- Trolling (examples: "you're clearly a mac fanboy", "you want fries with that?")

- Be trite or redundant (examples: "lol", "i agree", "+1 interesting", "upmod parent")

- Personal attacks (examples: "I bet if you were him you'd say 'go away customer, I only write my software in Rails/LISP/Haskell'")

- Poor attitude (examples: "shut the f*ck up", "that's dumb")

- Being incoherent, in jest or in seriousness (examples: "mahler called, he wants his symphony back")

- Rambling on without saying anything (examples: "then i went to see my dentist, but that's a whole another story...")

- And, last but not least, disagreement. Theoretically, you will not be downmodded for saying something disagreeable. In practice, however, downmodding on disagreement does happen. Some misuse is to be expected, and all we can do is live with that.

Not necessarily. Sometimes downmods are because while the post is good, it's not 100-points-good. And of course, I'm sure everyone has downmodded a comment because you disagreed, not because the comment was bad. (The lack of a downmod button on replies is a great idea. I am always in the habit of dowmodding disagreeing responses on reddit. Just because I can.)

Modding should only be used to improve a discussion, and in a discussion it is very common that people have different ideas. So when you downmod a comment, you are actually trying to remove it from the discussion and therefore damaging the discussion.

Only downmod comments that hurts the discussion

That is to say, +1, lol, I agree, and upmod parent ;)

Brilliant, sir.

I think a lot of people go beyond that--I haven't paid much attention here, but I know on reddit people will downmod anything they don't agree with like crazy.

[edit] just saw that someone else wrote the exact same thing; my bad.

As the community grows, however, reaching that low threshold may become easier and easier, so people less involved in the community suddenly get the same power before they know how to properly use it.

To fix this, the threshold should grow with the size of the community. For instance, instead of a static "50-100" points threshold, maybe it should be a dynamic question, such as, "is his karma in the top 70% of the population?"

Personally I think everyone should be required if they're going to downmod to at least give a reason why. Press the down button, a small, unobtrusive text area comes up and (perhaps a bare minimum of 140 chars just to keep it simple) the user explains why they think the comment doesn't hold it's worth.

It feels almost like something personal when someone just votes you down and doesn't help you understand their viewpoint, or share what they think about the matter. Almost

Great submission. +1

I personally don't mind it, and think it's nice (it certainly feels nice when things like that happen to me), but I can see how someone would not want to see it in the discussion thread they're reading.

"Yes, good job. Enough people have made it clear that the community is happy for this person, yet more people keep doing it"

I would think that as a general rule (especially in congratulatory posts), the upmods from the community would outweigh the downmods.

If some aspect of being a community (at least in your conception of it) hinders the exchange of interesting information, then maybe it's not worth having.

First, how do you distinguish the first "Congratulations" from the redundant 14th one? If you downmod everyone then you're penalizing some innocents.

Second, if so many people do the same thing consistently and you're about the only one who seems annoyed by that behavior maybe you should reconsider your reaction? Maybe it was a more "light-earthed" thread so people were less strict about redundance.

Second, if so many people do the same thing consistently and you're about the only one who seems annoyed by that behavior maybe you should reconsider your reaction? Maybe it was a more "light-earthed" thread so people were less strict about redundance.

Another commenter has mentioned doing the same thing in the same thread.

edit: You mean the flagging option? That's for dead obvious spam and trolling I think...

1. Threads about moderation tend to be really boring. People discussing things on a forum can be interesting, whereas people discussing the forum on which they're discussing the forum tends to get pretty old pretty quick. If every downmod is followed by a thread about why it got downmodded, including the occasional "oh come now it wasn't that bad" type comment, signal-to-noise will drop considerably, and signal-to-noise is the exact thing which the whole moderation system supposedly exists to increase.

2. Usually when I see a downmodded comment it's pretty obvious why it's been downmodded. Occasionally a worthwhile comment will reach 0 due to the action of one person (in which case, life's tough, suck it up) but severely-downmodded comments always seem to be either belligerent or content-free.

3. Doing so would, as someone else said, discourage downmodding. But rampant downmodding isn't a severe problem at present, and a lack of downmodding potentially could be.

It would be helpful to know why people mod us down, but it might just make people bitter.

In a democracy, not everyone is going to see things in the same light. That's just something that we all have to deal with and move on.

I already explain (usually) but then again, I rarely down-mod. I quite honestly don't see the point in down-modding if you're not going to take the time to organize your thoughts to write a sentence or two. It's just the decent thing to do.

Also, reflecting on ones' comment usually leads to irrelevant commentary (like comments I come across with 10 points and an edit asking why they were getting downmodded). I mean... anybody could be voting on your comments.

I'd almost (but not quite) prefer it there was no visible point count and votes just factored into the sorting of comments on the server.

I actually thing that this is a fantastic idea because it would reduce the amount of "bandwagon voting" that sometimes seems to go on. When you see a comment with 40+ points, there's this strange compulsion to just chip in another. I guess its "back the winner syndrome" or something.

I guess I feel like I only comment if I have something constructive to say. So that little bit of feedback about why it wasn't useful would be nice for me. I don't mind if no-one else has to see it.

It would look far less minimalist than the up/down arrows, which for many would be a downside.

Over on reddit, I downmod people pretty arbitrarily. Sometimes I like to push a post at 0 to -1 and watch it get sucked down to -20 by the groupthink. Other times, I disagree and don't feel like typing a response. Sometimes I just don't like the guy's username. Basically, I downmod just because I can, which doesn't make for a very good community. (I don't bother doing that here because it's not as amusing. Usually downmodded posts that are good get upmodded, unlike on reddit.)

Anyway, making it harder to downmod someone would be a good idea. It would make a punishing action "harder" on the downmodder, so people would only bother to downmod if they had a good reason. It would reserve downmods for spamming, not disagreeing.

I think.

Some people can't handle criticism, and there's no need to allow them to turn comments into their own personal griefing grounds.

I'd be interested in the modeling of alternative karma economies like this.

No, it would make the transaction too time consuming.

Cheers