Actually ok now that I am thinking, why don’t downvoters have to select the text and provide the negative feedback in order to issue a downvote?
Forcing people to write a whole sentence or multiple paragraphs to signal that they think some content is bad would of course have enormous chilling effects on people’s ability to express their preferences over content on the site, and reduce the signal we have on content-quality a lot.
Downvoters never reply. I suspect because they are obviously afraid I will retaliate their downvotes with my own...
I would be quite surprised if it’s about vote-retaliation. I think it’s usually because then people ask follow-up questions and there is usually an asymmetric burden of proof in public communication where interlocutors demand very high levels of precision and shareable evidence, when the actual underlying cognitive process was “my gut says this is bad, and I don’t want to see more of this”.
Forcing people to write a whole sentence or multiple paragraphs to signal that they think some content is bad would of course have enormous chilling effects on people’s ability to express their preferences over content on the site, and reduce the signal we have on content-quality a lot.
I would be quite surprised if it’s about vote-retaliation. I think it’s usually because then people ask follow-up questions and there is usually an asymmetric burden of proof in public communication where interlocutors demand very high levels of precision and shareable evidence, when the actual underlying cognitive process was “my gut says this is bad, and I don’t want to see more of this”.