Downvoting with explanation is of course more helpful than downvoting without explanation. Presumably everyone would agree that if you’re going to downvote, it’s great if you can explain why; the question is whether it’s okay to downvote without explanation.
I think there’s something to both sides here. If someone dislikes my posts or comments, I’d prefer they downvote without comment than not, because it will help me to learn what’s controversial or what some people find unhelpful. Naturally, I won’t prefer it at an emotional level at the time! But it may help me feel more emotionally good about comments that don’t get downvoted :)
What we have to weigh up is that advantage compared to the cost of putting people off. Thanks for being clear about this, Michelle: your comment updated me a long way towards thinking downvoting without comment is net negative. I wonder if there’s a tweak we could make to the system to get the best of both sides?
I think we definitely could, though it might not be easy. If the general tone of the conversation was very friendly, I imagine the atmosphere would be such that down-votes felt more like useful information and less like attacks. I guess I’ve so far felt that I’ve tried to contribute information when it’s been asked for, and found that all my comments had a uniform amount of up-voting and down-voting, such that I didn’t get much information from the down-voting at all, and it felt more as if at least one person just disliked that I was having the conversation / me (although I guess it could equally have been that different people each disagreed with different things I was saying). One way to fix this would be if people were very selective in their down-voting, targetting individual things said.
I should add—I’m not used to forums. I imagine down-voting is crucial when volume is high. But from my outsider perspective, it feels like a way to anonymously attack other people.
Downvoting with explanation is of course more helpful than downvoting without explanation. Presumably everyone would agree that if you’re going to downvote, it’s great if you can explain why; the question is whether it’s okay to downvote without explanation.
I think there’s something to both sides here. If someone dislikes my posts or comments, I’d prefer they downvote without comment than not, because it will help me to learn what’s controversial or what some people find unhelpful. Naturally, I won’t prefer it at an emotional level at the time! But it may help me feel more emotionally good about comments that don’t get downvoted :)
What we have to weigh up is that advantage compared to the cost of putting people off. Thanks for being clear about this, Michelle: your comment updated me a long way towards thinking downvoting without comment is net negative. I wonder if there’s a tweak we could make to the system to get the best of both sides?
I think we definitely could, though it might not be easy. If the general tone of the conversation was very friendly, I imagine the atmosphere would be such that down-votes felt more like useful information and less like attacks. I guess I’ve so far felt that I’ve tried to contribute information when it’s been asked for, and found that all my comments had a uniform amount of up-voting and down-voting, such that I didn’t get much information from the down-voting at all, and it felt more as if at least one person just disliked that I was having the conversation / me (although I guess it could equally have been that different people each disagreed with different things I was saying). One way to fix this would be if people were very selective in their down-voting, targetting individual things said. I should add—I’m not used to forums. I imagine down-voting is crucial when volume is high. But from my outsider perspective, it feels like a way to anonymously attack other people.