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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.
Re: up/down votes, I've seen downvotes for some comments I made and I've managed to sit on my vindictiveness to immediately go downvote the downvoters, but that's only because Scott beat niceness into me over on SSC and ACX.
I am certainly petty, spiteful, and vindictive enough to abuse up/downvoting for partisan purposes - "this guy is One Of Us, I must support him"/"oh you downvoted me, you son of a gun, see how you like it when I spam you with downvotes!"
That's why I don't like up/down voting systems or likes or anything of that nature, because whatever the good intentions, they invariably turn into popularity contests. For every "take this upvote for a good, informative, well-argued comment" vote, there will be fifty "I'm voting for you because the other guy disagreed with you and the other guy is my outgroup" votes.
Slashdot's voting system generally solves this problem, which is understandable given it was designed in the late 90s; you have a limited number of adjectives with which to flavor feedback (which can be used either positively or negatively), post voting is capped at 5 points, and users chosen at random only have 5 votes to bestow.
Importantly, there's no button that directly maps to "you're wrong/I don't like your argument/fuck you(r account's posting history)"- the only way to do that is to make a counterargument- and if you really feel the need to downvote something, and you have the random power to do so, you're burning an uncommon resource to do it.
It doesn't fully eliminate low-effort sniping (but even removing votes entirely doesn't do that; Tumblr and Twitter arguably have it as a design goal... as does 4chan, in its own way), but that's the cost of being able to distill community sentiment into a simple number-adjective pair (to help outside observers pick up the high points of the conversation and to be able to digest it quickly through auto-hiding the less well-rated posts).
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