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I think this might be structurally related to our political ideology of liberal democracy. We assume that bad takes die out or are overcome by good takes in th
by mikrl 4y ago
I think this might be structurally related to our political ideology of liberal democracy.
We assume that bad takes die out or are overcome by good takes in the marketplace of ideas. Therefore, the ‘magnitude’ of a bad take should intuitively be close to 0, and the magnitude of a good take should be positive and nonzero.
Allowing negative scores permits bad takes to become large in magnitude. Allowing or disallowing downvotes is basically just scaling the distribution of magnitude of takes since bad takes will sit closer to zero than good takes in general, even if they cannot be downvoted.
- ilyt 4y agoBut lack of downvotes mixes "just average takes not worth a upvote" with "this guy is obviously a moron, why I'm even seeing his comments together with other competent people?"
- amadeuspagel 4y agoThat's why upvotes and downvotes should be shown separately.
- doublerabbit 4y agoI feel the better approach would be where if you wish to downvote you must give a reason for the downvote. This would eliminate the snowball effect.
- ilyt 4y ago...that nobody would read. I think the usual "just don't show score for few minutes"/"don't show score that's only a bit negative" does the job well enough.