Hacker News Guidelines

Historically, it has been explicitly okay to downvote for disagreement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I know, I just think it's not a good idea at all.

It depends on what you're optimizing for: the feelings of individual commenters, or the overall quality of the thread.

I was thinking about the perspective of the whole site's quality globally.

Then it's much less clear why the alternate policy would be better.

I've touched on this in another thread under this comment - basically, I think that it doesn't help with the "optimise for curiosity" aspect of the site. Downvoting comments solely based on disagreeing discourages people from posting insightful yet unpopular comments, which is a net negative for curiosity here.

I understand what you're saying now. That's an indirect and tentative benefit, which needs to be stacked up against the immediate and obvious detriment of threads being littered with rote, obvious disagreements. Most especially important to be aware of: even good comments are routinely downvoted! But those downvotes are almost always rapidly swamped by upvotes. In the system you're implying, we'd be reading rote meta commentary for all those fluctuations.

I think the system we have now works well for the thing it's designed to improve.

There was a time when downvoting someone was accompanied by an explanation of why the downvote had just happened, but I think that didn't live long.

Either way, after the divisive last few years I don't think that that many people care for downvotes anymore, i.e. for what "the other side" thinks.

Maybe you're talking about some other site, but I don't remember HN ever operating this way. Downvoting disagreement is one of the oldest norms on the site.

2010-2012, I’d say. Too lazy to search through the comments back then. I also remember when meta discussions/posts like this one were actively discouraged, I’d say that lasted for longer.

Slightly related to the topic of moderation and this forum, the people behind it should really do something about allowing users in here to delete their comments/past history. We’re only a doxxing event away from making the news (this forum was no better than Reddit when it came to the Boston bombing, as an example and talking about doxxing).

Meta discussions are still discouraged, but I think that Dan sort of lets one slip by to vent out the pressure every once in awhile.

Downvoting for disagreement was absolutely a norm here 2010-2012. You'd have been chided for giving a reason to your downvote then.

The deletion of comments and comment history is a perennial topic; you can search Dan's comment history to understand the rationale behind our policies on it.

Also, the degree to which you are optimizing.