I think “blind voting” captures the distinction better – the key difference is whether you’re supposed to look at or model the outcome.
Btw another reason I think “take total karma into account” is important is because of how big a slap downvotes feel like. Blind voting both means that “mildly good comments” will get like 80 karma, but also means that mildly bad comments will get like −80 karma, which would make the site feel very punishing.
I do think that it would be very bad if this happened. However I don’t think this is likely. Quoting my other comment:
I think its important to note here that we are not really that homogenous in our opinions and weightings of different sources of value. Alot of the worries about Blind voting seem to assume that we’re all going to vote the same way about the same posts which I think is highly unrealistic. There also seems to be the assumption that everything fractionally above 0 value will get an upvote which again seems unrealistic.
This seems even more true for downvotes—I think people realise that downvotes feel extra bad and only use them sparingly. For instance, I only really downvote when I think something has been a definite breaking of a conversational norm or if someone is doubling down on an argument which has been convincingly refuted.
I think a spread of opinions on what constitutes a downvote (and a general feeling that comments get less votes in general) would make the −80 only happen to super egregiously bad comments.
I think “blind voting” captures the distinction better – the key difference is whether you’re supposed to look at or model the outcome.
Btw another reason I think “take total karma into account” is important is because of how big a slap downvotes feel like. Blind voting both means that “mildly good comments” will get like 80 karma, but also means that mildly bad comments will get like −80 karma, which would make the site feel very punishing.
I do think that it would be very bad if this happened. However I don’t think this is likely. Quoting my other comment:
This seems even more true for downvotes—I think people realise that downvotes feel extra bad and only use them sparingly. For instance, I only really downvote when I think something has been a definite breaking of a conversational norm or if someone is doubling down on an argument which has been convincingly refuted.
I think a spread of opinions on what constitutes a downvote (and a general feeling that comments get less votes in general) would make the −80 only happen to super egregiously bad comments.