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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'm opposed to hiding scores.
Rather than rehashing arguments on either side, I'd like to ask, how will the decision over whether to keep this change be made?
I've previously registered a prediction that hiding scores will ultimately reduce quantifiable site engagement without a commensurate rise in quality (whatever the consensus definition for quality may be). 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. There is already too much information online to treat every post as equal under some kind of egalitarian guise. Hiding votes permanently also makes the entire system less robust--what's to stop trolls from posting GPT created content that barely does not explicitly break rules but still waste readers' time?
Does the site admin have access to data that might inform a good decision other than gauging the sentiments of a dozen people who reply to this parent comment, and, ironically perhaps, the upvote/downvote ratios of the dozen replies?
We do have data about comments per day etc. See www.themotte.org/stats, www.themotte.org/daily_chart, and www.themotte.org/weekly_chart.
Actually the daily and weekly charts aren't working right now for some reason but they normally do.
Daily chart and Weekly chart are throwing 500 errors at me, but I hadn't seen the stats page yet. Thanks for linking it.
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