Downvotes are bad. They decrease trust and cause defection spirals. I am confident that the existence of downvotes makes the community less enjoyable, less welcoming and less productive on net.
That said, I’m not sure we should do anything to punish people using them in an extra-bad way.
I’d agree that it’s a two-edged sword, but 1) Keeping standards high is not our only goal, and being welcoming is good for other purposes, and 2) I think there are better ways to be unwelcoming to low-quality people that cause less collateral unwelcomingness to good people.
I assume they mean “you downvoted me so I downvote you, and every subsequent comment in this discussion, this ruining any chance we had at maintaining a cordial tone.”
It wouldn’t solve the main problem we’re discussing
Actually, now that I think about it, it would increase the cost of doing this without giving yourself away, since now you’d need a sockpuppet to downvote their replies to you.
One potential problem is that you could frame someone, but it would be fairly easy for them to clear their name.
Downvotes are bad. They decrease trust and cause defection spirals. I am confident that the existence of downvotes makes the community less enjoyable, less welcoming and less productive on net.
That said, I’m not sure we should do anything to punish people using them in an extra-bad way.
“being welcoming” is not actually good for a community if you want standards to be high.
I’d agree that it’s a two-edged sword, but 1) Keeping standards high is not our only goal, and being welcoming is good for other purposes, and 2) I think there are better ways to be unwelcoming to low-quality people that cause less collateral unwelcomingness to good people.
Example?
I assume they mean “you downvoted me so I downvote you, and every subsequent comment in this discussion, this ruining any chance we had at maintaining a cordial tone.”
Happens all. the. time.
This is why I don’t generally downvote people I’m talking to, unless I’m commenting specifically to explain a downvote.
This is also why Hacker News disables downvoting on replies to your comments.
Not a bad feature. It wouldn’t solve the main problem we’re discussing, but I do think it’d make LW a slightly more pleasant place to be.
You know, modulo the usual problems with getting the feature into production.
Yeah. Having basically no code contributors emerge from the community (given there are how many good programmers here?) is odd.
Have you seen the LW code? I looked at it once, and gave up immediately.
Rewriting the whole thing from scratch would probably be easier, although this could be just some bias speaking.
Heh. That’s a quite plausible explanation :-)
Actually, now that I think about it, it would increase the cost of doing this without giving yourself away, since now you’d need a sockpuppet to downvote their replies to you.
One potential problem is that you could frame someone, but it would be fairly easy for them to clear their name.