Worth noting that by default the karma notifier doesn’t show downvotes, for basically this reason.
I think it only makes sense to opt into seeing all downvotes if you’re confident you can take this as information without it harming your motivation.
Meanwhile, there are benefits to actually downvoting things that are wrong, or getting undue attention, or subtly making the site worse. It matters how things can sorted for attention allocation, and relative karma scores in a discussion are important, among other things, so that people don’t see bad arguments appearing highly endorsed and then feeling motivated to argue against them (when they wouldn’t ordinarily consider this a good use of their time)
So I think people should actually just downvote more, and not use the “show me all my downvotes” feature, which most people aren’t using and you probably shouldn’t worry about overmuch.
I opted in to seeing downvotes, and I think my curiosity (both about personal interactions on the site and about the general topic of mechanism design) will compel me to continue. I’m not worried about them—as I say, they were low-value comments, though not much different from others that get upvoted more (and IMO shouldn’t be). Mostly it shows that low-number-of-voters is mostly noise, and that’s fine.
My main point was wondering how I can monitor my own voting behavior? (ok, and a little complaining that variable-point voting is confusing.) I think I upvote pretty liberally and downvote very rarely, but I really wonder if that’s true, and I wonder things like how many votes I give (on multiple comments) on the same post.
I do agree that being able to see metrics on your own voting is pretty reasonable, although not something I expect to make it to the top of our priority queue for awhile.
Worth noting that by default the karma notifier doesn’t show downvotes, for basically this reason.
I think it only makes sense to opt into seeing all downvotes if you’re confident you can take this as information without it harming your motivation.
Meanwhile, there are benefits to actually downvoting things that are wrong, or getting undue attention, or subtly making the site worse. It matters how things can sorted for attention allocation, and relative karma scores in a discussion are important, among other things, so that people don’t see bad arguments appearing highly endorsed and then feeling motivated to argue against them (when they wouldn’t ordinarily consider this a good use of their time)
So I think people should actually just downvote more, and not use the “show me all my downvotes” feature, which most people aren’t using and you probably shouldn’t worry about overmuch.
I opted in to seeing downvotes, and I think my curiosity (both about personal interactions on the site and about the general topic of mechanism design) will compel me to continue. I’m not worried about them—as I say, they were low-value comments, though not much different from others that get upvoted more (and IMO shouldn’t be). Mostly it shows that low-number-of-voters is mostly noise, and that’s fine.
My main point was wondering how I can monitor my own voting behavior? (ok, and a little complaining that variable-point voting is confusing.) I think I upvote pretty liberally and downvote very rarely, but I really wonder if that’s true, and I wonder things like how many votes I give (on multiple comments) on the same post.
I do agree that being able to see metrics on your own voting is pretty reasonable, although not something I expect to make it to the top of our priority queue for awhile.