Anonymous downvoting allows karma assassinations etc.
Non-anonymous downvoting means that every time you downvote something you expose yourself to a conflict. When thinking about a downvote, you will also instinctively think about the chance that the person will get angry and punish you—by expressing hostility towards you, or by downvoting some of your comments. This could make people less likely to downvote some problematic kinds of behavior. It could become: “yeah, someone should downvote this, but why me?”
It seems like we should be willing to defend our downvotes, but in some situations this could be equal to feeding the trolls, or discouraging people from downvoting applause lights.
We need separate buttons and votes need various changes to be effective at encouraging improvement. Negative karma cannot provide new users with useful feedback, deter trolls and inform the popularity sorting system all at the same time. Here is why:
Unexplained downvotes don’t tell users what to improve, so they’re as good as ignored
If we feel a need to have a way to mark the low quality comments, and provide feedback to discourage annoyance, we should definitely ask that person to give a few words of feedback. As a new person who occasionally gets vote downs, I have absolutely no clue whether there is any pattern to them. They’re not encouraging me to acculturate at all. It just looks random. I’ve theorized that maybe somebody doesn’t like me, or that maybe I made a spelling error I didn’t catch, or maybe a troll is harassing me. I have no clue. This speculation isn’t getting me anywhere. I need specific feedback.
What would help me (and other new users) improve
If the vote downs provided at least a couple of words of feedback, and didn’t censor me, I’d be happy with that. Getting “Not new information” or “joke was not funny” would be much preferred to random anonymous discouragement. A category would be better than nothing, but a couple specific words would be best.
Reserving feedback for older members will reduce endless September risk and increase feedback value
The way this would reduce endless September risk is by highlighting the interactions with older users, which will amplify their ability to maintain culture if the ratio of new to old people is thrown off. Also, as a new user, I want to know that the feedback I’m getting is from somebody helpful, not a troll, or a newbie. This doesn’t guarantee that old member’s feedback is useful but it would prevent me from brushing them off thinking I might be getting harassed by trolls. If there’s a possibility trolls are giving the feedback, I really can’t take it seriously.
Attaching a punishment to a downvote sacrifices honest feedback in favor of not punishing the user
Consider this: You dislike somebody’s comment, but you don’t see them as a troll or a bad person. They’ve got two downvotes. Do you downvote them further and hide their comment? Probably not. That’s what a lot of people are thinking, because most of the time when I see downvotes, it’s just one or two. You know what I think when one or two people didn’t like my comment? “Can’t make all the people happy all the time. Oh well.”
Now if TEN people vote me down, I know something’s going on. THEN I can be completely sure it’s not a personal vendetta or someone having a bad day. We cannot take vote downs as a serious source of feedback if we only get one or two, and people won’t give you more than one or two if you’re punished at three.
Merging upvotes and downvotes into one figure promotes black and white thinking about popularity
Also, seeing the number of up votes versus down votes would be useful. If I say something that gets 40 up votes and 43 down votes, all I see in the current system is down votes. I may think most people are ignoring me or don’t like what I said. It could simply be that I said something controversial—and that can be a good thing. To avoid discouraging controversy, or to put it another way, to prevent conformity, showing both sides of the story is important. It may be the practice of showing only one side of the story that promotes conformity. Showing both might be a good way to prevent conformity.
How the separate ban button could work for trolls:
Giving a large portion of users the power to ban trolls would expedite the process of removing them. This can’t be a small number of people, or it would invite politically motivated “assassinations”. This can’t be new users because if new users flood the forum they may ban old users due to cultural misunderstandings who were contributing to the culture. If, say 5% of older active users press the ban button, it would disable the troll’s account. Currently, that would mean around 25 to 50 people if Vladimir is correct. They can’t be people with too little activity—this would encourage trolls and malicious users to create 50 dummy accounts, wait a few months, and then ban people they don’t like. The ban button can be totally anonymous and invisible, preventing trolls from getting any feedback at all, because it is completely separate from the voting system.
Anonymous downvoting allows karma assassinations etc.
Non-anonymous downvoting means that every time you downvote something you expose yourself to a conflict. When thinking about a downvote, you will also instinctively think about the chance that the person will get angry and punish you—by expressing hostility towards you, or by downvoting some of your comments. This could make people less likely to downvote some problematic kinds of behavior. It could become: “yeah, someone should downvote this, but why me?”
It seems like we should be willing to defend our downvotes, but in some situations this could be equal to feeding the trolls, or discouraging people from downvoting applause lights.
We need separate buttons and votes need various changes to be effective at encouraging improvement. Negative karma cannot provide new users with useful feedback, deter trolls and inform the popularity sorting system all at the same time. Here is why:
Unexplained downvotes don’t tell users what to improve, so they’re as good as ignored
If we feel a need to have a way to mark the low quality comments, and provide feedback to discourage annoyance, we should definitely ask that person to give a few words of feedback. As a new person who occasionally gets vote downs, I have absolutely no clue whether there is any pattern to them. They’re not encouraging me to acculturate at all. It just looks random. I’ve theorized that maybe somebody doesn’t like me, or that maybe I made a spelling error I didn’t catch, or maybe a troll is harassing me. I have no clue. This speculation isn’t getting me anywhere. I need specific feedback.
What would help me (and other new users) improve
If the vote downs provided at least a couple of words of feedback, and didn’t censor me, I’d be happy with that. Getting “Not new information” or “joke was not funny” would be much preferred to random anonymous discouragement. A category would be better than nothing, but a couple specific words would be best.
Reserving feedback for older members will reduce endless September risk and increase feedback value
The way this would reduce endless September risk is by highlighting the interactions with older users, which will amplify their ability to maintain culture if the ratio of new to old people is thrown off. Also, as a new user, I want to know that the feedback I’m getting is from somebody helpful, not a troll, or a newbie. This doesn’t guarantee that old member’s feedback is useful but it would prevent me from brushing them off thinking I might be getting harassed by trolls. If there’s a possibility trolls are giving the feedback, I really can’t take it seriously.
Attaching a punishment to a downvote sacrifices honest feedback in favor of not punishing the user
Consider this: You dislike somebody’s comment, but you don’t see them as a troll or a bad person. They’ve got two downvotes. Do you downvote them further and hide their comment? Probably not. That’s what a lot of people are thinking, because most of the time when I see downvotes, it’s just one or two. You know what I think when one or two people didn’t like my comment? “Can’t make all the people happy all the time. Oh well.”
Now if TEN people vote me down, I know something’s going on. THEN I can be completely sure it’s not a personal vendetta or someone having a bad day. We cannot take vote downs as a serious source of feedback if we only get one or two, and people won’t give you more than one or two if you’re punished at three.
Merging upvotes and downvotes into one figure promotes black and white thinking about popularity
Also, seeing the number of up votes versus down votes would be useful. If I say something that gets 40 up votes and 43 down votes, all I see in the current system is down votes. I may think most people are ignoring me or don’t like what I said. It could simply be that I said something controversial—and that can be a good thing. To avoid discouraging controversy, or to put it another way, to prevent conformity, showing both sides of the story is important. It may be the practice of showing only one side of the story that promotes conformity. Showing both might be a good way to prevent conformity.
How the separate ban button could work for trolls:
Giving a large portion of users the power to ban trolls would expedite the process of removing them. This can’t be a small number of people, or it would invite politically motivated “assassinations”. This can’t be new users because if new users flood the forum they may ban old users due to cultural misunderstandings who were contributing to the culture. If, say 5% of older active users press the ban button, it would disable the troll’s account. Currently, that would mean around 25 to 50 people if Vladimir is correct. They can’t be people with too little activity—this would encourage trolls and malicious users to create 50 dummy accounts, wait a few months, and then ban people they don’t like. The ban button can be totally anonymous and invisible, preventing trolls from getting any feedback at all, because it is completely separate from the voting system.
You can, in fact, do this already.
Love it when I totally miss something like that. fixes my comment
Unexplained upvotes are ambiguous, too. I frequently make several points in a comment. If it gets upvoted, I don’t know what people like.