Indeed our new reacts system separates them. But our new reacts system also doesn’t have strong votes. A problem with displaying the number of types of votes when strong votes are involved is that it much more easily allows for deanonymization if there are only a few people in the thread.
That makes sense. On the karma side, I think some of my discomfort comes from the underlying operationalization of post/comment karma as merely additive of individual karma weights.
True opinion of the value of the bulk of posts/comments probably lies on a bell curve, so I would expect most posts/comments to have significantly more upvotes than strong upvotes if voters are “honestly” conveying preferences and those preferences are fairly representative of the user base. Where the karma is coming predominately from strongvotes, the odds that the displayed total reflects the opinion of a smallish minority that feels passionately is much higher. That can be problematic if it gives the impression of community consensus where no such consensus exists.
If it were up to me, I would probably favor a rule along the lines of: a post/comment can’t get more than X% of its net positive karma from strongvotes, to ensure that a high karma count reflects some degree of breadth of community support rather than voting by a small handful of people with powerful strongvotes. Downvotes are a bit trickier, because the strong downvote hammer is an effective way of quickly pushing down norm-breaking and otherwise problematic content, and I think putting posts into deep negative territory is generally used for that purpose.
Indeed our new reacts system separates them. But our new reacts system also doesn’t have strong votes. A problem with displaying the number of types of votes when strong votes are involved is that it much more easily allows for deanonymization if there are only a few people in the thread.
That makes sense. On the karma side, I think some of my discomfort comes from the underlying operationalization of post/comment karma as merely additive of individual karma weights.
True opinion of the value of the bulk of posts/comments probably lies on a bell curve, so I would expect most posts/comments to have significantly more upvotes than strong upvotes if voters are “honestly” conveying preferences and those preferences are fairly representative of the user base. Where the karma is coming predominately from strongvotes, the odds that the displayed total reflects the opinion of a smallish minority that feels passionately is much higher. That can be problematic if it gives the impression of community consensus where no such consensus exists.
If it were up to me, I would probably favor a rule along the lines of: a post/comment can’t get more than X% of its net positive karma from strongvotes, to ensure that a high karma count reflects some degree of breadth of community support rather than voting by a small handful of people with powerful strongvotes. Downvotes are a bit trickier, because the strong downvote hammer is an effective way of quickly pushing down norm-breaking and otherwise problematic content, and I think putting posts into deep negative territory is generally used for that purpose.