zlacker

>>djtrip+(OP)
One thing I’m guilty of on this site is not upvoting enough. I vote down the banality and flag the pollution. Upvoting doesn’t seem to come as naturally — whenever I read an interesting response it’s the last thing on my mind. It’s a good thing really. Interesting stories and comments are the norm.

I wonder what the userDB says about any scarcity of upvoters? Are there many others like me? Am I not pulling my weight? Should I do it more?

>>gorgoi+EI1
I am the opposite. I vote up easily, but think a hundred times before downvoting. Downvoting feels like censorship to me.

>>nobrai+PT1
I wonder why this site -- or any site with up/downvoting, really -- doesn't implement a "must comment to downvote" policy. Far too often downvoting is just the "I disagree and think you suck" button[0]. Make someone elaborate on _why_ they disagree or _why_ the original poster is wrong before allowing a downvote.

0: in particular, on HN the downvote button also seems to serve the purpose of "I don't think other people should see what you have to say" button due to HN's passive-aggressive greying out of downvoted comments.

>>xienze+s52
That idea could work when it’s something relatively mild, and not attached to a larger media campaign – classic HN fare like this thread may have disagreements but all of the participants generally want to be here, are legitimately interested in the topic, and usually have some level of expertise and interest in being correct.

I don’t think it would be viable in the threads which touch on larger societal debates. A great example would be election topics after Trump started lying about election fraud and that message became something media outlets started pushing to millions of people on topics many people here are interested in like election systems or forensic analysis. That leads to waves of people repeating long-debunked claims ad nauseam and because they aren’t here to learn or even debate rationally, there’s not much point in filling up the thread with 200 comments saying “This is not true. See http…” over and over, and the volume means that the kind of people we’d most want to have involved in such a thread are going to get tired of it and move on.

One natural response is to say “no politics” but that’s really not possible given the involvement of IT in almost everything now and the areas where legislation is being proposed. The approach of having skilled people like dang moderate threads works well but it’s very expensive, so I think the community downvoting low-value posts is probably a necessary evil. It’d be tempting to have some way to say that someone isn’t contributing to a thread to boot them out but that seems hard to do without being too slow to matter or prone to brigading. Labeling might be worth trying, as much as a social cue to the voter as new information for the moderators.