Is it okay to downvote without explaining why?

Toxicity, very off-topic, ad hominem, bad jokes, trolls, me-toos, and low-effort comments are things I downvote.

I do not downvote opinions I don't agree with. I often see a well-crafted comment that is being downvoted, and upvote it although I do not agree with it. I think it's nice to have opposing views, and it's a tragedy when one viewpoint is silenced. Especially on a tech-focused forum.

If I were downvoting people who disagreed with me, I wouldn't always feel compelled to defend myself with a comment. I think those comment threads are almost always quite boring and so I try to avoid them. Being several "generations" deep is often indicative of this.

Explaining every downvote would make the signal to noise ratio worse. I vote in hopes of improving the signal to noise ratio. My replies rarely overlap with my downvotes.

If I'm taking the time to post a counterpoint, I'm usually not going to downvote the comment I'm replying to. But if somebody is posting something that I've seen here a dozen times before, I'm not going to write the dozenth attempted refutation. That's just more noise.

The rarest combination is when I flag a comment without downvoting it. That's when I agree with much of the spirit of the comment but it also contains a personal attack against another poster.

Slightly less rare: I'm reading through a comment, about to upvote it, and then the final sentence turns out to be needlessly inflammatory. Or it starts out inflammatory and then makes some good points. I neither upvote nor downvote these. I don't comment on the comment style when I see these cases, because writing about style instead of the substance of the original article under discussion also worsens the SNR.

Downvoting is a form of moderation, and we all know what happens to online communities without moderation.

I downvote low effort comments, including views I disagree with if they are off topic or poorly expressed. Nobody is owed an explanation of downvotes, but if someone asks for one on something I downvoted, I would reply if it hadn't already been adequately addressed by someone else.

When a comment is partly greyed out, I'm almost certain to either upvote or downvote. If I think the downvotes are unfair, I will upvote, and if I think the comment should be hidden, I'll hasten the process.

The point of downvoting is to keep the site as a useful resource, and that means downvoting when appropriate without spending an inordinate amount of time on it. Nobody has time to read every comment posted on HN.

I downvote very sparingly. I try to upvote points of view I disagree with, especially when they are in response to my own comments. I believe this policy encourages interesting discussion.

I reserve the downvote for comments that are mean-spirited or total non-sequiturs. I flag even more rarely, and that's for blatant bad behavior. I avoid engaging in any way at all on threads that deal with political issues I feel strongly about. Any engagement, even downvotes, is fuel for the fire.

> Ask HN: Is it okay to downvote without explaining why?

IMO, it is strongly preferred. Downvoting is about controlling signal to noise ratio; if it is not a waste of everyone’s attention to respond to a post, it doesn't deserve a downvote, and vice-versa.

Downvoting without a comment forces the commenter to think about the variety of reasons for the downvote. I find this valuable for myself when I am downvoted but I did not expect to be.

Alternatively sometimes I make a comment that I think is worthwhile saying, even though I know it will be downvoted (for reasons I may disagree with).

Making comments just to farm karma is very easy but I don’t find it satisfying (and certainly doesn’t help create good discussion).

My problem with downvotes isn't the downvotes themselves, it's that a downvote is devoid of context because it is a single button press. Even if a comment is toxic, abusive, or just off-topic, I think there is value in being able to attach a _reason_ to a downvote. Rather than downvotes, I would like to see 'vote-comments', where you can leave a +1 or -1 comment, so it acts like an upvote or downvote, but there has to be some text there as well, which would serve to contextualise the upvote/downvote.

Slashdot has a basic solution to this: moderation votes with a category. You can vote up or down, in a specific category: Insightful, Interesting, Informative, Irrelevant, Flamebait, Funny, etc. If your comment has a -2, you usually know why.

I've suggested it about 50 times here. Not the same categories, but some form of metadata associated with the vote. As soon as you click the arrow, it can prompt a list of tags to click. You could very quickly express yourself along with your vote and move along.

My suggestions for categories would be emotional (angry, happy, funny, confused, indifferent, stupid, crazy, awesome) and non-emotional (citation needed, seems right, false, morality, ethics, expert, novice, etc). This way you get a good picture of why somebody voted: what their emotional state was, and what their (perceived) intellectual position was.

Perhaps one reason it doesn't happen is it would fundamentally change the dynamics of the ingroups here. You'll notice that on some posts, it seems like everyone is parroting the same opinion as if it's an established fact. Or they upvote someone's comment because they have a high reputation. If you had to add a qualifier to your vote, it may quickly become transparent why these people are voting, and then the algorithm would have to change so as not to expose these defects in group social dynamics. Or the algorithm would stay the same, and people could see that the structure of the forum is based on a lot of crappy human heuristics and not strictly adhering to "the rules".

As for me, I shamelessly downvote most comments promoting climate denialism, because (1) it's wrong, and (2) it's not going to be productive (people have been having the same discussion for 10+ years), and (3) in order to have any productive discussion on the climate, people have to agree on basic shared facts. I'm not interested in the 700th rehash of whether the sun explains global warming.

And no, we've been having "But science requires skepticism!" debate for 10+ years as well. I can literally hear both sides' argument in my head, there's no point in repeating it.

Sometimes my inner keyboard warrior gets the better of me and I end up replying to these comments instead of downvoting, but in retrospect, I think I'm doing this community a disservice by amplifying the noise.

Let me put it this way: I've gotten far more comments downvoted without explanation that could have used an explanation than comments that get downvoted where I can look back and say "Yeah, that was fair." And, usually, by the time I'm downvoting and explaining, it's to the point where the comment displays such ignorance it's not worth a point by point response, but there's some hope that the commenter might learn something.

This comment I made a while ago is a case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736220 The person I was replying to had no literal idea of how economics is supposed to work (according to economists), so I downvoted, then explained.

I only downvote flagrantly off topic comments, myself.

Not to be sour about it but when the HN groupthink is in error one shouldn't bother to correct it. It's not worth the effort. Move on to the next topic, there is plenty of stuff. This isn't facebook, it doesn't thrive on drama. I often think broadening the scope of a topic helps me refine my perspective. As this tends towards the off-topic I usually don't bother.

Just remember that the point of up and down voting is to create that bunch of interesting articles on the front page. The goal isn't to be a fair & honest system or to put the truth on trial. Slight shallowness is even beneficial as things at times already get technical enough to exclude a lot of users.

Yes.

I think it is.

I tend to downvote cases where someone is using very toxic attitudes or disingenuously endorsing toxic things under the guise of fair inquiry.

This can take the form of “citation needed” or “sources please” bad faith sniped requests for “evidence.” It can also take the form of overtly abusive attitudes, defending things like misogyny or defending repression of different classes of people, for example if someone said something like, “I don’t feel like I have to make my heterosexual identity widely known at work, so I think people with a homosexual identity also should keep it to themselves.” This sort of thing is masqueraded as fair and balanced or “just an opinion” to make it seem like it deserves equal footing or equal consideration, but really this sort of thing is flagrantly uncivil and harmful, and dressing it up like it’s some innocuous comment is one of the worst parts.

Unfortunately, I can’t always explain my reasoning for these sorts of downvotes, because the community guidelines of HN are often very, very unfairly enforced, giving a free pass to things that are genuinely horrible yet reprimanding any follow-up comments that call those people out on their toxic bullshit. Sometimes the comments are so bad that I’ll take the risk of misplaced moderator admonition. But usually I just downvote & move on.

On technical topics, I will downvote things if they appear uncharitably one-sided or unfairly ridiculing an alternative on unfair grounds. For example I see this a ton in posts focusing on Nim & Julia, where instead of just dispassionately mentioning preferences or benefits, the posts go further to unfairly deride alternatives or make straw man comparisons.

I think downvoting is actually quite important for keeping bad commentary off of HN. Very sincerely, there’s a lot of commentary here that is one small step removed from The Red Pill or MRA toxicity, and unfortunately the site guidelines allow it to be treated as if it’s innocuous and fair / civil discourse.

I really worry a great deal for HN. As a site that aims to set high standards for community participation, it paints a bleak picture of societal discourse at large and in fact people who stand up for basic social norms and respect are the ones who get unfairly downvoted and admonished.

Allow me to demonstrate.

I downvote when someone responds with attacks rather than debating the topic itself.

I’m not sure how effective the system really is though. I’ve seen plenty of my own posts get downvoted for no reason other than I had a different opinion.

When people downvote without offering their own opinion, it feels more like censorship than anything else.

> Is it okay to downvote without explaining why?

Yes.

The Russians (ie IRA) on here for instance want to promote disinformation and conflict. The best way to do this is would be up voting and down voting.

Once you get into comments it is quite time intensive. But it is also easier to get caught, the community can't self regulate voting, it's invisible.

Different topic, I think a reason for down-voting with a 100 drop down options including options not allowed/encouraged(ie they are a Republican, I disliked another one of their comments) would be a very interesting experiment.

It might kill HN, so HN won't do this experiment since they have a working site. But there does need to be another evolution done by someone.

[edit] Probably wouldn't help, but HN should have a private "downvoted comments" to complement the private "upvoted comments" link in the admin panel so people can see their behaviour.

I think downvoting as a disagreement would be fine if (on HN) it did not cause a post to become grey or in worse case, leads to it getting flagged and then made invisible to everyone without showdead on.

Due to these effects, downvotes are used as a tool of censorship. It's explicitly used that way in many cases, to make sure that unpopular opinions/ideas are not seen by more people. Because they do not believe people are capable of making judgements for themselves, and must be protected from unpopular speech, because if they accidentally see it, they might end up agreeing with it. We can't have that, can we?

If it's some offensive post / off-topic then yes. If you simply disagree, it's called click trolling and it's a cowardly behavior when some downvote and run away without expressing what they don't agree with because they can't stand their ground in an argument.

Using downvotes for disagreement is simply a bad practice. They should be used for off-topic or inappropriate posts.

Ironic, how some actually downvote this post but don't comment :) This demonstrates the point.