Why do any votes need 'accountability'? Their purpose is to identify comments worth reading. Almost everything people write about voting itself is not worth reading and the less of it, the better.
Worth reading is very subjective. I think you are looking at popular opinions. The current system works that way as opposed to some randomized insertion in between. One often problem with popular opinion is that readers might jump on that trail and build a deep thread, which probably reduce the incentive to read any further by either skipping the middle to the end, ir simply ignore the rest.
Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).
The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.
My intention is to ensure contributing to publicly censoring/censuring costs something (intentionally tiny, but greater than zero/nothing) each time, beyond the one-time minimum karma requirement. "Downvote to disagree" seems unlikely to scale indefinitely, particularly as mobile means less willingness to contribute beyond clicking up/down (specifically now that there are apps catching on that remove all "fat-fingered web UI" friction!).
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
I know it's perfectly fine, I'm trying to follow this (very common) line of thought and adherents never seem to explain it in a way I can understand.
For one thing you're not really 'censoring' anything but even if we say, for the sake of argument, that you are why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote? The mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation is also quite compelling. What's the counter to that other than stuff that mostly seems to boil down to some version of 'getting downvotes kind of feels bad' (of which calling downvotes 'censoring' seems like a particularly overwrought variant).
Thanks for taking the time to bring up these counterpoints!
>why should it have some cost different than the cost of 'promoting' something when you upvote
If this is a blocker, show both! My recommendation to add the tiniest bit of friction only to the anonymous negative was an attempt to reflect existing site guidelines. My apologies if terminology is a distraction; I did add "censuring" as a better word.
>mods' argument that meta is bad for actual conversation
Up/down votes are currently only public on the receiver's side, and this meta gamification powers HN. Would revealing the other side of the equation deter abuse of anonymous control (with an acceptable level of side effects)? All I can answer for sure is that intervention for downvote abuse (if any) is behind-the-scenes for now.
[I assume] the pool of eligible downvoters continues to grow; maybe when the time comes the next step will be another moderator rather than crowdsourcing -- the precedent of hiding individual comment scores seems relevant.
