You are right; I completely expect that my posts in debates, or on controversial topics are going to be downvoted by people who disagree with me. It happens a lot because a) My opinions are different than many LWers and b) I’m new to all this “rationality” stuff, so I don’t always make as much sense as I wish I did. Sometimes I’m just plain wrong.… That’s alright, and in those cases I generally expect other people to eventually upvote (if I’m not plain wrong) and it all evens out on it’s own.
But when someone asks your opinion on a book and you give it (both the asking and the giving being done in a polite and informative manner) it seems bizarre (and honestly rather rude) that someone would just downvote all of your posts in the conversation without giving a reason.
Note: I sorta wish you could click on the karma and see who upvoted and who downvoted. Not just for situations like this, but (as I mentioned elsewhere) there’s a big difference between a post with 20 each up and down votes, and a post with no votes whatsoever, even though they both ended up at 0.
On the halfbakery website (not exactly a web forum, but similar in some ways) you can’t see names of voters, but you can see the positive and negative vote numbers separately, as well as an icon summarising the overall balance.
You are right; I completely expect that my posts in debates, or on controversial topics are going to be downvoted by people who disagree with me. It happens a lot because a) My opinions are different than many LWers and b) I’m new to all this “rationality” stuff, so I don’t always make as much sense as I wish I did. Sometimes I’m just plain wrong.… That’s alright, and in those cases I generally expect other people to eventually upvote (if I’m not plain wrong) and it all evens out on it’s own.
But when someone asks your opinion on a book and you give it (both the asking and the giving being done in a polite and informative manner) it seems bizarre (and honestly rather rude) that someone would just downvote all of your posts in the conversation without giving a reason.
Note: I sorta wish you could click on the karma and see who upvoted and who downvoted. Not just for situations like this, but (as I mentioned elsewhere) there’s a big difference between a post with 20 each up and down votes, and a post with no votes whatsoever, even though they both ended up at 0.
On the halfbakery website (not exactly a web forum, but similar in some ways) you can’t see names of voters, but you can see the positive and negative vote numbers separately, as well as an icon summarising the overall balance.