Well so he says, but is it useful? When downvoting means two different things, it is hard to discern what is meant. I usually vote with 'helpful'/'I learnt something new' and 'not helpful'/'wasted my time in a mean manner'. I also don't see how one could only want comments one agrees with at the top - you learn less, and there might be less of a discussion. (Maybe I misunderstood pg's intention here?)
One could argue for another voting just for agreement/disagreement that wouldn't impact the positioning and colour of the comments, because seeing HN's opinions is also interesting. It would however add another layer of complexity.
As long as people upvote "I learnt something I agree with," and not "I learnt something I disagree with," the effect is the same, the amplification is just tuned a bit. Having a different standard for upvotes and downvotes doesn't do much. If you get less upvotes, it is effectively as if you got more downvotes.
I found it curious that something is never mentioned in that post. That is, not voting at all.
So yeah, I generally agree with PG in that
> it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement
But he never said to do it in a trigger-happy manner. There can be many other reasons to vote, but when the reasoning is 'agreement/disagreement', voting IMHO should be done when you strongly agree or strongly disagree; this way you allow some "space" in between for freedom of expression.
So my current take on this whole vote up/down to convey agreement/dissagreement discussion would be not voting at all unless you find it pertinent.
Also IMHO, in other types of reasoning one should be a bit faster to downvote, for example 'rudeness', or worse, 'hate messages', for those ones I downvote immediately, or flag and sometimes even educate (if the person seems to be just confused, and I make one attempt only, if the person is not interested in changing their mind, I skip).
Other types of reasoning deserve a different approach, for example; Interesting comments I upvote even if I don't agree. Well redacted but uninteresting comments I leave untouched (I don't vote up nor down).
And there are many other considerations for different scenarios and different types of reasoning, I mostly prefer not to waste time, but I liked this post about kindness and find the topic of community very engaging and relevant to me. Maybe because I'm starting to build a community myself.
I admit that I'm a bit faster to upvote, for anything that deserves positive feedback; attention, approval, agreement, endorsement, celebration, applause, kudos, kindness, etc. And I'm OK with that.
