Why is it even possible to downvote a comment on HN without elaborating?

People can already comment if they want to explain their reasoning. A forced comment would more likely lead to a flood of repetitive explanations, and in general probably to many low-quality excuses. Because let's be honest, many downvotes are probably not for some high level justifiable reason. At the end, most attendees here are likely just normal humans with normal human flaws and showing the usual social friction. Forcing people to explain themselves, would just open Pandora's box and brewing bad blood.

The biggest problem is that HN would turn into a discussion about downvoting, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

There are a plethora of bad comments on this site. Downvoting them so they fall to the bottom, without commentary, is how the higher quality discussion stays on top. Adding in commentary would turn the whole site into a meta-discussion about content moderation, which is not the goal of HN.

I could see an alternate solution to the problem, though - a private poll of why the comment was downvoted, visible only to the person who wrote the comment, so they can better understand why their comment was not desired by the community.

How about a down vote reducing the voters karma too? Personally I downvote when I think either the point has already been made, or the comment is too awful to warrant my deathless prose.

I tend to downvote things it would be a waste of my time replying too. Having to justify the reason for a downvote would result in two things for me: no engagement with the thread or a simple one liner like "downvote because your comment is stupid". I prefer a downvote and move on.

I would definitely like the ability to downvote replies to your posts though, for the same reasons detailed above.

Maybe you should care less about what others think about what you have to say. And also notice that what you say isn't that important that someone needs to explain to you that they don't agree.

When someone's wrong it's not always in the content of their comment. Often they're missing context, don't have the whole picture and have made an excellent comment for the wrong point.

It takes a lot of time to turn that kind of comment train around.

The language and culture barrier on the internet does not help.

Downvotes are a blunt tool, they are the best we have for limiting exponential growth where otherwise one must justify more and more logic to counter a runaway train.

This a devils advocate response.

I remember asking this of r/programming (Reddit). Most people there didn’t want it because either they were cowardly or couldn’t find the words to formulate a legible comment.

Also, it’s kinder to be downvoted than flagged. Being flagged to death for mere disagreement is rare but if passions are high enough it does happen. I remember this specifically for comments in threads about Julian Assange that didn’t praise or defend him as a saint.

A while ago, I proposed that each downvote should be tied to a comment, such that a downvote cannot be submitted without an accompanying comment. The impact of that downvote is then weighted by its accompanying comment. If that comment is itself low quality, the impact of the downvote associated with it is either diminished or nullified.

If someone votes a personal prejudice or vested interest, any mandatory rationale provided would be pretextual. It would be great if downvotes were all well-motivated and accompanied by constructive critique, but it just ain't so. C.f. the Reviewer #2 problem in peer review.

Alternate scenario: Someone writes a comment that is mean-spirited and content-free. Do I have to explain why to be able to downvote it? Do we really need five replies explaining that the person is being a jerk? And then replies to those comments arguing that no, the person isn't really being a jerk, it's satire or appropriate criticism or meta or whatever, and that the downvoter is being overly sensitive, and maybe even downvoting the downvoter?

That's a terrible conversation, and it buries the real conversation. We don't want that.

A simpler solution would be to eliminate the downvote entirely. As the poster points out, it doesn't add much to the site. Mathematically, it just increases the contrast between favored and disfavored posts---the same thing could be done algorithmically, based on the rate of upvoting. It would also be helpful to randomize the order of comments for the user, with a strong random influence early in the thread that is reduced as the number of comments and upvotes increases. This would reduce the rich-get-richer effect, which might be amplified if the downvote is removed.

I agree and have asked for this change a few times.

Why not justify an upvote?