It's a bit startling to read an acknowledgement that up/down voting conflates disagreement with lack of value, and that this effect is undesirable. Debate over this point continues to bubble up every once in a while on HN, with some commenters pointing to pg's casual statement from some time ago that he was okay with a downvote meaning "I disagree."
Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees?
If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.
Suppose my click on the down arrow expresses the thought "you're wrong, fuck you". HN is better off when that's the end of it...whatever it was and regardless of if it was in the comment or in me or in both.
Oh dear. Nothing that I said was meant to express any policy about downvoting and certainly not any change in policy about downvoting. It's just a separate topic.
I didn't interpret it that way, and I apologize if it seemed that I did.
I was actually hoping for some read on the two questions I gave because I believe these are important issues, and your comment prompted an opportunity to raise them.
Please, no need to apologize. People have really strong opinions about this, as I'm sure you know, and I'm not sure yet how to comment on it in a helpful way.
Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees?
If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.