I previously defended keeping down-votes, I confess I’m not so sure now.
A fairly common trait is people conflate some viewpoint independent metric of ‘quality’ with ‘whether I like this person of the view they espouse’. I’m sure most users have voting patterns that line up with these predictors pretty strongly, although there is some residual signal from quality: I imagine a view where one has a pretty low threshold for upvoting stuff sympathetic to ones view, and a very high one for upvoting non-sympathetic, and vice versa for downvotes.
I’m not sure how the dynamic changes if you get rid of downvotes though. Assuredly there’s a similar effect where people just refrain to upvote your stuff and slavishly upvote your opponents. There probably is some value in ‘nuking’ really low quality remarks to save everyone time. Unsure.
I previously defended keeping down-votes, I confess I’m not so sure now.
A fairly common trait is people conflate some viewpoint independent metric of ‘quality’ with ‘whether I like this person of the view they espouse’. I’m sure most users have voting patterns that line up with these predictors pretty strongly, although there is some residual signal from quality: I imagine a view where one has a pretty low threshold for upvoting stuff sympathetic to ones view, and a very high one for upvoting non-sympathetic, and vice versa for downvotes.
I’m not sure how the dynamic changes if you get rid of downvotes though. Assuredly there’s a similar effect where people just refrain to upvote your stuff and slavishly upvote your opponents. There probably is some value in ‘nuking’ really low quality remarks to save everyone time. Unsure.
Yeah, I’m totally onboard with all of that, including the uncertainty.
My view on downvoting is less that we need to remove it, and more that the status quo is terrible and we should be trying really hard to fix it.