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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.
In other words, you are trying to build consensus?
There's no rule about how you can/should vote (we wouldn't really have a way to enforce it anyway), but admitting that you do this certainly affects how I view your participation here.
No, because I can’t control how other people vote. I see it more as providing real-time information about the current ideological balance of the community. I’m not trying to build anything, but merely to provide a snapshot. Just like when people show me, through voting, a sort of snap poll on where my own views fit in the ideological balance here.
Look, obviously I would love it if everyone here came around to agreeing with me about What Needs To Be Done about the issues I care about. In that sense, I am trying to literally “build a consensus” by actually persuading people to agree with me. So is everybody else here. But I’m not trying to use my upvoting/downvoting to alter other users’ perception of the validity of a particular comment. Again, they can’t even see how I voted until a full 24 hours afterward, which means hopefully we can avoid the sort of downvote spirals that take place on Reddit.
I think that for the most part, people interpret votecounts as "people want to see stuff like this", even if it doesnt effect visibility anymore. And I think this interpretation is correct, in the sense that most people vote like this, too. If you use your votes differently, youre propably not sending the signals you want.
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