(nods) Yup, that’s possible. For me, negative comments feel more antagonistic than numeric ratings, but people differ. And I agree that more people will downvote than write comments.
Incidentally, the word “offensive” may be misleading. The LW policy as stated is that downvoting means the voter wants less of this sort of thing, not that the voter is offended.
In the absence of downvoting, would you suggest an alternative mechanism for tagging/suppressing/hiding posts (or users) people want to see less of? If so, what mechanism?
Or would you recommend having no such mechanism at all?
I’d suggest just relying on replies and upvotes (or the lack of them) to do the soft calibration on what kind of stuff is preferred. I’d prefer the site to generally give people the benefit of the doubt and assume their opinions are worth countering with actual replies instead of an anonymous, unaddressable thumbs-down.
For outright trolling, spamming and other obvious noise that shouldn’t even be on the site, the report feature is good.
Still another thing with the votes is that existing downvotes and upvotes are like a pheromone trail. It’s a lot easier to downvote an already downvoted comment or upvote an already upvoted comment without much thought than it is to make the deliberation whether a new comment should have −1, 0 or +1 with no idea about what other people have already thought about it. This might lead to the voting system amplifying groupthink patterns.
(nods) Yup, that’s possible. For me, negative comments feel more antagonistic than numeric ratings, but people differ. And I agree that more people will downvote than write comments.
Incidentally, the word “offensive” may be misleading. The LW policy as stated is that downvoting means the voter wants less of this sort of thing, not that the voter is offended.
In the absence of downvoting, would you suggest an alternative mechanism for tagging/suppressing/hiding posts (or users) people want to see less of? If so, what mechanism?
Or would you recommend having no such mechanism at all?
I’d suggest just relying on replies and upvotes (or the lack of them) to do the soft calibration on what kind of stuff is preferred. I’d prefer the site to generally give people the benefit of the doubt and assume their opinions are worth countering with actual replies instead of an anonymous, unaddressable thumbs-down.
For outright trolling, spamming and other obvious noise that shouldn’t even be on the site, the report feature is good.
Still another thing with the votes is that existing downvotes and upvotes are like a pheromone trail. It’s a lot easier to downvote an already downvoted comment or upvote an already upvoted comment without much thought than it is to make the deliberation whether a new comment should have −1, 0 or +1 with no idea about what other people have already thought about it. This might lead to the voting system amplifying groupthink patterns.