What's the main difference on the quality of itens classification using a voting system that allow only up votes versus up and down votes (digg vs. reddit)? YC.news changed from up and down to only up. Why?
I noticed that on reddit the voting on my essays always had a higher proportion of downvotes after 10 minutes than 10 hours. I know there are reflexive upvoters as well as reflexive downvoters, but from the way the ratio changed over time it seemed that a higher percentage of downvoters were reflexive than upvoters. If so then the downarrow injects more stupidity into the system than the uparrow.<p>Shorter version: downvotes are more likely to be thoughtless.
I don't like downvoting because downvotes are so ambiguous in meaning. An upvote clearly means "read this!". A downvote could mean disagreement on the subject, dislike of the author or just disinterest. I might want to read a story with wich many people disagree, but I might not want to read one that everybody finds completely irrelevant or shallow.<p>The trouble is that the meanings of up and downvotes are different for news stories and comments respectively. For a comment, the votes almost exclusively mean agreement/disagreement. Only in rare cases do I disagree with a comment but still find it so important that I vote it up. This is different from, say, a scientific paper where this happens frequently.<p>Overall I think downvotes are unnecessary and cause a lot of bad blood.
I believe the problem with the down voting button is it often reflect more on the opinion of the voter rather than how well the article was written or its usefulness. <p>Good article that agree with the user = comment/up vote<p>Bad article that agree with the user = ignore<p>Good article that disagree with user = comment/down vote<p>Bad article that disagree with the user = down vote <p>Unless everyone actually vote up/down purely base on how good the article is and not their opinion, removing the down vote button is not a bad idea... <p>The voting button is a good idea if it's a poll, but the "hotness" of something is probably better tracked by the comments and other actions a user take...
One thing I noticed from K5 is that having both options leads to lobbying and information cascades. That is, if one or two early voters post comments saying the article is really good or really bad then that hugely affects whether later voters hit +1 or -1. With only the option to vote up, people might point out flaws in the article or praise it, but the comments are more intellectual and less designed to influence the voting of others. Of course K5 is much worse because the design strongly encourages people to vote one way or another, whereas on this site the bad articles will quickly disappear if people just ignore them.
I think a method of ranking news based on the number and quality of comments would be better than voting up and down. This method would be somewhat analogous to page rank in that the rank of a story (webpage) is indirectly determined by the comments (links) and quality of the comments. Writing a comment is arguable less reflexive than clicking an arrow.<p>Also interesting news that was generating a good discussion could tend to persist and stay near the top. This would encourge thoughtful comments as you are not penalized for taking some time to think about the matter rather than hastily shooting from the hip.<p>
related question: i've seen comments here that have, say, -2 points. if you can only vote up, how is it possible for a comment to ever go below one point? my guess is maybe you get a down-vote button once your karma goes above a certain score?
I wrote a reddit post on this <a href="http://reddit.com/info/gg2w/comments" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/info/gg2w/comments</a><p>... although most other commenters didn't agree.<p>Summary: up only voting measures personal interest. It tends to promote anything that has a constituency. Up and down voting measures community approval. It tends to promote group-think.