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The_Yoda on 03 January 2022
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Ryuu96 said:
Jaicee said:

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!! Had to say that since this my first post of 2022. Anyway...

This subject gets revisited every so often and my opinion remains unchanged: I don't really see the policy as a big deal one way or the other, but personally I dislike down-voting, mainly because my comments often get down-voted, seemingly because I often offer nuanced views about things and that's way too independent a thought pattern for most people. Either that or I dared write with more feeling than an Amazon Alexa response. It's discouraging because I tend to put a lot of effort into my contributions for them to just be lazily swatted down and stigmatized with the click of a button. Detractors should have to put more effort into their gripes than that, I feel. But then maybe there wouldn't be so many of those because most people are too lazy to actually explain why they object, especially if it involves writing more than one or two sentences.

I don't feel like I fit in very well as things are, so the unfortunate truth is that I become discouraged easily. Half the time if I see a down-vote by a comment I made, I'll just delete the comment to avoid the impending, humiliating pile-on that may hurt my reputation on the main forums as well, to say nothing of frankly my soul. And them maybe I'll think two or three times before offering another opinion on an article in the future. Maybe other people with higher self-esteem than me respond differently, but that's how it often goes for me.

There's surely a reason why down-voting ain't an option here on the main forums. I don't see why there's a divergence in the policy that way. Makes no sense to me.

Jaicee said:

Maybe that's how people with higher self-esteem them are inclined to respond, but I can't help getting discouraged, besides which I simply lack the energy to bother half the time these days. I mean it's an anonymous down-vote; what's there to respond to? It's not like the other person offered a counterpoint or something. It's also not like most people are persuadable anyway, and least of all the kind of lazy asshole who goes around throwing those out anonymously (it usually happens in waves, in my observation, with people going through and down-voting everyone who criticized company A or something like that) and then just vanishes.

I'd at least like to know WHO is doing the down-voting because if it's certain people then I won't care. I don't hold everyone here in equal esteem and will have an easier time disregarding certain people's negative opinions.

That's a shame and exactly my worry, I don't consider you or Zkup to be trolls who make crappy posts, quite the opposite, your posts are often detailed and thought out but we have you both claiming to have received downvote barrages in the past which have pushed you away from commenting, I don't see how this issue gets better, I see it getting worse, downvotes weaponised more and good users discouraged from posting.

I'll say again, the chances of someone not posting anymore because they were downvote bombed is hugely higher than someone deciding to not comment anymore because they lost downvoting power, it's a weigh up of which is hurting the site more and I believe downvotes are.

I also agree, I'm not sure why downvoting isn't an option in the main forums, I also don't understand why there's a difference in policy, it does make no sense, I've asked why in this thread multiple times and nobody else seems to know why there should be a difference either, not that I would want downvoting in forums, I think that would be awful but I think that's what most others would think too, so why the difference?

I'd be fully in favour of making downvotes and upvotes not anonymous anymore.

I have rarely seen meaningful discussion in the comments on articles.  Normally I see shallow opinion and by shallow I mean not well supported. People don't typically write half a page worth of response in support of their view in the comment section.  The default sorting option is by popularity.  Simply put I don't see it as in depth discussion.

Threads on the other hand often contain replies (gems here and there) that have a good deal of effort behind them and I believe the evolution of the conversation is important (i.e. being in chronological order is quite important).  Sorting on the metric of popularity has no place in a thread but finds a good home in the comment section. If someone wants to disagree and make it known then they can make a comment rather than just give a thumbs down.