Perhaps asking users why they are downvoting could help. Maybe not necessary to show their reason to others, but add friction and force someone to think twice.
At least force the downvoter to categorize their reason from a dropdown (e.g. slashdot), with an optional line of description. Hacker News could benefit from that too.
An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic."
The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"
Explaining a downvote is definitely something that I think should be obligatory. This alone could help seriously disincentivize people from downvoting things they simply disagree with.
Not op, but one idea: Ask for an articulate reason for downvoting. Increases the barrier of downvotes, and if people don't feel that it's articulate they could then downvote the downvote (with their reasons why).
Frequently downvoted reasons could be added to a blacklist that requires additional elucidation before being able to submit the downvote.
I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).
I had an idea about this, you could require a reason when downvoting.
It might make people less likely to downvote stuff unless they have a good reason. It might also help explain to the original poster why they are being downvoted.
I'm not really sure what the implications of this would be though. Perhaps it might make it harder to get rid of obvious trolls and spam.
It is a common suggestion but I think it would be a giant mistake to require people to post reasons for their downvotes. It would produce a ton of noise (because people would just make shit up) and dramatically increase meta-bickering about downvotes, which we already have way too much of.
Edit: here's a partial list of past explanations about this, in case anyone is interested in seeing how it has come up over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/downvote-reasons
I'm not really the down-voter type and always feel there ought to be a reason behind everything. Nonetheless, there are times when you need to down-vote a post.
Downvotes lately have become sort of a joke. People are downvoted for providing a different opinion. I think users should be required to provide a one-line reason for downvoting the user so we can all better understanding the motivation and perhaps come to an agreement why it was downvoted.
I was thinking more of offering reasons for downvotes due to the apparent increase in tribalism and what not, although I didn't exactly use the best examples.
One thing I noted before that would potentially be a good change: downvotes should either cost points, or else require a reply why you did the downvote.
I would like downvoting to require an explanation. It could be a single-line text box with the label "Explain why".
If you're serious about downvoting, it's no trouble to type in a short explanation such as "incorrect", "not funny", "obvious troll", "unnecessarily rude". (Those seem to be some typical reasons for downvotes.)
And if you're not quite sure why you're downvoting, having to explain would certainly serve as a determent.
Wouldn't it be great if people had to provide a reason along with their downvote? Maybe via a little text box that slides out, jQuery style. It would help alleviate the "why am I getting downvoted?" syndrome we all occasionally suffer from.
What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something else deserved their downvote more.
EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading, trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).
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