I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who re

I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have nothing else to say. It's weird to me when I get a large burst of 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting rights be taken away for any thread you're participating in. Reddit seems worse at this. It feels strongly like if you're in a 1:1 debate with someone they will downvote each response you make and that feels... stupid. Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility system. Not the mean or total votes, because they're skewed by a small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism I think to not be a little shit. I don't mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted. Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept that you're dealing with a particularly moronic group of individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting their head against -5's. That is useful information. These people are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic obsessed ranters, or, and I'll happily tank downvotes here, aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and definitely don't have massive negative externalities for everything. People decry "Echo chamber!" but in reality most people consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative downvotes don't actually have anything valuable to add to most conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.