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
This article is neither spam nor off topic.
1 reply →
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.
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