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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.
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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