> Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.
Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.
Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.
"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."
Downvotes are, of course, especially appropriate when a comment is BOTH uninformative in the context of the discussion and uncivil besides. I'm happy to upvote comments I disagree with (as a factual matter) if those comments prompt me to think about an issue I haven't thought about before, or if the comment contributes to the discussion being more nuanced in other ways. But there appears STILL to be no general rule in the Hacker News Guidelines[1] prohibiting downvoting to express disagreement. Submissions of course cannot be downvoted by anyone (they can be flagged) and no submitter or commenter can downvote child comments to what they have just posted. It's the overall sense of onlookers that determines net karma of a comment.
Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.
Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.