People who are down-voting, can you please explain why? To just down-vote seems unproductive.
Are you implying that every time someone downvotes a post they should provide an accompanying explanation of their decision? If not, what makes this post different from others?
I’m not OP but my thoughts—I agree that when I see _a lot_ of downvotes on a seemingly reasonable post that had a decent amount of work and thought put into it and _no one_ explains why, I think there is a collective action problem that could discourage future contributions and weaken discourse. So while I wouldn’t think any one individual should be obligated to explain their downvotes, I think the community in aggregate does have such an obligation in these cases where there are a lot of downvotes and there is no clearly obvious reason why (e.g., obvious spam).
I strongly agree with Peter’s thoughts on this, and wrote up my own reasoning here. Basically, I read a downvote to mean either “I think you’re wrong” or “there’s a definite factual error here” and it’s frustrating to see lots of downvotes with no indication of what might be wrong.
Sometimes, I can guess pretty easily at why I think someone might have downvoted, but a post’s author might not be in the same position (very frustrating for them), and I don’t want to speak on a downvoter’s behalf by speculating about their hypothetical beliefs (which I may well get wrong).
It takes a long time to craft a response to posts like these. Even if there are clear problems with the post, given the sensitive topic you have to spend a lot of time on nuance, checking citations, and getting the tone right. That is a very high bar, one that I don’t think is reasonable to expect everyone to pass. In contrast, people who agree seem to get a pass for silently upvoting.
That’s a reasonable objection. I wouldn’t mind seeing even a non-nuanced response (e.g. “I think this post undervalues the utility of X compared to Y”) rather than no response, but many other readers don’t share my preferences and might take issue with that kind of comment (especially for this topic). And of course, mobile users are especially disadvantaged when it comes to comment-writing.
Still, if someone is a downvoter and wants to do something helpful for others in the same situation, creating one critical response that can then be upvoted (showing the relative popularity of objection X vs. objections Y, Z, etc.) seems unusually valuable.
Are you implying that every time someone downvotes a post they should provide an accompanying explanation of their decision? If not, what makes this post different from others?
I’m not OP but my thoughts—I agree that when I see _a lot_ of downvotes on a seemingly reasonable post that had a decent amount of work and thought put into it and _no one_ explains why, I think there is a collective action problem that could discourage future contributions and weaken discourse. So while I wouldn’t think any one individual should be obligated to explain their downvotes, I think the community in aggregate does have such an obligation in these cases where there are a lot of downvotes and there is no clearly obvious reason why (e.g., obvious spam).
That makes sense.
I strongly agree with Peter’s thoughts on this, and wrote up my own reasoning here. Basically, I read a downvote to mean either “I think you’re wrong” or “there’s a definite factual error here” and it’s frustrating to see lots of downvotes with no indication of what might be wrong.
Sometimes, I can guess pretty easily at why I think someone might have downvoted, but a post’s author might not be in the same position (very frustrating for them), and I don’t want to speak on a downvoter’s behalf by speculating about their hypothetical beliefs (which I may well get wrong).
It takes a long time to craft a response to posts like these. Even if there are clear problems with the post, given the sensitive topic you have to spend a lot of time on nuance, checking citations, and getting the tone right. That is a very high bar, one that I don’t think is reasonable to expect everyone to pass. In contrast, people who agree seem to get a pass for silently upvoting.
That’s a reasonable objection. I wouldn’t mind seeing even a non-nuanced response (e.g. “I think this post undervalues the utility of X compared to Y”) rather than no response, but many other readers don’t share my preferences and might take issue with that kind of comment (especially for this topic). And of course, mobile users are especially disadvantaged when it comes to comment-writing.
Still, if someone is a downvoter and wants to do something helpful for others in the same situation, creating one critical response that can then be upvoted (showing the relative popularity of objection X vs. objections Y, Z, etc.) seems unusually valuable.