Note that be average score for comments has been trending downward though 2014, up to Oct 2014: http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-comments/monthly_average_points.... (via http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ )

Unfortunately, I can't get more up-to-date data on comment scores because HN closed the loophole I used to get comment scores immediately after that post, which is disappointing.

As an aside, I'm disappointed too that comment scores are no longer available. I stopped crawling HN comments altogether when that happened; they became roughly as valuable as Reddit comments, since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones.

>since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones

You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. Granted, it's harder to automate, but if the tradeoff is having to engage with more of the narrative of a thread then I don't know that that's a bad trade. So many variables can go into a comment score that the actual number becomes less meaningful than the sort order of the threads themselves.

> You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them.

The snark isn't necessary. It's probably safe to assume I had set up a thing which would inject into my news feed comments above a certain threshold for certain users in threads I might not come across otherwise -- since that's exactly what I was doing.

I don't read HN threads very often anymore. Something about too many people trying to out-snark other people without breaking the rules of decorum here made it feel too skeezy.

Damn, now I'm doing it too. That's the other thing -- my mood in general has improved a lot ever since I stopped being a very active HN user a year and a half or so ago.

Apologies for the snark, but to me, pulling popular comments from certain posters out of context into a feed sort of undermines the point of the forum altogether, which is the conversation as a whole.

I won't push the point though, but when people start treating a site like this as a feed instead of a forum, then I think the quality of the site is diminished.

It doesn't have to be out of context: not all comment threads are equal, and it makes a lot of sense to pull to your feed certain threads based on the aggregate upvote count of all comments in the thread (or just pull the whole thread if it has any highly upvoted comment). That's easily a good way to de-noise any popular thread (which could be a non-productive flame war)

1) That post appears to be factually incorrect, so people downvote it.

2) Did you upvote it? Why not? You've said you think it was unfairly downvoted. A few people have downvotes but everyone with an account can upvote. One or two people downvoted that comment. How many people didn't upvote it?

Two potential effects, one is that as more people reach the cutoff level to down vote they do, and two as people grow the community, opinions about what should merit a down vote evolves.

Some services use up/down votes strictly for 'like it'/'didn't like it' others are more nuanced. Might be nice to add an interstitial for 'new' downvoters to check their understanding of the intent but I don't imagine it will change.

> Some services use up/down votes strictly for 'like it'/'didn't like it'

Yeah, this is what I really hope HN can avoid, which is why I brought the topic up. Such a trend can only lead to an echo chamber effect and a community that refuses to be challenged.

There are healthy ways the HN community can be challenged. Given that it is a community rather than an individual the domain of challenges are those appropriate for communities in general and the unique aspects of HN in particular. What is and isn't appropriate is a variation of HN's community sentiment toward political topics.

Some opinions are meant to foster discussion. Others are meant to invite disagreement or structured with a disregard for that potential. Cargo culting is less if an issue than trolling behavior, in my opinion, and the diversity of ideas I see on HN has increased from the days when mentioning Microsoft in a positive light or Apple in a negative one invited downvotes to grey.

I've taken to mostly using my upvote as a means of reverting other peoples bad downvotes. I think they should just take downvoting away entirely.

My impression is there's a lot more moderation going on.

I've noticed a shift to where people downvote if they don't agree with a comment instead of using at it was intended to downvote bad comments.

I wonder if comment downvoting needs further restrictions; I'm tired of having to make "I don't know why parent is getting downvoted" type comments to get people to reconsider downvoting.

> I've noticed a shift to where people downvote if they don't agree with a comment instead of using at it was intended to downvote bad comments.

It's not a shift. It was accepted practice for a thousand days before you had this account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

And it's still a practice with rather disturbing implications, seeing as how downvoting causes a comment to fade further and further; it implies that dissenting comments (regardless of their validity) are worthy of being silenced.

I don't believe that "downvote to disagree" is compatible with "encouraging intellectual diversity". I tend to only do it when disagrees particularly poorly, eg bad evidence or reasoning, or is being a jerk. But I definitely have noticed more downvoting in the last couple months, of myself and others where it didn't feel like the downvoters were interested in suffering the existence of disagreement.

Yep. I down vote instead of "wrestling a pig in a mudpit." This thread is a perfect example. I'm not going to convince anyone who is complaining about downvoting in disagreement that downvoting for disagreement is good because they are complaining about rather than enquiring into the use of downvotes.

Stick around long enough and you realize it all evens out over time, wrong upvotes balance wrong downvotes...or in some sorts of threads overwhelm them...and the way to avoid diwnvotes is to write better comments. Accusing 'other people' of bad behavior is a lazy injustice.

Limited numbers of people have the ability to downvote. Everyone with an account has the ability to upvote.

When you see a comment that has a single downvote for disagreement you're also seeing a comment that has several thousand logged-in views that didn't want to supply a corrective upvote.

Perhaps they just don't agree with it?

I'm not complaining about the concept of downvoting. My only concern is with the implementation, and the implication that dissent is a bad thing worthy of suppression. A better approach would be to provide a visual indicator of controversy that doesn't make the comment in question more difficult to read (perhaps some smiley/frowney face below the voting buttons or some other graphical indicator?).

You can find plenty of examples in a lot of the more heated/busy HN discussions. I'm too lazy to dig up more examples, but they're pretty common (especially once politics comes into play; I've noticed a bit of a left-wing bent on HN over the last couple of years (which isn't much of a surprise considering how much of an influence Bay-Area/"Valley" culture has on HN)).

By using the downvote button as a disagreement button, and by observing that using said downvote button causes the comment's text to fade further and further from black to grey to white, it can be observed that any case of disagreement expressed via the downvote button results in supression of the comment's content (by making it harder to read).

I asked for an example because the majority of comments I see that are heavily downvoted are probably downvoted for something other than disagreement.

So, do you have any examples of comments that were downvoted for disagreement? Especially if they were heavily downvoted?

To be fair, that's an opinion stated by pg, not necessarily a statement of site policy. The opinion of the site's administrator and creator matters, but it isn't incontrovertible.

Yes. My main point was that "downvote to disagree" has been around for a long time. If anything, complaining about downvote to disagree is new.

I seem to remember that the complaints have been around as long as I can remember. What's new is how popular they are.

Fully agree with this. I've responded and disagreed with a number of active discussions, all backed up with data or sound reasoning & eloquently written only to find that my responses were downvoted.

I was always of the understanding that down voting was to discourage things that were against HN policy, comments that lacked content, etc.

Unfortunately, pg said downvoting for disagreement is perfectly acceptable, so it's probably not going away.

However, complaining about being downvoted is against the rules, so you're just expected to swallow it.

If you're using Firefox and are a bit tired of unpopular comments being blotted out to spare you the indigity of reading them, here is a small userscript that fixes this "feature."

https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/5b5e413220afb93c9c93

> Unfortunately, pg said downvoting for disagreement is perfectly acceptable, so it's probably not going away

Even Homer nods. Pg blew that one. He said:

   I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement.
   Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it
   seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

If the down arrows merely did the opposite of the up arrows on comments, and so moved the comment farther down the page, then he'd have a good point. However, as soon as a comment goes non-positive (which will happen if the very first person to vote on it votes down), the color is changed to make it harder to read, and the more it goes down, the harder it gets to read.

If down votes are used for mere expression of disagreement, this means that if a topic is at all controversial it only takes a bit of bad luck to have your comment seen first by a few people who disagree, and then it is so sunk that people can't read it, and the people who would have up voted and brought it back to visibility never see it.

When I read HN on mobile, sometimes I cannot follow the conversation on controversial but interesting topics because so many of the comments are greyed out. When I get back to my desktop (where I override the HN stylesheet to mark those comments in a different way that doesn't make them hard to read), I invariably find that a large fraction of the greyed out comments were well written and valuable contributions to the discussion.

Because of that, several times I've refrained from participating in threads that I thought were going to be controversial.

Downvotes are overloaded. Disagreement is just one of their modes. The overall purpose is to keep HN from being worse. It's an editorial tool for strategic protection of the commons not absolute valuation of each comment.

>Several times I've refrained from participating in threads that I thought were going to be controversial.

I kind of suspect that's the intended effect.

Maybe if people were given a set amount of downvotes they could use per day it might make them think more before using them? And maybe they could "earn" more downvote power by receiving upvotes, this could create incentive for downvoters to reply to the people they're downvoting in an attempt to get upvotes to use for further downvoting.