← Back to context

Comment by bugbuddy

5 days ago

Imagine how useful it would be we could just add a button show our approval or disapproval of a piece of content without having to type true or false in the comment section. Let’s call it upvote or downvote button.

/s

I agree it wasn't a helpful comment.

On the other hand, I don't know what this mythical downvote button for stories is you describe. I've certainly never seen it.

Would be nice if HN actually had that.

  • It's what "flag" is for:

    > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    • No it's not.

      There are a lot of stories that aren't worthy of flagging, but they're just low-quality.

      And I've seen people abuse flagging because they treat it like downvoting. Flagging removes a story from the front page entirely, whereas ideally downvoting would simply deprioritize it, i.e. a bunch of downvotes would move it from #5 rank to #60 or something, not get rid of it entirely.

      I've definitely had to e-mail the mods a number of times to restore a flagged story that was entirely appropriate, but which a few users simply didn't like. It would be much better to have a downvote button, and reserve flagging for actual spam and inappropriate content.

      1 reply →