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I agree about the PG-worship or whatever you want to call it. I preferred to absent myself from here for a while after it got real bad (to the point of the fir

I agree about the PG-worship or whatever you want to call it. I preferred to absent myself from here for a while after it got real bad (to the point of the first article commonly being a 2-3 year old essay that had bubbled to the top AGAIN), simply because I felt fundamentally outside of the norm here - I rarely agree with anything PG says in its entirety. Paul is a thoughtful enough person that I've never felt that it would upset him if I disagreed here, but I would imagine there would be a lot of people keen to argue with me until I was blue in the face about it. An opinion is an opinion however, and we're all entitled to our own - I take downvotes not as a personal attack, but simply an expression of disagreement, be it with your opinion OR the way you express it.

Udo 16y ago
I have no opinion on PG-worship one way or the other (probably because I'm new here) but I agree about the general "problem" that involves people who seem to downvote (or even flag) thoughtful comments just because they disagree. Sometimes, they not only downvote a comment they dislike, they apparently go to your profile and downvote everything(!) you wrote recently. Maybe it's a weakness of the implementation, or maybe I just didn't understand the purpose of the moderation system correctly and this is actually the way it is supposed to work? I tend to upvote anything that seems coherent and interesting, not just the stuff I agree with. If I ever get to the point where I'm allowed to downvote, I'll exercise that privilege only to mod down trolls, spammers, or very bad style. Everything else can much better be handled by replying to an entry and having an actual discussion. So am I mistaken? What is the mod system for, officially? Quality control or consensus building?
- warren_s 16y ago
  Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't believe stuff should be down-voted just because it doesn't fit into the prevailing opinion, I'm just saying that I don't take it personally when it happens.
  - Udo 16y ago
    Sure it's difficult to take this personally, considering pretty all of us are just semi-anonymous handles on a website and we don't know anything personal about our fellow users to begin with. I believe the perception that there is a problem here really comes from two sources: first, you almost never know why you are suddenly and utterly modded into a black hole. Second, there is this creeping suspicion that the actual purpose of the mod system is either not well defined enough or not properly agreed upon in the community. This leads to cases where coherent and interesting comments are sometimes -4, which is exactly the rating that should be reserved for porn, spam and really gross trolling. At the same time, some users achieve consistently high ratings for comments that seem to be lacking in content, leading me as a new user to suspect that the system is either rigged in some way or at least very susceptible to ridiculous pile-on effects. The good news is though that this doesn't happen often enough to be a serious problem (yet?).

Udo 16y ago

I have no opinion on PG-worship one way or the other (probably because I'm new here) but I agree about the general "problem" that involves people who seem to downvote (or even flag) thoughtful comments just because they disagree. Sometimes, they not only downvote a comment they dislike, they apparently go to your profile and downvote everything(!) you wrote recently. Maybe it's a weakness of the implementation, or maybe I just didn't understand the purpose of the moderation system correctly and this is actually the way it is supposed to work? I tend to upvote anything that seems coherent and interesting, not just the stuff I agree with. If I ever get to the point where I'm allowed to downvote, I'll exercise that privilege only to mod down trolls, spammers, or very bad style. Everything else can much better be handled by replying to an entry and having an actual discussion. So am I mistaken? What is the mod system for, officially? Quality control or consensus building?

warren_s 16y ago
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't believe stuff should be down-voted just because it doesn't fit into the prevailing opinion, I'm just saying that I don't take it personally when it happens.
- Udo 16y ago
  Sure it's difficult to take this personally, considering pretty all of us are just semi-anonymous handles on a website and we don't know anything personal about our fellow users to begin with. I believe the perception that there is a problem here really comes from two sources: first, you almost never know why you are suddenly and utterly modded into a black hole. Second, there is this creeping suspicion that the actual purpose of the mod system is either not well defined enough or not properly agreed upon in the community. This leads to cases where coherent and interesting comments are sometimes -4, which is exactly the rating that should be reserved for porn, spam and really gross trolling. At the same time, some users achieve consistently high ratings for comments that seem to be lacking in content, leading me as a new user to suspect that the system is either rigged in some way or at least very susceptible to ridiculous pile-on effects. The good news is though that this doesn't happen often enough to be a serious problem (yet?).