Back when we had scores shown most people would seem to vote towards their ideal score for that post -- that was the consensus in voting discussions I was party to (IIRC). I'd vote down highly voted comments that I agreed with because the comment wasn't that good; also upvote any comment that was negative that seemed to have value.
But then I learnt pg said basically 'downvote if you disagree', which IMO makes the site much worse. Also then votes were hidden and so I spend most votes on things I disagree with because they made a good point and I believe others should at least be able to see the text of the comment.
I also dislike hidden censorship, hidden rules, and hidden moderators/moderation (eg covert post promotion for Ycombinator companies).
> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.
> 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.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
> [...] Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
"pg" is still making statements, e.g., in this thread, as "pvg".
What was the motivation for hiding scores? Was it to prevent exactly what you describe? (i.e. downvoting based on view that a comment received "too many" upvotes)
What happened to polls; HN used to have them. Wouldnt they accomplish the desired behaviour? (i.e. measurement of disagreement)
But then I learnt pg said basically 'downvote if you disagree', which IMO makes the site much worse. Also then votes were hidden and so I spend most votes on things I disagree with because they made a good point and I believe others should at least be able to see the text of the comment.
I also dislike hidden censorship, hidden rules, and hidden moderators/moderation (eg covert post promotion for Ycombinator companies).