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?
- On mobile, Android, I use Materialistic to read HN. The UI is much better than the web version, and voting uses a standard mobile UI element (or swipe, but I don't use that). You can't downvote in Materialistic, only upvote, so if you're worried about accidental downvoting that goes away.
There may be genuine reasons for downvoting, errors in what is presented, etc. Fair enough.
But if you downvote because you don't like something, all you are doing is attempting to create an echo chamber of views and opinions you already believe. Is that what you want? If so, you are now in a war for control of the echo chamber you want to see with others of like mind - its a race to the bottom.
In reverse, if you value alternative, unusual and/or creative ideas, perhaps this is something that should consider giving an upvote to, even if you disagree with it.
That's my opinion anyway. And I try to do as I suggest.
Only unproductive comments, of course. Different opinions should be welcome.
- zoom into the button, then click
- override the css yourself, e.g,: using your one of the many userstyles extensions or browser developer tools
- inject custom JavaScript using GreaseMonkey or Tampermonkey
- use a third party HN client. As you would imagine, there's a sea of those - one of them must be halfways decent :-D
- purchase a new device with better touch precision. Pixel 3/6 with display scaled down handles the problem of adjacent links smaller than a fingertip exceptionally well
- If able, try to reduce the finger sausages. Otherwise, use a stylus.
Why should YC change it for everyone to make it more attractive on your device?
It also makes me biased to downvoted posts.
I would completely disable voting system in any kind of conversations.
I may be upvoting more if the up/down links were below the comment. Usually I don't vote until I read the complete comment, and then, scrolling back up just to vote and then back to continue reading feels tedious. But maybe that's the whole point.
But I still end up in Telegram because of thumbnails.
Like this question? Otherwise I would downvote. Which I never do.
I'm happy to (attempt to! re-)upvote comments that have been downvoted, as long as they're actually thoughtful and contribute to the argument/conversation, and obviously (and often!) I'll upvote a well thought through comment.
I seem to go through periods where I downvote more often, but almost without exception it's just downvoting pointless/sarcastic/unpleasant comments. Gotta say though - for a 10+ year old community, I remain amazed that the discourse is usually civil, largely intelligent and still(!) remains spam free.
I think it needs moderators doing their jobs with appropriate tools.
Yes, but if it has actual content. +1 comments are inferior to upvotes.
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.
For example, an articulate, well-reasoned, passionate argument for why PHP is the best get shit done language? Sure, I can upvote that even if I firmly disagree.
But an articulate, well-reasoned, passionate argument for vi being superior to emacs? I can’t downvote fast enough, but only because we cannot burn the heretic in these enlightened times.
If the ratio is too low (eg: spam, shallow content, same old tired point), it's not an issue to downvote IMO. That helps with the current post and also encourages good behaviour in the future.
This is not the same as downvoting with a point that you personally disagree with. This is censorship and toxic to the community.
Requiring a comment is probably a bit much, but I do think two separate downvote buttons would be helpful to the commenter, even if only they could see this feedback. Maybe one link labeled with "disagree" and one with "low quality" or something. UI-wise this would have the added benefit of letting new users know that HN officially expects them to consider both options.
It is. As is upvoting, since it makes the unvoted and down voted harder to see.
I do not understand why people think this "mob rule" of up and down voting will end up with the "best" things being selected. It will only be the most common/neutral things being brought to our attention.
Unpopular ideas are not wrong, just unpopular. Just ask Copernicus.
But this is what CONSTANTLY happens here. It is the norm everywhere there is likes/dislikes. It is inverse authoritarianism.
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.
However "votes" for commenting suggested links makes more sense for me. It naturally expose topics that users willing to discuss and care about.