Two HN Announcements

I'd say that this has gotten worse over time. I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.

> I haven't seen as many interesting back and forth discussions on HN for a long time. There are probably a lot of different factors behind that but the rise of downvoting as a means of disagreeing with a comment hasn't helped.

There are a few topics I happen to know quite a lot about (e.g. health economics), and I generally enjoy discussing them with people in real life.

I've long since given up on being able to discuss them on HN, however, because it's really demoralizing to write a 1000-word comment with five footnote citations explaining the nuances of the health insurance billing system and labor supply market, only to get downvoted within 30 seconds by people who (presumably) don't like that my comments don't perfectly support their opinions. Rinse and repeat throughout an entire discussion thread.

So instead, on these topics where I know I'll inevitably get downvoted, I just write a single comment, much shorter, and oftentimes without citations. If people respond, I often don't bother to reply. It's not that I dislike debating, or that I dislike debating this topic. But it's a waste of my time to keep writing comments only to get (virtually) slapped in the face every time I hit "submit".

There are other users I've noticed who have followed similar patterns. Which is a shame, because I've learned a lot from them in the past.

Perhaps you've stopped writing them, but I still associate your username with high quality comments. Try not to care too much about the random downvotes, and please keep writing extensive well-footnoted comments about the issues you care about. It's probably a small audience, but we are appreciative.

It would be nice to know who downvotes how often in relation to others (publicly or at the very least for the person herself)

People could then compare their behavior against the others and one could define a "too often" in terms of std-dev from the mean or a quantile, both within a specific time window (say last 365 days).

In this way one has at least a candidate set of abusers (for the "HN Mods") and everyone could compare his downvoting behavior and adjust.

Additionally, since it's a simple statistic, it should be easy to implement.

Personally I like the stackexchange model where downvotes have a cost.

The problem with that is that you can't not care about them if you care about meaningful debate and conversation.

The effect of downvotes is to push comments down and fade them away into the background. That should be the effect of filtering low-quality comments, but why should that be the effect of disagreement?

More to the point, is it not to your benefit to encounter and engage with quality points of view that differ from your own?

Certainly, and one can still benefit if the comment is slightly grayed out and lower on the page. I'm suggesting that allowing the asocial behavior of small number of random strangers to ruin your day is likely to result in lots of ruined days.

Better, if you can mentally arrange it, is to treat some small number of downvotes as the price of admission rather than a personal attack, and to continue the conversation with those who are listening. The hard part is figuring out which downvotes are actually useful feedback, and which should be treated as random noise.

This wasn't my point above, though. My point was that I like chimeracoder's long detailed comments, and would like him to keep writing them, regardless of the behavior he observes in others.

The anonymity of votes is something that acts against the worst aspects of groupthink and knee-jerk opinions in the HN crowd. I don't trying to literally penalize disagreement with the median voter here would help at all.

The idea would be not to penalize local quantity (votes or downvotes on a topic) but aggregated quantities. Chances are that if I downvote 10 times per day (with say an avg number of down votes of 2 per day) that I am doing something wrong or I five times as much as the average user. In both cases it's food for thought.

Ratios of vote/downvote per user would probably also mean something.

Finally, I'd prefer to have these statistics private for each user, so there is no way groupthink could get a hold.

That's also possible, maybe with increasing costs, but the problem is that it introduces state (so it's not as easy as a statistic to calculate). Constant costs could discourage downvoting and AFAIR, PG wanted to have his numbers being integers (so no rational costs either).