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Notes -
A humble request to the voters of this forum:
Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with. Contrary views are fertile ground for good discussion, as several of these QC reports show. Please try and see them as a complement to your side of the argument, not a threat. If nothing else, they provide a contrasting backdrop against which to paint one's own picture. This should be encouraged, not discouraged.
A prime example would be the discussion about pronoun policy a few days ago.
Downvoting doesn’t have any substantive effect on the visibility of a comment, though. On Reddit, sure, the downvotes are visible to everyone in real-time, and if the downvote ratio is big enough, the comment becomes hidden by default and has to be manually clicked on to become visible. Here, though, the comment “score” isn’t even visible to anyone, including the author, for a full 24 hours, and even after that the comment is just as visible as it was before.
I routinely downvote posts I disagree with - even well-written and effortful ones. I do so not to discourage the author from posting further about his or her views, but because I want that author to have a realistic idea of how relatively popular those views are in this space. I think that this information is useful to me as it pertains to my own posts. I eagerly await being able to see the score on my own comments; not only for the cheap dopamine rush, although that’s certainly a factor, but also because I want to see how well I’m doing at persuading people. If I got a lot of downvotes, it’s probably because I’m not doing a very good job - or, at least, I didn’t with that particular comment - of bringing people around to finding my way of thinking persuasive.
Sure, maybe it’s because the comment was poorly-written or poorly-argued, and maybe a better version of the same comment would have gotten a better score, but as a rule of thumb it’s useful to assume that the score is a reflection on whether or not people agreed with the sentiments I expressed. That helps me, because it means I can craft future arguments around things that resonated with people, and maybe de-emphasize or be more elective about expressing certain ideas that are turning people off.
Yeah, sure, it’s a bummer when a comment I thought was a banger gets a lot of downvotes, but I’d still prefer that to one that got very little engagement, positive or negative, at all. Ideally the downvoters would accompany their votes with an argument, but realistically people don’t always have time or anything profound to say, so the downvote is just a way to casually express “your idea is not popular here, if people like me have any say in it” and move on. I do this myself. It’s not the greatest use of the forum’s mechanics, but it works well enough.
Well, since AFAIK, themotte.org never defined what the arrows mean here, I can't say you're wrong, but this community emigrated from Reddit, where the arrows did have an intended meaning
I think it's fair to assume that on this Reddit clone, the arrows have inherited that meaning. In my opinion, a measure of value is better feedback than a measure of agreement because I want to optimize for good participation. Optimizing for agreement is how you get an echo chamber, or audience capture.
"So don't do that then, and ignore the downvotes", I assume you would say? Sure, but I think you admit the vote score do matter. That "cheap dopamine rush" exists and affects how people feel about their posts. I worry when I see threads like the pronoun one where someone is patiently laying out a minority opinion, and getting negative reinforcement for it.
I found myself agreeing with both of you and my synthesis is that I shouldn't fuss over the regulars, but strongly avoid downvoting newbies to groom them into staying
Yeah I'm a bit like you - how I vote depends on various factors, and how new they are is a big one. I generally try to upvote users I haven't seen a lot of, posts that can lead to interesting conversations, and posts that put a lot of effort into explaining their beliefs and how they reached them - even if I think the logic in the post is supremely flawed. With regulars on the other hand, I vote primarily on the strength of their argument, and downvotes I save for either extremely poor arguments or disingenuousness.
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