5 ms·

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

• 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?).