Downvotes on Article Comments

[Zkuq]

Barkley said:
If I disagree with a comment I downvote it.

The simple solution is to stop comments becoming invisible, thus opinions aren't censored and the like/dislike for popularity actually works. There's a report button after all.

This here is the solution. Comments that a lot of people disagree with aren't necessarily bad comments, so they shouldn't be hidden! That said, ranking comments lowers just because people disagree with them is bad too. There should really be two separate voting systems to properly solve the problems:

• one for indicating agreement or disagreement
• one for indicating whether a comment is good or bad

Of course even a system like that can be abused, but at least disagreement and bad comments wouldn't automatically get mixed up. But at the very least, the current system shouldn't ever hide comments by default, or prevents answering to downvoted comment threads.