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From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them f

From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them for rude posts or other posts that aren't helpful to a discussion.

hamburglar 6y ago
I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).
mytailorisrich 6y ago
Yes, my personal conclusion is that downvotes are not useful and the functionality is usually best removed. All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read. Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".
tom_mellior 6y ago
"Disagree" describes a wide range of things though. It can be "you claim facts that are demonstrably false", "you claim facts that I cannot demonstrate are false, but I have strong doubts and you do not provide sources", "you cite correct facts but your interpretation of them is demonstrably wrong", "you cite correct facts but I interpret them differently", etc. And those are just factual disagreements, without getting into "you're making a strawman argument", etc. Thinks probably shouldn't be this fine-grained, but I hope you get the idea that there is reasonable room for more helpful feedback than "I disagree".

hamburglar 6y ago

I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).

mytailorisrich 6y ago

Yes, my personal conclusion is that downvotes are not useful and the functionality is usually best removed. All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read. Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".

tom_mellior 6y ago

"Disagree" describes a wide range of things though. It can be "you claim facts that are demonstrably false", "you claim facts that I cannot demonstrate are false, but I have strong doubts and you do not provide sources", "you cite correct facts but your interpretation of them is demonstrably wrong", "you cite correct facts but I interpret them differently", etc. And those are just factual disagreements, without getting into "you're making a strawman argument", etc. Thinks probably shouldn't be this fine-grained, but I hope you get the idea that there is reasonable room for more helpful feedback than "I disagree".