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This is because many people here still vote by agreement, rather than for comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on. This happe
by mkyc 17y ago
This is because many people here still vote by agreement, rather than for comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on. This happens on a much larger scale with lower-rated comments. I once saw the word "no" with a score of 50~, which made up for the contributor's running streak of -5~. It wasn't that their contribution quality became better, it was that their comment hit that major "upvote when you agree" fault in our system. It's infuriating and seriously reduces our quality. I try to upvote even poorly composed devil's advocate comments just to counteract this, because even reckless disagreement is often a gold mine of those little bits of information that you didn't take into consideration, but should have.
Vote for what you think others should see, not for what you agree with.
- jodrellblank 17y ago(I just voted you up because I agree with you. Hrm.)
- mkyc 17y agoIt's not that you should avoid upvoting what you agree with, just that it shouldn't be the only reason you upvote. A lot of the posts that violate this simply bait existing divisions, which contributes nothing. Perhaps I should add "and people don't need to see that which they already agree with."
- tdavis 17y agoAwesome example of this I just found: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=675881 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=675881 The original post nor the reply are particularly interesting or insightful, yet the negative one is at -4 and the positive one is at 8. Something goes here about how, "You can take the links out of Digg, but..."
- abstractbill 17y agomany people here still vote by agreement, rather than for comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on Given up and down arrows next to a comment, the overwhelming majority of people will always vote based on agreement, no matter what you tell them to do, because the user interface practically begs people to do that. If you want people to vote based on something else, you'll have to redesign the user interface (and even then I suspect it will be difficult).