<story><title>An Update on Hacker News</title><url>http://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-hacker-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>readerrrr</author><text>If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments.&lt;p&gt;But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn&amp;#x27;t the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn&amp;#x27;t agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hackuser</author><text>&amp;gt; downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment&lt;p&gt;I hope downvoting has nothing to do with agreement; I thought it was for comments that aren&amp;#x27;t valuable to the conversation (e.g., not substantive, poorly reasoned, false, or poorly communicated).&lt;p&gt;I want to see many more comments that are valuable and challenge the community (and challenge my thinking too). The groupthink is already well known and if not, will certainly be posted by someone.&lt;p&gt;In practice, I do see downvoting used on comments that are valuable but challenging. It&amp;#x27;s disappointing.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: remove embarrassing typo</text></comment>
<story><title>An Update on Hacker News</title><url>http://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-hacker-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>readerrrr</author><text>If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments.&lt;p&gt;But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn&amp;#x27;t the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn&amp;#x27;t agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SomeCallMeTim</author><text>As far as I can tell, there are no guidelines or FAQs about what downvoting should be &amp;quot;used for&amp;quot; on HN.&lt;p&gt;On Reddit, the Reddiquette [1] standard is that you should only downvote if a comment &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t contribute to the conversation.&lt;/i&gt; I think is is an excellent standard. It&amp;#x27;s been suggested in the past that a similar standard should be present on HN. [2]&lt;p&gt;Considering that flagging is a privilege that can be lost if someone decides that you&amp;#x27;re abusing it, ideally it should be reserved for the egregious cases that are unquestionably bad. Downvoting on HN should be for comments that truly don&amp;#x27;t contribute to the conversation, though the comments in question may not rise to the level of flagging.&lt;p&gt;As an example: Say you have a comment expressing an opinion with no support, no references, and factual errors. Is it &amp;quot;inappropriate&amp;quot;? Arguable. Does it contribute to the conversation? Not in any positive way. I would suggest downvoting that comment would be the right answer, &lt;i&gt;even if you agree with the sentiment&lt;/i&gt;, because it doesn&amp;#x27;t positively contribute to the conversation. But flagging wouldn&amp;#x27;t be appropriate considering the comment is on topic and not spam (which &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; given as criteria in the HN Guidelines).&lt;p&gt;If you encourage downvoting because you disagree with an opinion, then minority opinions get buried. And sometimes it&amp;#x27;s useful to see that an opinion isn&amp;#x27;t unanimous, and that there&amp;#x27;s another side to an argument, even if you disagree.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;reddiquette&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721314&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=721314&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>