For better or worse, the up/downvote buttons are used to express an opinion -- that is the primary purpose.
The problem is that any crowdsourced curation feature uses significant downvotes as a signal for spam or content which otherwise violates the site policies.
What you said is of course correct, but what I'm saying is that while the concept of a down vote button is useful, people end up using it in the fashion I described because of its convenience.
Maybe merging them isn't the best idea, but changing it to mimic the flag button (i.e. moving it and requiring a reason to be specified before submission) would probably fix this issue, I'd wager.
JavaScript makes the upvote/downvote buttons work in a way that users expect them to work. Given that is almost 50% of the end-user functionality of this site, I'd say that's pretty important.
I always thought the only way downvotes buttons should be implemented is that they're non-functional, in that they do nothing other than let a user take an action; you could perhaps then influence what that specific user sees in the future, to help get an idea of their tastes, or instead not actually affecting where a comment or post shows up in an order.
Yes, I think many people are under the mistaken impression that the upvote/downvote buttons are functionally symmetrical, which is understandable given that they are presented as visually symmetrical. But upvoting serves to avoid redundant 'I agree.' posts, while if users downvote to disagree, it robs the discussion of valuable content (i.e., why they disagree). It would help if the UI were modified to signal this asymmetry.
> Adding an explicit up/downvote would capture some additional information, but it would overlap with the above, and most users would ignore the button. I’d guess Google has at some point experimented with this and found it wasn’t worth keeping.
Prior to reading these arguments I would have agreed. But I suppose I have to admit that I would prefer that someone said "This feature isn't necessary - feature Y is a perfectly good substitute" or even "this feature is inappropriate according to the goals of this project" and upvote those comments, rather than downvoting the original feature/pull request without giving a reason.
I'm not nearly as adamantly opposed to a downvote button, but I can understand the argument.
> it's just a sampling from the subset of HN users that can figure out what the buttons do
Or those who don't experience layout problems. Often there is a significant part of the down arrow that results in an upvote or vice versa. Generally happens in FF for me. I feel like I need to check the URL before clicking.
Adding an extra button just means they will now use both buttons to disagree.
Almost everyone with a logged in account can upvote, so you might be better off persuading people to upvote unfairly downvoted comments than trying to persuade people to stop downvoting for disagreement.
Don't forget that a gray comment hasn't just had downvotes. It's also failed to get any upvotes.
Realize they are used as downvotes which is why using them as part of the ranking system makes no sense. Adding a downvote button also makes no sense. If you see something you do not want to see, but others do want to see it, click "hide" and move on.
The problem is that any crowdsourced curation feature uses significant downvotes as a signal for spam or content which otherwise violates the site policies.
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