That's a reasonable take on what downvoting is for, but the HN take is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement.

Interesting. At first I thought, wait a minute, isn't "don't downvote to disagree" in the HN Guidelines? Then I checked, and no, it isn't. The guidelines talk about downvoting ("downmodding") very briefly, and only to say that one shouldn't complain when it happens to him or her. There are no guidelines on how or why to downvote.

Maybe this is a problem, in and of itself? Seems different people have different takes on the use case for downvoting.

The "HN take on downvoting" comes directly from Paul Graham. People disagree with it, but it is what it is.

I don't downvote disagreement, but that's because I'm a compulsive (and, from what I can tell, fast) commenter.

The simple way to metabolize this system is just not to get unhappy when you get downvoted.

Gotcha. I'll take your word for it, because I regard you as about as much a lay authority on HN posting as HN has. And if pg has weighed in on this topic, well, he's quite the authority, too. :)

That being said, I still feel weird about downvoting to disagree. The way I see it, disagreement-downvoting creates noise in its own way. Less noise than unproductive or bad replies, certainly, but more noise than doing nothing.

"The simple way to metabolize this system is just not to get unhappy when you get down voted."

True, and this is also an official guideline. (A good one, too, IMO).

> is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement

No, quite the opposite. (See I wrote a comment explaining that I disagree, I didn't just click the arrow. Much more valuable to you and the reader.)

And that's why you are wrong, by saying why you disagree you might (rarely) change the posters mind, or more likely change a 3rd readers mind about the topic.

Clicking downvote is pretty useless.

I don't know who you're arguing with, but I was making a positive statement, not a normative one.

It wasn't obvious that you do not hold by the HN norm you described.

I don't think it's the norm anyway, I think it's a minority that do that.

I think it was helpful for ars to cite the problems with such a policy in a reply, even if you weren't advocating that policy.

Wouldn't it be better to upvote the disagreements you agree with?

This isn't my argument, but you're missing its point. Think of disagreement downvotes as a pressure release valve for the downvoter. The idea is to prevent you from expressing your disagreement in an unproductive comment.

There is no particular purpose for HN downvotes other than to express dislike. It's not needed to move 'stupid' comments down, because only 'non-stupid' comments rise up. The comments which are never voted on have no intrinsic value, so they might as well be stupid anyway.

I wasn't even aware of flagging on comments until someone mentioned it, and to be honest it's so inconvenient i'd probably never do it. Downvote is an easy enough way for me to say "I don't like this" and it helps reinforce the group dynamic, which is what they want (this whole post is about manipulating group dynamics).

The only way to fix downvoting is to put an express purpose behind it, like a button that says "I disagree" next to a button that says "I dislike" next to a button that says "Inappropriate comment". But for some reason forum admins always prefer generic feedback which give rise to unexpected behavior. Heh, it probably keeps people upset, which reinforces user engagement.

Again, interesting.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I don't approach voting from an agree/disagree axis. I approach it from a productive/unproductive axis. I upvote comments I find helpful, articulate, or informative. I downvote comments I find unhelpful, inarticulate, or uninformative. I leave alone comments that I find "meh," or that someone has already said better, or that neither add to, nor subtract from, the conversation. Basically: something either adds to the conversation (upvote), subtracts from the conversation (downvote), completely derails the conversation (flag), or is neutral.

Case in point: I didn't necessarily agree with your comment, but I found it articulate and interesting. It presented a perspective I hadn't considered. It made me think. I upvoted it.

Now, one could argue that agree/disagree and productive/unproductive are basically the same thing in practice. They both represent a desire to move the conversation in one direction or the other. (To your point about the group dynamics). But I don't know if I totally buy into that. I have no idea if this is true, but I'd hypothesize that voting patterns would be different under one explicit guideline or the other. I'd also think that downvoting-to-disagree runs the risk of fostering an echo chamber, which discourages dissenting or different viewpoints, particularly on hot-button topics.

>There is no particular purpose for HN downvotes other than to express dislike. It's not needed to move 'stupid' comments down, because only 'non-stupid' comments rise up.

The problem is that smart-but-unpopular comments may fail to rise up. We want to prevent groupthink by ensuring that the top comments don't exclude ones that are well written and productive while expressing a contrary viewpoint.

A simple "vote down for disagree" breaks that.

Well first of all, I disagree with your assertion that top comments with contrary viewpoints might prevent groupthink. Sometimes being contrary is inherent to groupthink. And being well-written and productive doesn't mean the comment is insightful, intelligent, or informative, which one assumes would be a preferred top comment. (personally I think promoting comments that are well-written, productive and contrary just gets you a class of people who can bicker in a very civilized manner, like two English gentlemen having a polite row)

Why do we vote in directions? It would appear that according to social media, we only have one orientation in voting (vertically) and can thus only go in two directions (up and down). But this makes no sense. For one thing, the 'direction' of a comment/conversation may go many different ways... conversations do not go in a straight line. And the idea of 'elevation' in a conversation is also confusing: if anything, a conversation would be more three-dimensional than two, moving around a changing landscape.

In addition, 'up' and 'down' gives an immediate subconscious reaction where 'up' is associated with goodness (and therefore correctness) and 'down' with badness (and therefore incorrectness). I say this moral implication is the default because it makes no sense for only one direction to be correct, unless you needed to know where you were supposed to go, and your default assumption was that you should never go down. (That would be a bad presumption for airplanes, for example, as they would never land until they ran out of fuel)

So what does it mean when HNers 'vote down'? Are they agreeing with something, or disagreeing? Are we assuming they're trying to impose a nuanced influence on a particular part of a person's commentary? If it was a generic part of their comment, was it their moral or ethical stance, or their writing style, or the correctness of their comment? We have no idea; all we know is they wanted that comment to go 'down'.

A simple vote down, regardless of its supposed intent, doesn't provide any specific benefit if it comes without context. The lack of a down vote would do the opposite, however: it would force people to only be able to provide positive feedback, or no feedback at all. How does this effect group dynamics? It actually works on individual behavioral conditioning: provide positive feedback, and you get positive behavioral conditioning, and negative behavior gets weeded out automatically (because the individual wants to be rewarded, which it knows it only gets for positive behavior). This is what practically all dog-trainers and child psychologists suggest as the best method to promote positive behavior. This would have two similar effects: people would be nicer, and they would provide 'better quality' comments.

So I think 'downvoting' is a loaded and useless way to regulate comments. I think that valid alternatives would be votes for specific feedback, or if you wanted to provide a way to simply "move thread position", a button that said so specifically. These would create specific, immediate changes in the group dynamics and the interactions of the users, unlike a generic downvote button. If you're trying to prevent groupthink, give the users tools to allow them to express themselves better.

>Sometimes being contrary is inherent to groupthink.

And lack of being contrary, is more conducive to groupthink.

>And being well-written and productive doesn't mean the comment is insightful, intelligent, or informative, which one assumes would be a preferred top comment.

Only if you're using a non-standard definition of productive. Could you spell out what you mean here? In common use, a productive discussion is one in which at least one side emerged with a better understanding of the issue. (If you can do that without being insightful, more power to you!)

This contrasts with a discussion in which arguers blur important distinctions, talk past each other, and so on.

It may be helpful (productive?) to give an example of (what I consider) a comment that is insightful, informative, and correct, but unproductive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840204

In this case, it's because the poster simply reiterated the logic behind the point his critics already accepted, thereby doing nothing to convey understanding of why they should take his position.

So, I don't think you actually disagree that "productive = good" here, but have non-standard criteria for what counts as productive.

It moves stupid comments down _faster_. If the comment's super stupid, that can be worthwhile.

What's the difference between a super stupid comment and a comment which gets no votes at all? I'll bet you the answer to that is "I really didn't like it", which mostly means emotional value. So the purpose of the downvote there is to basically have an emotional reaction button. Take away the downvote and you take away the emotion from the voting. Then all you have is upvoting, which is based purely on merit. It sounds like people don't like the idea of forum meritocracy, though.

> "What's the difference between a super stupid comment and a comment which gets no votes at all?"

Feedback for the comment writer. Shows the difference between "nobody thought much of my comment either way" and "some people really disliked my comment".

I think it's been very effective at weeding out the completely pointless comments (memes, jokes, "this", "I agree", etc.) and is also somewhat effective at weeding out subtle incivilities (I've changed my behavior in response to downvotes before.)

Some comments degrade the quality of the conversation. We might disagree about which ones, but surely we can agree about that, right? The obvious candidates are purely asshole comments, trolling comments, intentionally racist comments, etc., and there are less obvious ones too. (Almost any joke where the author feels a need to reply, "guess no one around here has a sense of humor" after being downvoted probably fits.)

The discussion is better if those comments are lower on the page and, ideally, discouraged from being made at all. Downvoting does both.

> Then all you have is upvoting, which is based purely on merit. It sounds like people don't like the idea of forum meritocracy, though.

I don't understand what this means or what a "meritocracy" is in this setting. (The moderators are in charge; the highest ranked users will never form a ruling class or be in power. Most forums are not "meritocracies", "socialist exeriments", "democracies", "plutocracies", "oligarchies", "monopolies", or anything that implies something other than a loosely managed commenting system.)

HN has many readers that know an absolute shitload about different subjects, and I'd like them to share interesting information and anecdotes about interesting articles. I don't want to read stupid jokes and memes on HN, because there are other places that are better for that. So I like that there are ways to explicitly encourage certain comments and explicitly discourage others.

> Some comments degrade the quality of the conversation. We might disagree about which ones, but surely we can agree about that, right?

Yes.

> I don't understand what this means or what a "meritocracy" is in this setting.

Basically, thread sorting would be based (mostly) on merit.

> the highest ranked users will never form a ruling class or be in power

The highest ranking users have high social power. Their power is simply a tendency to steer the group without telling anyone what to do. Usually it's unintentional, and sometimes they have no idea they're doing.

Most forums are actually discrete social communities made up of ingroups, with their own cultural standards and hierarchies, and often a few custom heuristics. Some of them are really incredible from a behavioral standpoint, like an internet chat galapagos island. HN is not so special, but it does have a clearly defined social structure.

I agree with you that the stupid jokes, memes etc should stay off HN. That's why I think some kind of meta-voting is necessary: because a simple downvote is used for a lot of things right now, and not just "this-comment-is-out-of-bounds" like you're talking about. Barring meta-voting, removing the downvote keeps the troll talk but it still filters down to the bottom with the other useless comments.