If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit.
No, if someone e.g starts randomly insulting people, or being utterly clumsy in their reasoning, and then everyone would have to voice their disagreement, repeatedly, that would be noise atop of noise. It would crowd out any signal in the discussion.
Some types of disagreement at least need be able to be expressed without noising up the place. One of these is “You’re very obviously wrong, and this comment is bad for this place, and it’s bad for this place that I even have to use two sentences to you to explain why”.
The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees
Even in the better cases scenario where there are no trolls or spammers involved—what makes you think that you have to choose between only the options “Someone disagrees with you and you don’t know why” and “Someone disagrees with you, and you’re told why”—and you don’t consider the third option “You have no way of knowing if anyone agrees or disagrees with you”?
You seem to think that the only alternative of “downvoting and not commenting” is “commenting”—so that we need only prevent downvotes to encourage discussion. Ofcourse there are atleast two alternatives instead, and one of them is “not downvoting and not commenting either”.
Then the members wouldn’t get any feedback, not even that of a downvote/upvote; they wouldn’t even know if anyone even read their posts.
I’d find that even more depressing. An upvote or a downvote is atleast knowledge that someone read what I had to say.
The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that
No, another option they would have is to not reply at all. Or to call other people names. Or to lower the tone of the conversation.
A downvote is an easy way to tell someone “I believe you’re doing something wrong” without the addition of noise.
Ah, now I feel extremely silly. The irony did not occur to me; it was simply a long comment that I agreed with completely, and I wasn’t satisfied merely upvoting it because it didn’t have any (other) upvotes yet at the time. Plus, doubly ironically, I was on a moral crusade to defend the karma system...
No, if someone e.g starts randomly insulting people, or being utterly clumsy in their reasoning, and then everyone would have to voice their disagreement, repeatedly, that would be noise atop of noise. It would crowd out any signal in the discussion.
Some types of disagreement at least need be able to be expressed without noising up the place. One of these is “You’re very obviously wrong, and this comment is bad for this place, and it’s bad for this place that I even have to use two sentences to you to explain why”.
Even in the better cases scenario where there are no trolls or spammers involved—what makes you think that you have to choose between only the options “Someone disagrees with you and you don’t know why” and “Someone disagrees with you, and you’re told why”—and you don’t consider the third option “You have no way of knowing if anyone agrees or disagrees with you”?
You seem to think that the only alternative of “downvoting and not commenting” is “commenting”—so that we need only prevent downvotes to encourage discussion. Ofcourse there are atleast two alternatives instead, and one of them is “not downvoting and not commenting either”.
Then the members wouldn’t get any feedback, not even that of a downvote/upvote; they wouldn’t even know if anyone even read their posts.
I’d find that even more depressing. An upvote or a downvote is atleast knowledge that someone read what I had to say.
No, another option they would have is to not reply at all. Or to call other people names. Or to lower the tone of the conversation.
A downvote is an easy way to tell someone “I believe you’re doing something wrong” without the addition of noise.
Right on.
I’m hoping you meant this ironically.
Ah, now I feel extremely silly. The irony did not occur to me; it was simply a long comment that I agreed with completely, and I wasn’t satisfied merely upvoting it because it didn’t have any (other) upvotes yet at the time. Plus, doubly ironically, I was on a moral crusade to defend the karma system...
Right, what about an agree/disagree feature?