Comment by ihuman
12 years ago
I'm a bit confused by the wording of your comment. Are you saying that downvoting "is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments" or to show agreement? You use "it," but I can't tell which statement you are referring to.
Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the discussion.
The idea that downvoting for disagreement is not legitimate is a classic instance of the canonical invasive species on HN, the Redditism.
There is very little value in knowing that some people disagree with a comment, but there is tremendous value in learning other ideas. This is a bad policy.
That's a good point. But let me ask you: do you think HN actually has this problem, i.e. of ideas being suppressed because people disagree? If so, I'd be curious to see examples. Most of the downvoted stuff I see has some other readily available explanation; usually some form of rudeness.
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I think you're wrong and are just trying up make some claim about Reddit. I don't think it is as simple as "upvoting in agreement is legitimate therefore the converse is true." Down voting as the effect of removing the comment from discussion and is even used to indicate there is something unfair, mean, or what have you. I think what you're talking is more for a site that shows the scores of comments but does not obscure them.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
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>downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN //
Um, no. You downvote when a comment doesn't contribute. If you disagree then you can state it and if that contributes it can get upvoted too.
I'm talking about what the HN policy has always been. This is a factual question, and it's not as you describe it.
What's interesting is how the opposite gets repeated far more often, usually in an authoritative tone, as if the speaker had just consulted a rulebook.
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Here are two PG comments with slightly different takes on downvoting to signal disagreeing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683#up_658691
My takeaway has been that HN does not have Reddit's "don't downvote people just because you think that they are wrong" rule. Interestingly, PG's observation that people do not tend to downvote people who's comments are already gray does not seem to be true at all on reddit.
I've always thought that downvoting was for things that didn't contribute, and for things that were technically wrong (including logical fallacies and similar). However, disagreeing on opinion doesn't strike me as an area (on HN or otherwise) where downvoting makes sense.
So downvoting "1TB of data can easily be uploaded over a 20Mbps connection" (Takes 4.8 days, versus a 20 MegaBytes ps connection, which takes ~14 hours and while not easy, is at least more feasible) -- should be ok. But a comment with correction would normally be better...
Downvoting someone for saying that they prefer working in Eclipse (just because I prefer vim) doesn't seem very useful?
I don't think that the line between "I disagree with your opinion" and "I think this is incorrect" is always clear, particularly when new theories or analysis is being floated. As examples:
If I state that "chocolate is better than vanilla", and you disagree with me, it's not really that you think I am incorrect; you simply just disagree with me.
However if I state that I think "[country] will do [something] in Crimea", then you might disagree with me because you do think that I am incorrect. However in that case, because my statement was speculative, there isn't a strong sense of "objectively correct or incorrect".
I think that most 'disagreements' in online conversations are closer to the second than the first.
Downvoting someone saying they prefer some text editor is useful because those conversations are often very dull.
Downvoting the incorrect post is valid but as you say it would be more useful to provide a correction post.