Calm down man, nobody's breaking anything. Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion. You can express your thinking on the matter by up/down voting. Relax :)
Heh - maybe you're right, and I wish the world were as you describe. :-)
There is however a deeper underlying issue; decorum is important and communities that exhibit genuine 'niceness' are nice. Communities that allow, or worse, overlook dark behaviour degenerate.
Flagging and down voting is one part of the solution, but when the nastiness reaches a level that the nice people start to disengage and go elsewhere, it's clear to me that we need another element of control. Perhaps algorithmically detecting repeat offenders? Perhaps more granularity with down votes?
There's are differences between a down vote because one disagrees with the author, and a down vote because one believes the author is ill-informed and spreading misinformation, and a down vote because the author is being downright juvenile.
A number of hits on the third case against a given author on multiple comments could conceivably constitute an automatic warning and / or banning system.
I don't want people to be unable to express their views, but when the mean-spirited people who contribute nothing but nonsense start to represent a large percentage of a community, it's reasonable to see if anything can be done.
> There's are differences between a down vote because one disagrees with the author, and a down vote because one believes the author is ill-informed and spreading misinformation, and a down vote because the author is being downright juvenile.
The difference is that the first two should not be voted down. If you vote down, you should not comment. If you comment, it means at the very least the comment added to the conversation, unless your comment is also not worth posting and you should be voted down as well.
It's fairly simple: does the comment bring value to the conversation? If it does so directly, vote up. If only indirectly, than don't. If it does not, vote down.
Whether you disagree or not is irrelevant. And someone being ill-informed should be corrected. At the very least, by writing an incorrect comment, they are presenting an opportunity to be corrected.
> I don't want people to be unable to express their views, but when the mean-spirited people who contribute nothing but nonsense start to represent a large percentage of a community, it's reasonable to see if anything can be done.
Things can already be done. Vote down and don't reply. That is the best way. Vote down and ignore.
Perhaps the should split the upvote/downvote buttons into those 3 categories? I know the downvoting because of disagreement is a really really annoying state of affairs, particularly when they don't tell you WHY they disagree but instead just downvote you.
I would down vote much more often if it weren't so ambiguous. If I had more options. Sometimes I want to down vote just 0.1, just to say Walter, you're not wrong: you're just an asshole.
I also think pointed, honest replies like yours above go a long way. The best way to get people to assume good faith is to show it. (Reyk's Second Law)
Are you aware that people like you are destroying something that was once brilliant?
HN is going through an Eternal September.