Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

I&#x27;ve noticed a difference between downvoting and non-downvoting discussions systems.<p>In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this isn&#x27;t &quot;the truth&quot; or &quot;the consensus of the community&quot; but of the people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners within that community will flood in and are highly motivated on the subject, and so the consensus will reflect <i>their</i> interest in the subject.<p>But either way, consensus.<p>Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up, and the rest of the participants can only argue against it but not drive it back down... this creates the &quot;engagement-based content&quot; that aggregators crave.<p>The problem, of course, is that bots and sockpuppets are treated the same as established community members and can skew the &quot;consensus&quot;. Realistically, the leadership of an online community needs to be able to identify who are credible voices on a subject and give them the power to steer the conversation. Yes, it&#x27;s not egalitarian, but these systems <i>never have been</i>.

Perhaps the model simply isn&#x27;t rich enough. Right now, we model posts as either belonging to the good bucket or the bad bucket, and do various things (upvoting, downvoting, AI, ...) to guess the &quot;right&quot; bucket. Maybe it shouldn&#x27;t be surprising that a system based on polarization results in polarization?<p>Which is not to say that just adding complexity is the right fix. Sure, you can add dislike + disagree + ijusthateyourguts buttons, or force votes to be justified (funny&#x2F;incorrect&#x2F;disagree&#x2F;...), or whatever. But it&#x27;s not obvious what&#x27;s worth the overhead (UX-wise), and if it ends up boiling down to just finding more nuanced reasons to toss things into one bucket or another (or even a single score), I&#x27;m not sure if we&#x27;re any further ahead.<p>Perhaps clustering is a better model than polarized buckets? As in, this comment belongs to the set of things that left-leaning people seem to support. This other comment belongs to the conspiracy theory #1 cluster. (The system would likely not know or care what the clusters <i>mean</i>.) If you choose to engage with the idiots who love cluster A, you can do so, and if you want their noise out of your feed then you can do that too.<p>You&#x27;d still need to decide what input signals will enable this -- you <i>could</i> do it with just upvotes and correlating users&#x27; activity across a site, but you would need to evaluate that in terms of what best supports the model (clusters instead of buckets).<p>And clusters aren&#x27;t the end-all be-all either. A racist, misogynistic comment that also says something that group X strongly agrees with isn&#x27;t going to be fully described by being in the &quot;jerk comment&quot; cluster. But we have to deal with a low-dimensional approximation in order for any mechanism to be worthwhile.

I&#x27;ve been in academia for awhile, I&#x27;m used to getting serious criticism. I&#x27;m a man, my whole life I&#x27;ve been told to toughen up. There&#x27;s really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.<p>But downvotes? I pretty much won&#x27;t post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I&#x27;ve got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I&#x27;m not sufficiently ideological, it&#x27;s fucking stupid, and it&#x27;s worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?<p>It&#x27;s not that I can&#x27;t take being told I&#x27;m wrong, I just don&#x27;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.<p>If downvotes don&#x27;t matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I&#x27;m tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.

I think Americans don&#x27;t give enough attention to the bi-party system as an important cause for the current political divide, and increasingly, civil divide.<p>My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful &quot;us vs them&quot; feeling. I&#x27;ve never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other side of the political spectrum as in the US. I&#x27;m from continental Europe and that divide there is much less present. And I think it&#x27;s because we have so many different parties, that the &quot;us vs them&quot; feeling isn&#x27;t so powerful.<p>Sure, social media and the completely politicized media landscape exacerbate the issue. But I think the root cause is the two-party political system.

&gt; The expression to feed into an anonymous algorithm that we don’t just not like something — that we actually dislike it.<p>The author seems to assume that this sort of interaction would lead to these algorithms recommending similar content less, but these algorithms tend to prioritize engagement, not enjoyment. Downvotes are a form of engagement, so don&#x27;t be surprised if these algorithms use your downvote patterns to learn what to show you to make you angry, upset, and engaged.

&gt; Reddit moderators who run subreddits are given the choice to allow the function. When it’s enabled, it’s used as a filter to sort out divisive posts from the rest but also leads to problems like abuse based on opinions and introducing a feeling of negativity into the communities.<p>Just want to clarify this: reddit inc. doesn&#x27;t really offer communities a way to &quot;disable&quot; downvoting. The subreddits referenced at the link in this article are using the custom CSS to <i>hide</i> the downvote button. Notably this does not impact users who are browsing 1) via the mobile app, a substantial to majority percentage of traffic based on the community in question 2) with custom CSS disabled [which can be done via a global reddit setting or via popular extensions like RES 3) via the reddit desktop redesign [&#x27;r3&#x27;]. In the desktop redesign, some communities try to continue hiding downvotes by using the customization tools to set the button to a transparent png - but this is blatantly ineffective - the downvote hitbox remains accessible and feedback is offered to the user on a successful click when they see the score change.<p>I have some experience with this, having helped researcher Nate Matias test the impact of downvote behavior in a community I&#x27;m involved with. You can see the summary of the resulting paper <i>Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior?</i> here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensandtech.org&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;do-downvote-buttons-cause-unruly-online-behavior&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensandtech.org&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;do-downvote-buttons-caus...</a>

In my experience of HN and StackOverflow, at first, I did not like people downvoting my naive or thoughtless comments. Throughout the years, my reputation on StackOverflow grew and a little bit on HN since the bar is so much higher seems... but in any case, this has been a learning journey in being a more thoughtful and respectful contributor and without those downvotes, I wouldn&#x27;t have had the self reflection to be better, as trivial as that may sound.

The trouble with up and down buttons, or like and dislike is that they often are only used by the lovers or haters - the 10-20% of people at the opposite ends of the &#x27;likeability spectrum&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;ve never figured out if up&#x2F;down votes mean the content is good or that people agree with it? (the old issue of people liking death announcements&#x2F;obituaries) On HN I tend not to downvote unless the person is writing like they&#x27;re on Reddit, or in an offensive&#x2F;confrontational manner.

Facebook has an option to “See fewer posts like this”. Select the three dots icon on the upper right corner of a post (mobile app) to see it. It doesn’t notify the person that you’ve chosen to not see their posts, so there’s no social risk in clicking it.<p>I use it liberally and it works. I check Facebook maybe a couple times a month and almost never see anything I don’t want to see any more.

Down-votes are, plain and simple, mob rule.<p>There&#x27;s ample historical evidence that the fact that many people believe in something absolutely does not make it correct. I&#x27;d even venture to go to the other extreme: if many people believe something to be correct there&#x27;s IMO 50% chance of it being severely and hilariously wrong.<p>Watch a few National Geographic documentaries on monkeys and how their tribes are constantly at war with each other. It&#x27;s eye-opening. They fling poop at whomever they don&#x27;t like, not only in the other tribe, but inside their own as well.<p>Like @crazy_horse said, I have zero problems being wrong or engaging in a discussion from which I might emerge with my mind changed.<p>But I don&#x27;t like turning myself into target practice for poop flinging masters.

Has this person even used Reddit? Or StackOverflow? Or even GitHub? I’ve used social platforms with downvote buttons; saying that they make you feel bad and should be removed is like saying that cigarettes should be removed because they smell bad.<p>But to be specific, instead of just using metaphors:<p>* A downvote carries less information than an upvote does. If a feature request gets a lot of upvotes, the voters are saying you should ship it. If it gets a lot of downvotes, does it mean that the voters don’t think it solves a real problem (so you should just drop it)? Or does it mean that they think the solution is bad (so it should be tweaked)?<p>A post usually justifies itself, so the meaning of upvotes is obvious, while it rarely has one, single, obvious counter argument, so a downvote could mean any number of things.<p>* Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help?<p>* Downvotes get used for bullying. Their application for this is obvious, relatively low-effort, and if it influences a sorting algo, can have long-lasting effects on someone’s social reach. There are definitely groups with vote bots on Reddit and HN.<p>* On platforms with anonymous voting, it creates paranoia. You have people telling you your content is bad, but you don’t know who and you don’t know why. People <i>say</i> that they only downvote content that doesn’t add anything to the discussion at all, but what you see seems different, where informative but unorthodox comments get downvoted seemingly because the voters disagree. Who’s doing that? Reddit won’t tell you, so you’re forced to guess, and that’s really damaging to a community, because people get accused of abusing the downvote button with no way of ever proving it right or wrong.<p>* On platforms with public voting, someone can lash out at you for downvoting them. It’s very easy to take it personally (see point 1 on how downvoting is low-information).

Downvotes on something like reddit are very different from downvotes on something like Facebook. Imagine being a teenager and getting downvoted by your own friends. These are complicated tradeoffs of course, but that&#x27;s an important part of the story.

One problem with downvotes, at least the way they are implemented in reddit and HN, is that they cancel out upvotes. You are not able to see how many upvotes a post got, only how many upvotes minus downvotes.

The Facebook thing shows the absurdity of trying to tie people&#x27;s hands - in practice the &quot;haha&quot; reaction has become the downvote, only now it&#x27;s spiteful mockery. Gee, that was an improvement.<p>There are interventions you can make on the interface to improve civility of discourse, but they&#x27;re more complicated than just trying to crudely stifle anger.

My mental model of downvote systems is that systems without them allow more diverse thoughts.<p>Imagine a topic where everyone feels compelled to vote, skewed about 51% to 49%. Without downvotes, your top comments are going to be a mix of both sides. Opinions are about 50-50 and comments will look like that. It will feel frustrating, like in the article, because you see about half of these posts from those evil Others, and have no way to disagree aside from commenting.<p>With downvotes, the 51% side’s score becomes 51-49=+2, and the 49% side’s score becomes 49-51=-2; below a never-read comment at zero! All the top comments are from the (slim) majority, making it feel like a strong consensus, when it isn’t. It will feel better to that 51%. Who knows what the 49% will do. Leave?<p>Of course it’s never exactly as straightforward as that, but that’s the tendency. I like systems without downvotes because what you’re likely to see more proportionally reflects the diversity of opinions of the others on the site.

Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.

I don&#x27;t find that voting systems are a positive evolution, generally. It&#x27;s a non-committal way to interface for people that don&#x27;t contribute any tangible content to a discussion. I remember when Facepunch Studios integrated it, which was simulating SA. It was years ago and I was a youth, but I remember, in myself at least, attempting to cater to voters. I don&#x27;t suspect I fall far from the average interaction in that capacity. And I think that breeds disingenuous user interaction. And FP was a bog-standard BBS forum, the only thing that decided the content stream was moderation and new posts&#x2F;threads; using votes to promote or demote content streams - targeting, [at least] has been pretty widely discussed as a hazard and that&#x27;s all I see it as. So between those two features, targeting and disingenuous posting (itself a form of targeting), I think that voting systems at large are a real detractor in general conversation. And if we consider malefactors and echo formation... I just don&#x27;t see a whole lot in the way of good other than streamlining and automating moderation, which is appropriate in some circumstances, in general conversation I think it just compromises the whole thing.<p>Of course, it&#x27;s all dependent on the design of the website. If you&#x27;re there simply to generate reams of data for marketing teams to sop up, that&#x27;s something you can do with this sort of system. But if you&#x27;re designing for legitimate vulnerability and honest to god expression 4chan is probably the best model in a sort of ironic twist. It&#x27;s user-streamlined, no account, setup or email, the page is barebones, you don&#x27;t need to post anything whatever and there&#x27;s no history to haunt you. And maybe you could argue you can&#x27;t trust anything on 4chan, but you could argue the same anywhere, and in fact I&#x27;d assume that the quantity of Facebook and Reddit are far more rife with artifice than 4chan. But FB and R aren&#x27;t actually designed for absolute expression, they&#x27;re designed to generate marketing feedback.

I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk their own downvotes.<p>I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked downvote I learn nothing.

I&#x27;m surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it&#x27;s almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have nothing else to say. It&#x27;s weird to me when I get a large burst of 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting rights be taken away for any thread you&#x27;re participating in. Reddit seems worse at this. It feels strongly like if you&#x27;re in a 1:1 debate with someone they will downvote each response you make and that feels... stupid.<p>Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility system. Not the mean or total votes, because they&#x27;re skewed by a small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism I think to not be a little shit.<p>I don&#x27;t mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted. Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept that you&#x27;re dealing with a particularly moronic group of individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting their head against -5&#x27;s. That is useful information. These people are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic obsessed ranters, or, and I&#x27;ll happily tank downvotes here, aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and definitely don&#x27;t have massive negative externalities for everything.<p>People decry &quot;Echo chamber!&quot; but in reality most people consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative downvotes don&#x27;t actually have anything valuable to add to most conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.

Downvotes seem to work fine in small niche communities without much politics and whose focus is truth-seeking about their topic. But not so much in larger politically charged communities.<p>In the former, the community members tend to use downvotes as they should, to hide spam and trash comments, while remaining open to new or unpopular ideas that are well-reasoned and presented.<p>But in the latter, downvotes are too often abused to suppress ideas the majority disagree with, even if well-reasoned or presented. In that context, I find a better combination is having a &quot;flag&quot; button instead of downvote. Flag makes it clearer that the purpose is to flag spam, misinformation, or troll speech, rather than merely things you disagree with.

Downvote is unwelcoming for newcomer, create possibility for toxic environment, and useless<p>See downvotes in stackoverflow and reddit. Why not flag instead? I’ve seen many people being afraid to get downvoted that they finally back off from posting question

On my social site we have over 160 different reactions, it&#x27;s a constantly evolving thing reflecting current trends and memes etc (we also had them long before FB).<p>But the one thing that&#x27;s really interesting is out of all the &#x27;negative&#x27; reactions the &#x27;dislike&#x27; was ALWAYS taken personally, people used to qualify it with a comment &#x27;disliking the post, not you&#x27; etc. And if they didn&#x27;t the OP would take it personally.<p>But when we renamed it from &#x27;dislike&#x27; to &#x27;disagree&#x27; that problem just evaporated. Human nature is just weird.

I&#x27;d like to propose an &quot;informative&quot; button and a &quot;political&quot; button so that I could ask to see things that are useful &amp; intelligent but have nothing to do with politics.

I don&#x27;t have a solution but my thinking at the moment is either (a) get rid of the downvote or (b) keep it to rank order of comments but don&#x27;t show it to users including the commentor. That also means not showing it in aggregate.<p>I wrote an extension to hide points for myself<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hn-points-exorcism&#x2F;dpijcanaophgcblkpililldhmgomkjlo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hn-points-exorcism...</a>

I&#x27;m curious why downvoting feels painful or frustrating. Perhaps I&#x27;m majorly naive. When I post a comment in HN, I sometimes feel a twinge of nervousness, since I&#x27;m not attempting any level of anonymity and I&#x27;m aware that some people have strong opinions, sometimes become personal, and cancel culture is a thing, but at the end of the day, if I&#x27;m downvoted, it&#x27;s only a comment on the internet, not something about which I feel personally judged. People are entitled to their opinions, I&#x27;m not attached to them agreeing.<p>Sometimes, after I write something, I think, &#x27;I could have phrased that more effectively&#x27; and sometimes I even change my mind based on someone else&#x27;s more informed points. This is why I engage in discussion, not to be right, but to explore things I&#x27;m interested in and to learn.<p>I appreciate downvoting in an environment like HN, where usually it seems to be wielded in service of better conversation, but I also have seen it used to push down voices that might be simply passionate. There is a certain hegemony that may be enforced by downvotes. (&quot;Why is THIS on HN?&quot; is a clue). Still, there&#x27;s an amazing level of thoughtful moderation, and I prefer to notice the culture from a slightly sociological perspective rather than thinking it needs to change by fiat, and make my small contributions from a slightly different perspective.<p>I don&#x27;t comment on things that feel emotional to me, and sometimes things make me frustrated. I think downvoting is actually a good tool- however, I hope someone will educate me here.

&quot;Society&quot; needs neither downvoting nor upvoting; it&#x27;s a false dichotomy. What we need is to eliminate social media entirely. People need to get out in the real world and talk to others; that way, each person has to expend real energy to state their opinions one way or the other.<p>It&#x27;s easy to hate someone remotely over the internet and even easier to click a vote button, no matter what way the thumb is pointing. What&#x27;s much harder is participating in <i>physical</i> society.

While I don&#x27;t think they are useful, I have come to relish downvotes because if I have provoked a snide response at least it is sincere, where a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that&#x27;s when you know it&#x27;s quality writing.<p>Downvotes are a substitute for discourse. If want something better, post it. It&#x27;s like someone wanted to design a product for a braying, superstitious mob and created an electronic thumbs down button. I&#x27;m all for giving voice to the voiceless, but downvotes aren&#x27;t speech or a voice, they are a manipulation tool that encourage and reward the absolute worst quality of thought and reasoning.<p>On HN they are somewhat and relatively judicious by convention, but it is not an exaggeration to say there is a cadre of even educated people who believe their intellectual role is not to establish truth or find consensus, but to direct &quot;narrative,&quot; which means specifically to lie and decieve for power. Downvotes are not discourse, they are the exclusive tool of this so-called narrative control. I tolerate downvotes because they draw engagement, even if it is of an inferior kind, and ideally they will be converted from boos to discourse, perhaps even a snide remark.

A person with extremely mainstream views suggests that the mainstream should be able to bury opinions that do not align with theirs. Oh my, how surprising.

I would like to see justified downvoting implemented instead. For example users should be able to counter-argument (as in a different reply mode) a post&#x2F;comment, in that case If the counter-argument gets more upvotes than the parent post&#x2F;comment then the parent comment should start greying out like it does here. Of course this doesn&#x27;t even try to fix sybil attacks but I still would prefer it.

There ought to be better ways, if any is needed at all. Downvoting should never be free and unlimited (having requirements is fine, but only involves a bit more time and effort to the would-be disturbance), most of the time it turns into bashing opposition of the consensus, which is turns out to be wrong too often to permit it. Self-reinforcing mere beliefs without evidence or proofs doesn&#x27;t make it any more valid, but hinders discussion completely. Not too long ago there was some drama about a fork and some harrasment allegations, and see how it turned out (still zero evidence about anything at all), yet anyone doubting was downvoted away. Also, I&#x27;d argue the ability to give &quot;thumbs down&quot; itself already is a child-cuddling system. I don&#x27;t understand the need of such things at times, chronological sorting of parent replies may not be the most time-efficient for readers, but it&#x27;s the most natural.

Can we bring back the time when there was no social media instead? I feel like that&#x27;s what society desperately needs.

I greatly dislike downvoting. Fundamentally, in my opinion, it&#x27;s an act of censorship. Especially on sites that ultimately hide that information after a certain threshold, as HN does. It&#x27;s no different in my mind than turning your nose up at someone or trying to talk over someone in a real-life conversation (assuming those still happen). I would much rather upvote the good comments, so that they rise to the top. I probably spend half my upvotes on this forum and others to undo what I consider to be unfair downvotes. If there is a comment I don&#x27;t like and it bothers me, then it&#x27;s better for me to reply to it rather than just signal my disapproval at it.<p>The only time I would downvote personally is for something like spam, and I rarely even do that.<p>I just think it&#x27;s better all around to be positive instead of negative.

Facebook is worth $1 trillion. Twitter also very successful. I think they know what they are doing and do not need the advice of some random writer. Down-votes suck. They feel much worse on an absolute basis than the pleasure of up-votes. I am all in favor of removing them from all sites.

I think opining on the internet should be rethought. I think that instead of the relatively opaque up&#x2F;down, it should be a 2D grid of agree&#x2F;disagree and good&#x2F;bad argument. Allowing you to still commend users that you disagree with by noting they make solid logical arguments.

I think it&#x27;s worth distinguishing between &quot;I disagree with this comment&quot; and &quot;This comment is not well written: it is superficial, makes extraordinary claims without backup, or is illogical.&quot; My one problem with downvotes is it&#x27;s hard to know which is meant.

I don&#x27;t like upvotes but I strongly dislike downvotes. Having karma is even worse because it forces people into creating throwaways or accepting the anonymous wrath of the hive mind.<p>Who up or downvoted you, and why, you will never know. What I find most suspicious is that moderation often travels in packs. Most interesting. As if people have multiple accounts. Crazy, I know<p>Just take a look at Slashdot. It&#x27;s been the same 100 guys simultaneously writing and moderating using multiple accounts for literally decades. It&#x27;s almost dead now for some reason. Maybe people with good karma should start at 5 while the dirty 0 peasants have their posting privileged revoked. That&#x27;ll fix everything.<p>Silencing everyone we disagree with is the answer!

I don&#x27;t want to downvote articles or posts, I want to downvote <i>people</i>. Especially across multiple platforms. If I downvote a person&#x27;s blog post, I want their Reddit comments to be less prioritized. I want them to show up less in my Google results. I want that to flow over into the results of people who have upvoted <i>me</i>, creating a web of influence over good vs bad content. I know, tons of pitfalls and shortcomings to an approach like this, but please try to think of an improvement to it rather than shooting it down immediately :)<p>Of course, 100% accountability rapidly becomes a Black Mirror episode, but I think right now we&#x27;re at the opposite end of the accountability spectrum.

I find linking the rise in partisanship to social media doesn&#x27;t appear to be supported by the shared graphs, which indicate whatever caused the state change happened in the 90s, which is before social media took off?

Downvotes aren&#x27;t going to fix anything until algorithms stop segregating us into individual groups of uniform opinion. How can you downvote what you never even see in the first place?

This is a silly article. Add downvotes, don&#x27;t add them -- it doesn&#x27;t address the polarization issue he identifies.<p>Many things can be and used to be individual choices and not societal issues open to debate (and mutual hatred). If you refuse to accept that, then everyone who doesn&#x27;t make your choices becomes your enemy.<p>I&#x27;m not lamenting the bygone days, since they sucked in numerous ways. But they did contains a kernel of truth, in that shrinking the size of public discourse is the only way to keep it civil.

Perhaps there should be two different things to vote on: One for &quot;agree&#x2F;disagree with points made&quot; and one for &quot;constructive contribution to the discussion&quot;.

I am all for downvotes, but just like here you shouldn&#x27;t be able to downvote anyone who comments your comment. This will just lead people to instantly downvote anyone who doesn&#x27;t 100% agree with them.<p>Secondly all downvotes should be acompanied by a reason for the vote and those should be publicly visible both on the comment&#x2F;topic and generally in the profile of the user. This way it would be apparent if someone is just downvoting based on ideology and should be ignored.

I agree that we need negative feedback in our voting systems. But it doesn&#x27;t have to be downvotes. You can use the number of views as a negative force. I created some simulations and plots: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fdietze&#x2F;downvote-scoring" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fdietze&#x2F;downvote-scoring</a>

I would be fine with downvoting on stuff like news, interest groups, etc. I absolutely don&#x27;t want to see it on personal feeds though. I don&#x27;t need that drama in my social media feed, but if you could downvote the trolls and spammers on facebook (so the posts would be hidden if negative, or filterable), that would be awesome.

Why did this article feel the need to put the political divide chart up there? You can clearly see the divide started long before the internet was a factor. The political divide has been caused by first past the post voting (which causes the 2 party system) and gerrymandering (which drastically exacerbates political radicalism).

What&#x27;s the context of this &quot;bring back&quot;. I only engage in public discussions on Reddit and HN and both have downvotes. And I&#x27;m not going to read the article just to try to figure out what platform he&#x27;s referring to. Is there a platform that had downvotes and then subsequently the feature was removed?

&gt; <i>“If we just gave people a very simple, frictionless way to say, ‘I disagree with this,’ you would probably reduce a massive amount of the sort of negative swaller that exists inside of social media.” — Ashton Kutcher</i><p>Is &quot;swaller&quot; a word? I&#x27;ve never heard it and don&#x27;t see it in my dictionary.

Sure being on the wrong end of a downvoting is not pleasant - particularly when it&#x27;s unexpected or undeserved. But it&#x27;s not &quot;sticks and stones&quot;, and without it, how can anyone tell if they&#x27;re wasting their time preaching to the choir?

It&#x27;s my theory that we need voting systems that go in more than one dimension. Correctness, Humor, Politeness and other dimensions are somewhat orthogonal to each other, and trying to cram all of that into up&#x2F;down just doesn&#x27;t work.

I quite like how the Daily Mail does separate upvote and downvote counts.

I&#x27;ve been arguing that websites should only allow users to downvote.

101% disagree. In my opinion, social media and comment sections are already a fire-hose of negativity without consequences. We don&#x27;t need to enable passive-aggressive hate any further.

Killfiles too. If someone says something really bad you just put him there and he disappears from the site for you regardless of what he says or what threads he&#x27;ll trigger next.

Downvotes tend to get taken away when things the bigcos want you to see and like -- like trailers for shitty movies with major Hollywood backing -- get ratio&#x27;d all to hell.

I have never, not once been able to downvote on HN and zi couldn&#x27;t care less. If something is egregious there&#x27;s always the flagging option.<p>I don&#x27;t see how anyone needs downvotes

Just a thought experiment, what if we can vote <i>against</i> one political candidate. Does this bring better or worse democracy?

It is amazing how much we have accelerated the shift towards a society where no one‘s feelings is allowed to be hurt.

Downvotes are irrelevant, society needs to get off FB (today it marked a post of mine containing only a link to the CDC&#x27;s website with no further text or emoticons as &quot;misinformation&quot;) and possibly off all pure textual discussion media, since they mostly encourage spontaneous, irresponsible reactions instead of discourse. Even Tiktok&#x27;s video responses are better than FB and Twitter...

What&#x27;s really missing is a &quot;meh&quot; button, meaning &quot;this was a waste of time&quot;.<p>I&#x27;d have clicked it.

Society doesn&#x27;t need a downvote or an upvote. I&#x27;d be happier with the removal of both buttons.

It&#x27;s ironic that we can&#x27;t downvote this article on Hacker News. Only upvote it.

Upvotes and downvotes are both old tech.<p>&quot;Applause&quot; reactions&#x2F;flags seem promising.

I fully agree with the statement, although the solution may be difficult. In general, there has to be a way to give negative feedback. Without any correction feedback loop at all, the worst of the worst is thriving.<p>Negative feedback is not just for consensus, also as a quality filter. I&#x27;ll start with the example of Medium, the blogging platform.<p>The idea of this platform is to encourage long form high quality writing. But that&#x27;s not what&#x27;s happening. Every topic is hijacked by people gaming the system, producing endless streams of lazy articles that lack any original thought, any sources, nuance, any quality.<p>There&#x27;s no way at all to give negative feedback other than blocking each individual author or writing a critical comment. Both don&#x27;t solve the problem. I consider it an existential problem for the platform as only crap comes to the surface. Why would I possibly pay for this garbage? There has to be a way to clean the garbage.<p>So here, the idea of negative feedback is to serve as a quality filter.<p>On Twitter, it&#x27;s a different use case. It&#x27;s to reduce harm. Twitter is an outrage platform. Saying dumb, extreme, unhinged things will maximize engagement. The goal of negative feedback here would not be to censor anything, instead to tell the algorithm to dampen the &quot;spread&quot; factor. Show the post with lots of negative feedback less prominently in timelines, which will reduce the amount of retweets, new followers, etc. Somebody consistently extreme should not be rewarded for it.<p>Arguably, on Twitter it&#x27;s going to be difficult. The way things work currently is their business model. Further, there&#x27;s the mob mentality likely to abuse any such mechanism.<p>I&#x27;ll end with an example where negative feedback is implemented extremely well. It&#x27;s the dutch site tweakers.net. They have a pretty sophisticated comment system.<p>You vote on individual comments roughly like this:<p>-1: troll, offensive 0: off-topic, irrelevant +1: on-topic (this is the default level) +2: informative (enriches the topic) +3: excellent (well researched essential addition)<p>So you give a quality vote, not an opinion&#x2F;agreement vote. Some people still opinion vote, say a comment like this:<p>&quot;Microsoft sucks&quot;<p>And then give it a +3, instead of the -1 or 0 it should get. Do this a few times and they take away your voting rights entirely. You get one chance to get it back by begging, and if you promise to better your ways. Screw it up again and it&#x27;s gone forever.<p>A fairly involved system, which will obviously not work everywhere, but it&#x27;s really good.

we need to free associate and disassociate from groups.<p>we focus so much on the former and pay not attention to the latter. we delude ourselves into believinf we can all get along.....we can but away from each other....

Can I read it without signing up?

An opposing opinion:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mcmillen.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;20210721-downvotes-considered-harmful.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mcmillen.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;20210721-downvotes-considered-...</a><p>The TL;DR:<p>&quot;Any voting system where most posts mostly receive upvotes, but also allows downvotes, has a huge problem:<p>No matter how you do the math, downvotes count more than upvotes do.&quot;

I feel like the solution is to allow downvotes, but not to allow the total score to go below 1.

side note &#x2F;s: Spotify would know me a whole lot better too &amp; we can deemphasize glorified &quot;we know you best models&quot;

Get rid of paywalls and we’ll talk.

I think you should only have a set amount of upvotes and downvotes per day. Or have a mod point structure similar to Slashdot. That way it prevents commenting to just get karma, and it allows for people to properly respond in a way that they&#x27;d like to without having fear of a downvote brigade. The people who can moderate then at that point will mod appropriately if it is even worthwhile of attention. So, is a troll even worth your time to give mod points over? Or someone who just isn&#x27;t thinking right but can have a legitimate discussion?<p>That way it deters someone from just being really scummy and downvoting all your posts, thus bringing your karma down even though what they were mad at had nothing to do with those other posts. Also, voting for karma to be locked after x amount of days&#x2F;months.

Ohhhh, gods it&#x27;s another rebranded Medium page. Couldn&#x27;t read it, paywalled. Flagged.

Vis-à-vis HN and the discussion of down-voting here specifically:<p>There are definitely times when the down-voting is pathetically petty and inane. One of the most glaring examples I&#x27;ve noticed is this: any time somebody makes a post asking for book recommendations in any form (eg, &quot;What&#x27;s a book that influenced you?&quot; or &quot;What books do you recommend for $REASON?&quot;, or however they choose to phrase it), no matter what the rest of the content of your response is, IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted.<p>That&#x27;s it... just <i>mentioning</i> an Ayn Rand book like <i>The Fountainhead</i> or <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> will provoke some people to downvote you. You could scarcely get more petty and ridiculous if you tried.<p>It&#x27;s not like I&#x27;m even talking about overtly political threads, or a comment that specifically endorses Rand or her philosophy &#x2F; ideology &#x2F; etc. That I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles.<p>But to think that merely having the audacity to include a certain author&#x27;s books on a list is reason to downvote a comment? And it wouldn&#x27;t matter if it were Rand or anybody, the fundamental point is the same. It&#x27;s one thing to dislike an author, but &quot;C&#x27;mon, man...&quot; as they say.