I wouldn’t have thought of this before reading Dagon’s comment, but I agree that ‘disable downvoting completely’ seems like a solution with few or no drawbacks at this point. Certainly I think it would be a massive improvement over the status quo, at very small cost (even if the result is just hacked in, it should be pretty straightforward to hack in.)
I think some people don’t see this as a big deal because they generally ignore karma, or they just instruct others to ignore karma, but some of us (perhaps from a history of reading reddit, who knows) have it ingrained enough that there’s at least a real “trivial inconvenience” associated with ignoring that signal, and there are associated negative feelings towards the site which are growing over time at a System 1 level.
I wouldn’t have thought of this before reading Dagon’s comment, but I agree that ‘disable downvoting completely’ seems like a solution with few or no drawbacks at this point. Certainly I think it would be a massive improvement over the status quo, at very small cost (even if the result is just hacked in, it should be pretty straightforward to hack in.)
I think some people don’t see this as a big deal because they generally ignore karma, or they just instruct others to ignore karma, but some of us (perhaps from a history of reading reddit, who knows) have it ingrained enough that there’s at least a real “trivial inconvenience” associated with ignoring that signal, and there are associated negative feelings towards the site which are growing over time at a System 1 level.