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The same rhetorical flourishes that would go overlooked on posts in favour of the prevailing view? I don't buy it.
A downvote is not a bullet. It's more like a middle finger, or a scowl, or an eye-roll, but that's enough. It's enough to say "we don't want you here. go away", and that's my point. It's against the spirit of this forum. It is politics and tribalism above the pursuit of truth.
They'd likely be downvoted, just by different people.
All I'm seeing is crying about rhetorically dishing it out but not being willing to take even the most minor pushback.
A lot of the heavily downvoted comments in that thread are not rhetorically spicy. Must I? Fine..
I think the most likely explanation is that our readership is doing opinion war when it comes to an issue they really care about, and that's bad. I picture Motte-Jesus storming this temple, flipping tables screaming "Stop turning my Father's house into an echo chamber!"
What, you think people don't know when they are being sneered at?
I think the most likely explanation is that you're upset that you can't convince anyone at the object level, so you're resorting to shaming over meta-level concerns.
No, and if those posts had been left at +1,0 I would not have said a word.
This is solely about the negative reinforcement on unobjectionable comments that merely have an unpopular opinion. The people who downvote those are doing this forum wrong. I will die on this hill.
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I'm not a fan of the downvote brigade, and I didn't and wouldn't consider any of those downvote worthy, but I don't think they're particularly good comments, either.
(maybe excluding Corvos' last one? It's still an argument-by-definition, but at least it's trying to engage, where aldomilyar's ipse dixiting and wanderer's just kinda making counterfactual claims on pure vibes.)
Do the pro-gun comments in the thread meet your standard?
Like quoting 4-chan to say-but-not-say someone's argument is retarded? +30,-2 btw (charitably, just quoting it because it's the best explanation they could find, but like .. you could see how that would be massively downvoted if it were an anti-gun rant instead)
I'm not a fan of the tone (or, frankly, the length of the quote), but I'd ask that you look closer at the actual content. Compare aldomilyar's "I feel like the benefits I get from general disarmament outweigh the costs I get in the rare situation where I'm being attacked violently and would have had my gun at hand and be able to use it effectively, or I am achieving intense guerilla warfare against state oppressor of my choice." or Wanderer's "The idea that, if UK citizens fought back against the censorship laws, the government could bring lethal force to bear against the unarmed crowd is… I mean, I just don't think it's in the Western European Overton window."
((and those are the charitable ones; please smack me over the head if the most friendly description you can give of one of my posts is "comment raising a line of argument".))
I could debate these things, or challenge their underlying assumptions. But I'm not convinced that there's any level of evidence that would actually make them wrong: no external evidence has to impact someone's feelings at all, or their idea of what the overton window looks like. Some, like whether the various gun rights movements in gun-ban-heavy countries count, are so bizarre a claim as to make it believable someone's already tried that and failed. For all its other flaws, ChickenOverlord's copypasta is very specifically filed with claims that can be destroyed by a single existence proof.
If you want to make the argument that these posts are getting downvoted because of political allegiances, or that similarly vibes-based posts wouldn't get downvoted as hard, yeah, probably. But there's separate from whether these posts are good.
Yes, that is the argument. Downvoting on political allegiance is corrosive to this site. I don't want to litigate the specific value of each example. You can find something in each to downvote on, I'm sure. God forbid someone have a little fun with a turn of phrase, quoting a meme, etc. etc. but considering they are minority opinions, and we want to preserve a diverse ideological ecosystem, they should be at least left alone, not shunned. That's how you get .. gestures at the trajectory of this site over the years.
But I will say it's interesting that so many seem to interpret aldomilyar's comment as problematic. I happen to unironically hold that opinion. I think most people I know IRL would agree with it. If that is considered snark or trolling here, maybe the situation is more dire than I thought.
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That comment is low effort, but conveys its points very well.
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