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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 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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