Removing low-quality content has increasing marginal utility, like removing drains on your attention; you’re not going to notice a big difference until most of the low-quality content is gone. Getting downvotes back is one tool for removing low-quality content but plausibly others are needed. It would be great if most of the posts in Discussion were high-quality, for several reasons, e.g. people feel more like Discussion is a place they could put their highest-quality content.
The difference between having 50% bad content and 30% bad content isn’t just the 20% of bad content; it’s also the contributions from all those who would keep visiting if they anticipated a 30% chance of seeing bad content but would not keep visiting if they anticipated a 50% chance of seeing bad content.
I think there is an argument that the effort lost steam when our best response to downvote abuse was shutting off downvotes as a “temporary stopgap” measure.
Many, arguably most, of the consequences of downvotes don’t show up in the immediate term. Habits and expectations take time to change, posters choose whether or not to leave altogether, and so on.
I don’t things were particularly good a month ago when we had downvotes.
Removing low-quality content has increasing marginal utility, like removing drains on your attention; you’re not going to notice a big difference until most of the low-quality content is gone. Getting downvotes back is one tool for removing low-quality content but plausibly others are needed. It would be great if most of the posts in Discussion were high-quality, for several reasons, e.g. people feel more like Discussion is a place they could put their highest-quality content.
The difference between having 50% bad content and 30% bad content isn’t just the 20% of bad content; it’s also the contributions from all those who would keep visiting if they anticipated a 30% chance of seeing bad content but would not keep visiting if they anticipated a 50% chance of seeing bad content.
I think there is an argument that the effort lost steam when our best response to downvote abuse was shutting off downvotes as a “temporary stopgap” measure.
Many, arguably most, of the consequences of downvotes don’t show up in the immediate term. Habits and expectations take time to change, posters choose whether or not to leave altogether, and so on.