In the spirit of Tell culture, I’d like to make known my preference for not being downvoted without a reason given. I’m open to modifying my behavior in response to criticism, but just downvoting something I write doesn’t give me much information, and I find it rather unpleasant to know that people disapprove of something I’ve done, without knowing what I did wrong or what I might be able to do to fix it.
I disagree with this sentiment. If anything, giving criticism and downvoting are alternatives, not things that go together. For example, since I don’t like this idea I might have just downvoted this comment. But since I’m responding to it I’m not going to do that; it isn’t necessary to downvote if I’m going to express my criticism anyway, and most likely it wouldn’t be helpful either, since you’d probably just be annoyed by the downvote.
In other words, your comment is basically a criticizing of downvoting in general; if that is a reasonable preference, we should just remove the possibility of downvoting at all.
My personal downvoting policy is this: I tend to refrain from downvoting unless the comment really is atrocious in a way that I feel ought to be intuitively obvious. This has very little to do with the actual content of the comment and a great deal to do with the presentation; for example, I won’t downvote a comment that I disagree with, but I will downvote a comment that I perceive as adding nothing to the discussion.
In practice, this means that I do not downvote very often; in the totality of my time here on this site, I believe I’ve downvoted less than ten comments. The less atrocious comments, however, I neither upvote nor downvote; instead, I write a reply discussing what I disagree with in the comment and what can be done better. (Note that in this case I actually upvoted your comment for being well-written and thoughtful, even though I disagree with your conclusion.) In that sense, my downvoting rationale adheres to your “exclusivity” principle. And yet I feel that downvoting based on pure disagreement, which you appear to be endorsing, is rude and is not a healthy behavior for the community, seeing as it basically serves to provide negative reinforcement every time someone says something contrarian, which is hardly conducive to an atmosphere of cooperative discourse. Comments that you disagree with should be replied to, not downvoted without explanation, unless there’s some other factor unrelated to content that caused the downvote.
Most of the time, however, when I’m downvoted, I find that I can hardly discern the reason. I strive to make clear comments that express my point concisely without going on for to long, so whatever the reason is, it can’t be presentation. Content, then? But if I’m saying something stupid or wrong, I’d very much like to know! Naturally I don’t think I am, so if someone randomly downvotes one of my comments without telling me why, I’m forced to either (a) make unsupported speculations about what I’m doing wrong, or (b) disregard the downvote as uninformative and therefore not worth thinking about. Neither option seems particularly appealing to me, so I’d say that as a strategy to positively impact the behavior the of person being downvoted, your suggested policy of downvoting fails. Is there some other reason you’re endorsing it?
I did not suggest downvoting purely on account of disagreement. It is true that if I had not responded to Gondolinian’s comment, I might have downvoted it. But not just because I disagree, but because I find complaints about downvoting unpleasant and would rather see less of them on the site.
In general there might be many other reasons for downvoting which do not necessarily involve disagreement, such as vagueness, excessive verbosity, illogical reasoning, and so on. Again, of course you can simply respond and mention those things, but again in that case there is not all that much reason for downvoting at all. The advantage of downvoting is that it takes very little resources and does not require responding to something which may not be worthy of a response.
The suggested policy does not necessarily fail, for several reasons: 1) the person may indeed in some cases realize why he is being downvoted; 2) even if he does not, he may speculate randomly and modify his behavior until he is no longer downvoted—i.e. downvoting provides selective pressure on comments; 3) in some extreme cases, it would be good even if he just becomes less likely to comment at all. In any case, as I said, the point of downvoting is that such a small use of resources is involved that it is not necessary that there be some particular positive effect in every case.
I’m retracting this because in retrospect, I don’t think it was a good idea to post this (I was rather tired when I wrote this—not a state of mind known for its good judgement.), and I’d rather not worry about having this as a potential karma sink. While I still agree with what I wrote, I don’t think it was necessary to post about it, as I think most have similar preferences, and I can see how some would read it as whining (Though that’s not what I was going for.).
An explanation is better than a vote, sure, but isn’t a vote still better than nothing at all? And up is better than down in a vacuum, but up given good is as valuable as down given bad, no? It reminds me of someone’s description of pain as the greatest gift we never wanted. It is information and information tends to be good. I get not liking it, but value it. There’s no cash value to high karma.
In the spirit of Tell culture, I’d like to make known my preference for not being downvoted without a reason given. I’m open to modifying my behavior in response to criticism, but just downvoting something I write doesn’t give me much information, and I find it rather unpleasant to know that people disapprove of something I’ve done, without knowing what I did wrong or what I might be able to do to fix it.
I disagree with this sentiment. If anything, giving criticism and downvoting are alternatives, not things that go together. For example, since I don’t like this idea I might have just downvoted this comment. But since I’m responding to it I’m not going to do that; it isn’t necessary to downvote if I’m going to express my criticism anyway, and most likely it wouldn’t be helpful either, since you’d probably just be annoyed by the downvote.
In other words, your comment is basically a criticizing of downvoting in general; if that is a reasonable preference, we should just remove the possibility of downvoting at all.
My personal downvoting policy is this: I tend to refrain from downvoting unless the comment really is atrocious in a way that I feel ought to be intuitively obvious. This has very little to do with the actual content of the comment and a great deal to do with the presentation; for example, I won’t downvote a comment that I disagree with, but I will downvote a comment that I perceive as adding nothing to the discussion.
In practice, this means that I do not downvote very often; in the totality of my time here on this site, I believe I’ve downvoted less than ten comments. The less atrocious comments, however, I neither upvote nor downvote; instead, I write a reply discussing what I disagree with in the comment and what can be done better. (Note that in this case I actually upvoted your comment for being well-written and thoughtful, even though I disagree with your conclusion.) In that sense, my downvoting rationale adheres to your “exclusivity” principle. And yet I feel that downvoting based on pure disagreement, which you appear to be endorsing, is rude and is not a healthy behavior for the community, seeing as it basically serves to provide negative reinforcement every time someone says something contrarian, which is hardly conducive to an atmosphere of cooperative discourse. Comments that you disagree with should be replied to, not downvoted without explanation, unless there’s some other factor unrelated to content that caused the downvote.
Most of the time, however, when I’m downvoted, I find that I can hardly discern the reason. I strive to make clear comments that express my point concisely without going on for to long, so whatever the reason is, it can’t be presentation. Content, then? But if I’m saying something stupid or wrong, I’d very much like to know! Naturally I don’t think I am, so if someone randomly downvotes one of my comments without telling me why, I’m forced to either (a) make unsupported speculations about what I’m doing wrong, or (b) disregard the downvote as uninformative and therefore not worth thinking about. Neither option seems particularly appealing to me, so I’d say that as a strategy to positively impact the behavior the of person being downvoted, your suggested policy of downvoting fails. Is there some other reason you’re endorsing it?
I did not suggest downvoting purely on account of disagreement. It is true that if I had not responded to Gondolinian’s comment, I might have downvoted it. But not just because I disagree, but because I find complaints about downvoting unpleasant and would rather see less of them on the site.
In general there might be many other reasons for downvoting which do not necessarily involve disagreement, such as vagueness, excessive verbosity, illogical reasoning, and so on. Again, of course you can simply respond and mention those things, but again in that case there is not all that much reason for downvoting at all. The advantage of downvoting is that it takes very little resources and does not require responding to something which may not be worthy of a response.
The suggested policy does not necessarily fail, for several reasons: 1) the person may indeed in some cases realize why he is being downvoted; 2) even if he does not, he may speculate randomly and modify his behavior until he is no longer downvoted—i.e. downvoting provides selective pressure on comments; 3) in some extreme cases, it would be good even if he just becomes less likely to comment at all. In any case, as I said, the point of downvoting is that such a small use of resources is involved that it is not necessary that there be some particular positive effect in every case.
I’m retracting this because in retrospect, I don’t think it was a good idea to post this (I was rather tired when I wrote this—not a state of mind known for its good judgement.), and I’d rather not worry about having this as a potential karma sink. While I still agree with what I wrote, I don’t think it was necessary to post about it, as I think most have similar preferences, and I can see how some would read it as whining (Though that’s not what I was going for.).
An explanation is better than a vote, sure, but isn’t a vote still better than nothing at all? And up is better than down in a vacuum, but up given good is as valuable as down given bad, no? It reminds me of someone’s description of pain as the greatest gift we never wanted. It is information and information tends to be good. I get not liking it, but value it. There’s no cash value to high karma.