Most arguments for downvoting I've heard revolve around the desire to maintain a high signal to noise ratio, but in my view, the marginal increase in SNR downvoting offers over upvoting and flagging alone isn't worth the chilling effect it has on unpopular speech.

Even without downvoting, popular comments will rise up to the top and inappropriate comments will be flagged to oblivion.

Downvoting is just an additional layer of censorship on comments that express unpopular opinions. While the first layer of censorship (from popular comments getting bumped up by upvoting) can be justified because of its high marginal contribution to SNR over a system without any censorship mechanism other than flagging, I don't think the same can be said about downvoting in a system where upvoting and flagging already exists.

I feel downvoting has steadily been turning the HN comments section into yet another uninteresting, groupthinking hivemind with nothing provocative to offer, and will continue to do so until it gets reined in. And this is speaking as someone who doesn't get downvotes all that often.

Do you have any thoughts about the voting system on HN? Not that it's going to change, but I am becoming quite tired of seeing worthwhile, interesting comments downvoted into grayness. It feels like a kind of anonymous shaming, like a group of people put on masks, gather around someone, and wag their fingers at them until they are shamed into silence. It only takes a few people to downvote a comment into obscurity, and it may happen by chance that the first few people to see it are censorious, preventing others who would upvote it from even seeing it. I strongly think that there should only be two options: upvote, or flag for rule violations.

What's usually lacking in these discussions about downvotes are specific examples. I'm biased, but it seems to me that's because it's usually pretty easy to see how downvoted comments got there. But you have to wait a while to see the effect. Unfair downvotes happen, but the community usually corrects them after a while. So reacting too quickly to unfair downvotes—other than by giving them a corrective upvote—is always a mistake, as is making the thread worse by complaining about it.

HN's voting system is flawed, but I've yet to hear of any alternative to downvoting that wouldn't, in my view, make the quality problem worse.

I've made a few downvoted comments. One was flagged and removed, and drew a rebuke from dang (on the Slashdot sale story, as it happens), and though my initial comment was perhaps to telegraphically negative, there was substance there.

Also: while it does little good to complain about downvotes as the OP, I've occasionally noted comments in which the downvote brigade strikes me as emotional and/or hivemindish. I'll also frequently drop to the bottom of long threads and upvote comments I feel are getting undue negation even where I disagree with the contents.

This last: so long as the sentiments seem grounded in facts and reason, I don't believe any comment should be greyed.

As for moderation in general, it's a Hard Problem. HN is coasting largely on a community that has good, though far from perfect tendencies. I've seen far too many discussion systems be overwhelmed by the combination of toxic social dynamics and poorly conceived moderation systems. HN suffers only one of those handicaps, for now.

More on moderation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...

Making it acceptable to downvote based merely on differences in opinion lowers the quality of discussion, promotes groupthink, and makes people not want to waste time putting any actual effort into writing comments.

Taking the last point first: HN downvotes aren't arbitrary and excessive. In most cases, not 99% but maybe 90 and certainly 80, it's easy to see why a comment has been downvoted—except when you agree with it on a topic that pushes your buttons, in which case you will always think the downvote was unfair, but then your opinion can't be trusted. (That applies to all us; we just have different buttons and agree with different things.)

That does leave a margin where the statistical vote cloud converges on a negative score unfairly. But how often does that really happen—maybe 10%? Once you account for the many factors of randomness, e.g. in who happens to see a comment, there's not much room left to make outcomes more precise. Certainly a feeble "rule change" wouldn't do it; if you think it would, try running an internet forum and telling users how to behave. You will quickly know how King Canute must have felt. We'd be better off hiring someone fair-minded to go through all the comments, find those 10%, and upvote them. But what a fate to subject a human being to.

> a symptom of deterioration

HN downvote behavior has been stable for a long time, so whatever's going on, I don't think it's deterioration. But if it is, then I go with what Voltaire said about coffee being a slow poison: it must be very slow.

> a lot of people assume Reddit's standard should apply here,

People assume Reddit's standards apply on HN because Reddit is 100x as big as HN, and therefore much better known even among HN users. This is a simple consequence of size. It has nothing to do with what Reddit's standards specifically are or how high its quality is. I respect Reddit—Reddit is an amazing achievement—but it is not where HN should be taking lessons in discussion quality.

> How do you know? People have different opinions about what constitutes and contributes to quality.

I don't know, but I'll tell you why I say it. The emotional dynamic in downvoting is very strong. It stings to get downvoted—it feels like you've been downvoted. It sucks for me as much as anybody. From observing this reaction in myself, and how people's statements about downvotes are connected to their feelings in thousands of cases, I believe that this emotional dynamic accounts for most of what people say on the topic. That's not a criticism; it's just how we are. But given that, it's easy to see how the common belief about downvotes arises: it's not that there was anything bad about my comment (impossible!)—it must rather be that some schmuck disagreed. Therefore, to make the world a better place, people shouldn't be allowed to downvote for disagreement. This is wishful thinking.

I can tell you for sure that, whatever beliefs we have about it, people overwhelmingly downvote based on how they feel about a comment, probably in the first 5 seconds. They're not following any "guidelines". Most don't even know what the guidelines are. It's just lizard-brain like/dislike. Suppose we changed the rules to ask users only to downvote under more refined conditions. Whose behavior would that modify? Not most people's—only that of the very most conscientious users. But those are precisely the users whose instincts should be trusted in the first place.

That is why I don't think we should set up such a rule: first, it's wishful thinking; second, no clear upside. And third, HN's origins are in a kind of counterintuitive minimalism that I think is worth something, and that it takes a certain stubbornness to preserve. Everyone disagrees with the specific acts of stubborn preservation, but somehow people end up liking, or like/hating, the sum it all adds up to.

In any case, I'm much more hesitant to down vote here just because I disagree with an opinion than on Reddit, and I think a lot of people do the same. To me, that higher standard for what's both considered a good comment and what's acceptable are what makes HN more useful for interesting discussion. There are probably 5-8 aspects of comments that could be voted on, but what we see with these singular rating systems is that the community forms around what is acceptable and what is not, and people generally fall in line with the community norms (both in submissions and in their own rating of others). Reddit is interesting in that I've noticed that this community norm is somewhat malleable based on the subreddit. /r/gifs and /r/programming have a distinctly different feel in the comments.

Also, looking at comments, often I see only upvote and no downvote button. Why is that?

Funny thing, when I went to quote the specific HN guideline, I'm almost certain it used to say "Please don't comment about downvotes. It never helps" or something very much like that.

But the current guideline says:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Which we're all in violation of! I'll do my best to follow this rule in the future.

Because of the way that downvoting works on HN, the few times I use it, my thought is "nobody should see this comment". Because enough downvotes delegitemize and hide a comment, it's effectively telling other people that it's not worth being read.

I don't know if that's actually going through people's minds when they downvote, but that's what I think which is exactly why I rarely use it. But too many people now are simply using it on posts they don't like, even if a post deserves to be there. For some reason, it's an unpopular opinion to believe that an idea or opinion you think is wrong deserves to be seen and rebutted rather than silenced.

There has never been a rule against downvoting for disagreement on HN. (Perhaps the people who think this are mistakenly applying the rule from Reddit, a much better-known site.) But that doesn't mean just any kind of downvoting is ok. For example, downvoting a comment that says 2+2=5 is ok (unless it was quoting Dostoevsky!) But downvoting a substantive comment merely because you don't like the same things as the author is not ok. We see this a lot, for example, in programming language debates.

Some users want us to formalize the downvote policy in a precise rule, but we don't have a precise rule. Here's what we do say about downvotes. First, when you see a comment unfairly in the grey, be a good community member and provide a corrective upvote. Most comments that unfairly dip into grey get corrected this way.

Second, when you get downvoted, resist the temptation to strike back. Getting downvoted excites emotion. It stings a little, and the mind recoils from the idea that one might have deserved it. The way to respond as an HN user is to take the hit, review your comment to see what might have evoked it, adjust future comments when you see anything, and shrug it off when you don't.

If you want more clarification of community norms around downvoting, I've been impressed by brudgers' recent few comments on it and by dragonwriter's comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916. They both did a better job of articulating the function of downvoting on HN than anything we've written ourselves. There is a body of community practice around this, and if you pay attention with the intent of learning it, you will.