[chansiky]

My opinion is downvotes should require a reason for downvote. Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation.

Getting in the weeds here, but then if others agree with the downvote rationale, they can upvote the downvote which can be used as some metric. This already happens on HN and reddit - people downvote all the time then provide a reason, but not all people provide a reason for their disagreement, allowing for useless downvotes that dont help the community in any way - for example an "ad hominem" downvote. What this means is that disagreeing opinions are allowed attacks without any risk of retaliation, and in what game is that ever fair?

[iaml]

Yeah, I agree it would be interesting. Very often I'd like to be able to reply to everyone who brigade-downvotes things on reddit when for example they don't have some context or something counterintuitive is actually true according to reputable source.

[randomdata]

> Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation.

Agreement isn't useful feedback. An upvote implies that the comment is funny, a virtual laugh if you will, which is useful feedback to allow you to hone the entertainment value of your comments.

I suspect the next person will have a different take, though. Which ultimately means that the votes mean nothing at all beyond that someone, assuming no bots are at play, pressed a button.

Therefore, votes are just a poor man's analytics system. They give some vague feedback that someone was near your comment and nothing more. Which button was pressed makes no difference.

[ddingus]

The downside of that is increased meta.

And the reason is simple:

They did not agree and or lack shared perspective before the down vote and that being true after the downvote starts another disagreeable discussion.

It all gets worse when people know who downvoted them...

[chansiky]

Only the initial downvoting commenter would have to reveal his name. Then others can just bolster the downvote which harms the rating of the original comment, sort of like a "let him without sin be the first to throw the stone" situation. Then others can join in if they agree. And that might hurt if they're throwing stones at us but at least we get to see where the stones are coming from. Currently we dont, we just get stoned and dont know why.

[spiffytech]

Tildes.net tries something interesting here: there is no downvote, but users can flag comments with one of the provided negative attributes (offtopic, noise, malice)[0]. This discourages "downvote to disagree", and provides enough signal to e.g., sink an off-topic comment, but summon a moderator for malicious comments.

[0] https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#la...

[chansiky]

Thanks for sharing, this is a really interesting thought and its very close to one I had based on this thread, with the one difference being that instead of letting others decide what kind of comment one makes, we should really lean into thinking of commenting as a sort of game and let the user decides what kind of comment they are making, by letting them choose to attack/defend/support a position.

We've seen how the upvote/downvote w/ranking systems play, I'm not a big fan of what reddit has become lately, and I wonder where HN would be without great moderators. At the very least it would be refreshing to see how alternative mechanics lead to different communities.

Sort of related is this thought, Wikipedia is an MMORPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...