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It looks like a developer finally got around to hiding scores for 24 hours on this site (Thanks, FatherInire). I'm curious if people thought that the scores being shown immediately changed how they interacted with or saw the forum. For me it made things feel a lot more confrontational and higher-stakes, I'm glad we're hiding scores again. Immediately visible scores encourages dog-piling and "ratio-ing" in my opinion which goes against the goal of this forum.
I don't know. Concretely against your points, I don't see how ratioing, which I would've thought of as a downvote substitute for forums that only have upvote equivalents, is relevant in our setting, and vote-based dogpiling in the CW thread would also require people to explicitly have a thought process like "this comment is already very low, I want to make it lower", which would surprise me especially in our contrarian setting.
Concretely, for me, I just scrolled through the thread a bit and found that the hiding of vote counts changed my interaction for the worse. I've been concerned by the optics and implicit consensus building by [outgroup I perceive as being overwhelmingly represented]'s propensity to use downvotes as a disagree button, resulting in posts that are perfectly fine contributions to the discussion but insult their sensibilities or aesthetic preferences sitting in the negative numbers, for a while now. To correct what seemed to me as a misvaluation of posts, I'd upvote posts that were _under_valued and downvote posts that were _over_valued for what in many cases would just be the actions of [outgroup]; if a post were already sitting at its proper score, I'd do nothing. (I often enough do actually withdraw my vote if I come back to a part of the thread later and see that the tides have turned and a post I upvoted is now overvalued.) Now that I have to vote blind, all I can do is instead guess if this is the sort of post that made [outgroup] seethe or rejoice resulting in votes over- or undervaluing it; the urge then is to vote based on this guess, which for all means and purposes would just turn me into [outgroup]'s toxoplasmotic mirror image. (Whenever they feel strongly about a topic, they vote based on agreement; whenever I expect they feel strongly about a topic, I vote based on my expectation of their disagreement.)
But see, that's the popularity contest element! You're not upvoting because "I think this is a good comment", you're upvoting because "Uh-oh, the other lot downvoted it, I need to restore balance".
No, you don't need to do this. What you need to do is write a comment about "hey, stop dogpiling this guy for partisan reasons".
And what is the proper score? You think it should be A positive to B negative, someone else thinks it is right as it is, another person thinks it is too positive. Nobody made you the arbiter of what is and is not the 'correct' proportion of upvotes or downvotes, and that kind of well-intentioned meddling just results in people cross-voting to settle what they view as 'unbalanced' voting, so we don't actually in the end have "this is good/this is bad" results on comments so we can judge what are and are not within the spirit of this site when it comes to 'tough but fair' argument, we have "I upvoted/downvoted for political reasons".
I would prefer to do away with voting altogether, since this kind of "I must carefully comb through the thread and make sure to upvote X and downvote Y" activity is breaking the entire system.
I tend to give out upvote subsidies when there are visible scores to try to preserve a friendly atmosphere here. I don't believe that anyone engaging politely according to the rules should get a scarlet letter fixed to their post saying "We all hate you. We think your ideas are stupid". I'll do this even when the comment isn't particularly logical or insightful.
IMO a large part of the reason social media platforms outmoded message boards is that they provided lurkers and semi-lurkers a "no effort" way of showing content creators that people were seeing and appreciating them. There are obvious downsides but messing with the DNA is dangerous.
And that is what causes a problem for me; we have vpn upthread saying "I know I will be less keen to read content here if I cannot selectively consume higher-quality (per upvotes) content and skip over the lower-quality ones". If he and others are using upvotes as a marker for "this is good content", then your upvoting for "let's be nice, even if the comment is bad" ruins the measurement. Now he is reading bad content that got upvoted and is scoring highly, and what conclusion can he draw from that other than "this place has gone to the dogs if bad content like this is getting upvoted" and then leave?
You're trying to be nice. I don't think niceness per se is the function of this place; no, we should not be abusive assholes, but the idea is to have good content that provokes debate, is informative, and backed up by some kind of argument. An upvoted series of "you're great" "no, you're great" for whatever side - conservative, progressive, right-wing, left-wing, up or down or side-to-side - is going to be rubbish.
Be nice - but if the person's comment is poor, then we should be able to respond as to why it's poor. Refraining because it's shooting fish in a barrel is the better way to deal with really bad content where the person is not being provocative for the sake of it. But refraining because 'this is outgroup bait', or even worse, upvoting as a pat on the head is the equivalent of "here's a gold star for little Timmy because he's so special (in the special needs sense) and won't get anything on merit, so let's patronise him".
I feel you've missed my point. I'm taking -5 posts up to -4. These posts are no worse than right-wing comments that are scored +10. In fact, the downvoted posts may be better, and I only think they're illogical or uninsightful because of my bias.
No one is bringing a bad post up to +50 as a participation trophy. My intent is only to balance out the obvious bias of our electorate.
VPN wants quality, and quality will go away in proportion to this forum becoming a pure right-wing crank self-congratulation society.
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Did you leave out a word or two here? I'm not sure how message boards provided lurkers a way of showing that they liked a certain post. You're referring to traditional linear forums, right? Some of them provide an upvote feature or even upvote/downvote, but many don't.
One word:
So the verb "provided" corresponds to "social media platforms", not "message boards". The meaning is backwards from what you thought I was so saying. Reddit and Twitter provide an easy engagement buttons for lurkers. Old forums did not.
Some forums have added upvotes nowadays, yes. Around the time Digg and then Reddit were on the rise, though, phpBB forums usually had nothing. Some had a karma system where you left messages for other users, but critically, these features were karma-gated. So lurkers could not "commend" or "upkarma" a post they found interesting. This was supposed to encourage quality participation. In practice, content creators would get less reaction for their effort. You could post on a social media platform and see the number +30 next to your comment, or on a forum and get no reaction.
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I'm guilty of voting to restore balance, but let me explain:
I think the voting ethics ought to be something like the original reddiquette. If a comment adds to the discussion - if it expresses something relevant clearly, even if you disagree - then you should upvote. If you can't bring yourself to do that, then at the very least, you should not downvote. In a well-behaved forum, the score of an unpopular, but valid comment should never fall below 1.
On this site (but not on Reddit for some reason) I noticed posters who play devils advocate, or disagree with the majority were regularly be downvoted below 0. Examples: ( 1 2 3, all negative at time of linking ). This is bad. These might not be quality contribution material, but they're fair comments and shouldn't be downvoted. To quote the rationalist maxim, "Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever". I see a lot of bullet holes here. I do my part to patch them up as best I can.
Okay, that's a reasonable reason for upvoting for balance. But the important thing is that the comment needs to be of some quality; popocatapetl's "I'll upvote even bad content just to be nice" is what causes real damage, because if we're using "upvotes = good", then upvotes on poor content just for the sake of 'niceness' skew that measurement.
I really dislike the upvote/downvote or likes or other methods, because I've seen people degenerate into chasing upvotes or likes or reblogs, and get very distraught about "I left a post or comment and nobody responded to it, why aren't my reblogs/likes going up? Does this mean I should stop writing completely?" The danger is when people do invest their sense of "I'm doing something right" into "but I only know that by how many upvotes I get".
Feck the begrudgers. If they downvote you, let them! That never stopped me, it shouldn't stop you!
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Right, same issue. I am an egalitarian voter when scores are visible. Too high a vote and, so long as the post, while net improving the forum, has any noticeable flaw – I won't add to it. Too low a vote – and I'll prefer to avoid participating in the dogpile. And of course if my opponent gets to zero while not being utterly insane, I upvote him to encourage engagement.
When scores are not visible, well... gotta vote on the merits. But perhaps it makes for a worse environment in the long run.
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I don't see how "popularity contest" is the right framing for this. I'd have thought that usually people say that a venue "devolves into a popularity contest" if people participating in it are largely motivated by maximising their popularity with some subset or all participants. Unless you think that "people think your posts are good" is an instance of "popularity", in which case anything that has upvotes and downvotes at all is a popularity contest, I don't see what voting on posts with the objective of moving them closer to what I perceive as the correct score has to do with this.
Do you actually think that a practice of making those comments, rather than voting, would make the discussion better? Any meta post like that takes up space that could be taken by posts talking about the substance instead. I think certain subreddits generally not renowned for good discourse are actually renowned for having a high percentage of posts basically like that, wher chains start with "I'm gonna get downvoted for this" and continue with "outgroup bots are sure are in force today".
So? I get one vote. I'm going to use it to shift the score in the direction I think it should be shifted in. The others are free to do the same.
Whoever designed the upvote/downvote system did make me an arbiter of one vote's worth of the aggregate position... you can argue for or against that design, which is in fact what I believe we were doing in this subthread. It seems to me that what you are doing is simply asserting a counterfactual in strong terms.
At least I (n=1) also want to cross-vote to settle what I view as unbalanced voting. If enough others also feel that way (which I think is the case), then the cross-voting will happen regardless of the well-intentioned meddling, and therefore you couldn't say that well-intentioned meddling results in cross-voting.
Well, my point is that we already don't have those results! I don't have time to litigate this in detail at the moment, but even years ago back on Reddit I could have produced endless examples of posts whose rating was clearly based on agreement rather than quality. This generally isn't the case for posts that are comfortably near the center of the community Overton window, but those are the posts that are usually the least interesting.
I don't see how telling someone off for voting opposite to what they believe to be the prevailing bias will do against this problem, unless you also argue convincingly that their perception of the prevailing bias is wrong (which you aren't doing). Already back then, I'd argue that the way to solve the problem is to make votes public, as in show a list of who exactly up- and downvoted a given post. Make people accountable for upvoting those one-liner quips about how quokkas are in denial but really [outgroup] just wants to eat babies, or downvoting effortposts that present a surprising argument that implies [ingroup] may have been wrong.
Are you voting to shift the score because:
(1) This is actually good/bad content
(2) This guy is One Of Us/One Of Them
(3) Oh no, people are being mean, let me swoop in and act Lady Bountiful/The Saviour
(4) I have my own notion of what constitutes 'balance' and so if I think this is an unbalanced vote, I'll upvote/downvote to swing it, regardless of whether the content really is good/bad
Again, my objections are based on if upvotes are being used to measure quality, then they should only be used for quality, not rebalancing or being nice or "I think too many people dislike/like this" or any other reason.
I don't want somebody 'rebalancing' a vote I gave as criticism/approval just because they have a different notion of what should or should not be considered acceptable. And that seems to be where the upvoting/downvoting is drifting away from "this is quality content" to other reasons, which is why I'd be just as happy to have it permanently scrapped. I don't count up or down votes that I get. I certainly don't look at the upvote/downvote score when I'm reading other comments and deciding if I like or dislike the content based on that, as distinct from "what is the body of the piece?"
As to "prevailing bias", that's a subjective measure. I have a pro-life bias, but even if I vehemently disagree with posts about abortion, I don't go around "This site has a pro-baby killing bias, I must redress that by downvoting every pro-abortion comment. And then find other comments by the person who posted a pro-abortion comment, and downvote those, in order to defeat the prevailing pro-baby killing bias on here!"
Somebody else might genuinely consider "For some unknown reason this place permits unreasonable bias against the perfectly moderate notion that twelve year olds should have the right to be employed in brothels providing full service for clients, I must therefore vote opposite to what I believe is the prevailing bias". That is not voting on "is the argument advanced about why twelve year olds should not be legally permitted to be whores a good argument", that is voting in favour of one's own bias.
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