN) narrative.

I think it’s more “conforming” than “constructive”.

If you post/comment in a certain manner you get upvoted and break into the potential downvoters. Otherwise, you stay in purgatory of the middlings.

I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.

You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that finished at -4.

As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.

Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.

Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.

I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.

By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.

Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.

My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.

I agree to that.

But do not agree to just leave comment and leave approach in general. Then it is not a discussion anymore. You will never experience if there are any counterpoints to your opinion/facts, if you do not read replies to your opinions/facts. But if you experienced you get too emotional ... so aybe better this approach, than the furiated insulting one I guess.

I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change.

Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed.

For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.

* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.

* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...

I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.

To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488

It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and influence.

The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its attention-worthiness.

Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged representations in the UI, but they can't be disagreed with like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it by not allowing responses.

Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of at least attention and content value based on collective intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions.

My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require justification, which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on this idea".

I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly.

This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought.

Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.

An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.

With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.

Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.

So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.

I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625

joinmastodon.org may interest you

Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?

Some of my favorite comments I've made here are the ones that get downvoted. They point me to places where one of several interesting scenarios has occurred, such as, but not limited to:

1) I'm right, other people have not yet realized it and the way I'm expressing it doesn't make it clear that there's a good argument there. This is a fantastic opportunity.

2) I'm wrong about something, and haven't yet realized how. This is extremely valuable information because my own cognitive biases mean that it's difficult for me to discover through introspection.

3) lots of other possibilities too!

When I stumble upon making a comment that gets unexpected downvotes, I have come across some of the most valuable information HN can give me.

If I make a comment that I know will get lots of downvotes, I'm just wasting everybody's time. If I share something interesting that I think will get lots of upvotes, I may give some good information to others, but otherwise I'm mostly validating myself, which isn't a great use of my time.

But most of the time I'm not commenting with any thoughts to votes, it's just about discussion. The votes just serves as a standin for body language that we'd get if we were talking face to face.

I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest good faith against the grain take are no longer on the platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and white.

Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes, Overtone windows narrows over time.

From My Filters

  ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)
  ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr
  ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr+tr

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781635

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/

In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.

It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to get too psychologically involved.

When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at community security through obscurity, and like all STO approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the long term than the approach outlined above.

A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse.

Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I think other feedback mechanisms are better.

Feature request if mods are reading: checkbox to hide my karma from me.

One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in making people explain their position, at least copy/paste another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their own downvotes.

You would need a separate mechanism for flagging though to filter low effort contributions and it is questionable if that wouldn't just replace downvotes with flagging. Alternatively maybe only have that rule for comments above a certain length, although that isn't a good metric either.

I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind of thing now and will make those votes not count.

Likewise I think they’ve also made it so that a single comment alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account of the person that wrote it that much any longer.

I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.

And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point.

Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.

The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet.

Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.

When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.

Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.

That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in academia?

Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious discussions.

I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...

And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. If wind was actually cheaper than fuel, they'd just be over building wind farms so that no new nat-gas plants were needed.

My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel, or maybe the two types of plants have different financing models that are hard to compare directly, but I wouldn't be qualified to check your results even if you presented all the data.

> It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits.

Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.

The docs seemed pretty clear that they were the operating costs of the installation. I had to find the install cost and the operating costs separately.

> Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.

That's a good point, but there is also an enormous amount of pressure to go carbon free and these power companies answer to several regulatory bodies all with enormous power of their operations. It's not unreasonable to believe there are requirements to move to wind for continued licensing.

I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.

I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.

As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.

That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one wants to create an account will most probably be the moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the account was created with forethought would just lead to the account never being created in the first place ("I would create an account to reply to this, but even if I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").

You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...

They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, but if I were to downvote this it would be because you don't have a persuasive argument for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.

This is criticism, IMO it's stupid criticism that should deserve a downvote, but you still wasted time to write it and it's ok, according to OP view of things, you responded to his words with some ad hominem attack, it's pointless and dumb in my opinion, but you put in the effort to respond and presented your arguments.

Compare it to the blind downvoting, you get downvoted, with no reasoning, not knowing who did it and if you get 4 of them your comment gets hidden.

Just 4.

I much prefer your ad hominems to hypotetical perfectly valid downvotes.

At least now people can form an opinion on what you wrote.

With downvotes people just assume that the comment was worthless or worse.

What if you had to reply to the comment before being able to downvote it?

It would at least be a bit less anonymous.

Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being the “one path” to truth.

The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools warned about using them to run society, as they are all designed with a certain amount of loss of precision.

When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models to people means rounding people off to make a choice work. Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of treating each other like rounding errors.

This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we protect as being pathological.

For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy?

Oh that’s right; their experts who built their systems that train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific theory of biology to manufacture consent.

If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on facebook that's being spread by something like eight individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business model.

I've actually considered using a screenname like commentdontdownvote lol.

(I know that this isn't what everyone does, just wanted to offer a data point.)

Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a sustained period of time for instance.

While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around, in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine used to suppress opinions.

It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a minute.

Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not very partisan so that could explain some of it.

People just aren't there to think and they have this "weapon" that they can use to shoo away anything they don't immediately understand.

It's even more ridiculous that simple one sentence or better yet, one meme comments get drives of upvotes.

You can easily automate that. Just copy and paste comments in the same thread, mix with some meme comments, and you're halfway to an account with high karma.

Begs the question, why bother participating in this bottom of the barrel mindwankery? Nothing but an addiction these days.

I say Reddit, but that platform is really a lot of smaller forums with useful information, even if you have to wade through some shit.

Imgur on the other hand, I finally couldn't stand the sheer idiocy and quit. It's amazing, and I wish I could quit this site and Reddit, too.

What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions.

There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast.

And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough down votes and are outcast.

And over time the echo chamber continues to grow....

Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.

I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to converge in a shared space or the alternative to social cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive for the global online community (the latter, of course, does drive those engagement numbers up though...).

So you mean a variety of opinions?

You learn more that way.

Lacking that ability, consensus of the commons is more likely to be correct than fringe opinion and can back-stop that missing ability.

Much of the Internet-connected world is currently running a fascinating experiment on itself regarding whether a public exposed to a fire-hose of unmodulated opinion can grow in aggregate wisdom or will be dissolved by gibbering foolishness. The results of this experiment are not yet determined.

My observations suggest that human beings above 18 are adults and can think for themselves.

"Benevolent" attempts at manipulating the crowds by people who think they are wiser or more knowledgeable...leads to more harm than good.

If you instead mean regulation of what information enters a consensus... That's basically every history book. Every encyclopedia. The curated speaker list at a convention. The moderated comment stream on Hacker News.

And yes, such regulation can be used for ill also. The fascists in World War II used direct control of broadcast media to shape the thinking of the population. Of course, so did Roosevelt with his fireside chats.

I don't know what the future of information exchange in social media looks like. But I'm getting a strong sense that it doesn't look like Facebook and Twitter. I don't think those systems provide the right tools to build consensus.. instead, they seem to build cacophony. They reward enragement (because it drives engagement) and make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the topic to distinguish mainstream opinion from fringe.

Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my votes? No. I have things to do.

Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make my point? No. I have things to do.

And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.

I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with time and interest provide most is the content but moderation incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority.

It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided market but I feel the need.

Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it is a solution on a small enough scale. But when you're literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7, there just aren't the resources to deal with that.

You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on community moderation that gets big, time beats all.

It'll be fine for a while and you'll think you've solved the issue, but then you'll tip and become larger than you can socially manage. And those with the most time will skew your samples and votes.

The fundamental issue of any fully open community is scale. From what I've seen, no online community really resists the swarm that comes when it goes viral. Whatever community that was there before, for all it's values and culture, gets replaced by the masses by sheer virtue of numbers.

Gatekeeping (or moderation) works, but like we've both already said, it only works for smaller scales.

So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative, adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up votes.

Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-inforcement.

I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses.

I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there

How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense of superiority.