I think I just down-voted someone by mistake, I think. It was by mistake - a misclick. I didn't mean to downvote or upvote the entry. Surely I'm not the only one.<p>It'd be nice if voting was un-doable.
People saying statistics filters out the few errors, I don't think this is true for the single news. User X posts a news that gets 2 points in a few minutes. With point 3 the news would stay a few seconds in the home page, enough if it is interesting for other users to be upvoted and end stable in the home page. If the third vote is down for error maybe this will never happen again since now even another upvote will not be enough, and goodbye. Moreover every news site out there has the ability to undo votes and is unlikely that everybody is wrong but HN.
It's just not that important. Accidents happen but cancel each other out due to statistical noise in busy threads. No single vote is going to doom a worthy comment to undeserved obscurity, or a crappy comment to endless notoriety.
It would be nice, especially for mobile users, but as a "cost of doing business", it's not worth a lot of effort. A better strategy: think of comment scores along a log scale, something goofy like log3.<p>It's not 'pg anymore, BTW: it's 'dang and his team now.
This comment appears to hint that PG is onboard with this feature <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984221" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984221</a> It's in reply to this <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388</a> which, among other things, asks about an undo function. I can't seem to find anything on search about PG saying anything though.
Or just move the freaking down vote button. Change the row layout from<p><pre><code> up/down user time
</code></pre>
to<p><pre><code> up user time down
</code></pre>
That will make it a lot harder to hit the wrong button.
This could be done without changing anything on the site. Just create a new page that can be accessed via options which lists the last 10 votes and a delete button.
Accidents happen. For every person that makes a mistake, I am sure there are many who will correct it. I don't think being able to change a vote is an important piece of functionality.