I strongly dislike the downvote mechanism, it teaches laziness and limits/prevents learning.

I'm copy/pasting a comment dang made not so long ago, followed by my reply:

dang's comment:
"Yes, I'm a moderator here. Sorry about all those scoldings and chidings. I know they're annoying, and if it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than to read [1]. But unfortunately the system can't regulate itself without feedback from some dedicated component—this is very clear. If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2].
It's interesting to ask why. I thought about that for years and I think I found an answer. It's because although the community has many smart and well-intentioned people, each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN (at least I hope they are). Some critical functions, like optimizing the site globally rather than just reacting to specific stories or comments, require someone whose job it is to give full attention to HN [3]. It's not that we're better—except in the sense that one gets better at anything with practice—it's that we play the role of looking out for the community as a whole.

Actually the system has three components: community and moderators, but also software. That's interesting too, because it has always been a property of HN that the core moderators were also the programmers. We rely heavily on software to help manage the portions of the problem that can be handled that way, with the intention of freeing more of our attention for the optimization problem. It only works up to a point, but without it we'd be doomed.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:da...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dan...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209"

My reply:

'Re: "... each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN"

Yet even based on this "you" think downvotes are a good idea to keep them, compounding the issue of partial attention with laziness by allowing a single click for a dopamine hit to satisfy someone's half-or-less attention interpretation of something - not required to spend the mental effort to actually qualitatively reply (that you/HN are seeming to strive for) where they'd be forced to pay more attention or their lack of attention will be exposed for fair ridicule via getting responded to; or the qualitative reply will help educate or cause the author being responded to hopefully learn something (that a downvote won't teach them) even if that is that they weren't clear enough with their writing and it's being misinterpreted. I'd implore you to do a multi-month to year trial of no downvotes on comments - I'm sure it'll piss off those who like to think they're right at half-or-less attention and regularly downvote click for that sweet sweet dopamine - and ironically those who normally downvote may actually comment their grievances/complain that there aren't downvotes.

I'm not trying to pick a fight, though I'm really curious how you see these truths I explained above? Having downvotes seems to support a lower quality, less discussion, and less requirement for attention - which seems contrary to what you seem to be working towards?'

Re: “If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2].”

dang offers no evidence of this, however I imagine anecdotally he sees how many upvotes/downvotes all comments receive. In reality what happens is those the upvoted comments at the top would already be at the top simply with the upvote mechanism - and the "lower quality" comments would move to the bottom anyway.

If indignation truly is a problem - have that as a Flag option. If reviewing that is too much for the paid moderators, then find volunteers who will review and confirm - and then manually suppress anger, hate, and whatever else qualifies. Adding that Flag mechanism in to solve that problem would then undo the pitfalls of having downvotes.

It’s odd too to me that dang/HN or anyone would allow a “mob” of people who you know will upvote angry commentary, meaning they’re reactive emotionally - getting a sweet hit of dopamine to reenforce the crowds anger - and then you’d also allow those same people the power on the other end of the spectrum, for them to unleash that reactiveness to downvote/suppress comments as well.

No downvote option + have a “Flag for indignation” option to then require review by paid or volunteer mods would be a precision weapon compared to crowdsourcing this mob, expecting them to do a rational job of moderation duties. If it ends up being substantial more work that gets created then start asking for monthly contributions to pay to support for more moderators.

Finally, is it really a good idea to allow people to get a reward for downvoting - just like giving the people who heavily upvote indignation a reward? Obviously it’s necessary to keep upvotes - I’ll hope that the precision moderation option I mention above will be implemented instead of downvotes.