Just about every time there is a meta discussion there are people suggesting that upvotes/downvotes are just agree/disagree buttons, or that we should just get rid of them altogether.
It is less common to see a defense of voting, but I think it is desperately needed.
My main thesis is that votes are accurate at conveying information, but that many people do not like the information they convey. I believe most people treat the vote buttons as basically a like/dislike button. Users do not always enjoy learning that their posts are "disliked" or the posts of their own that they like the most aren't always "liked" as much by others. Hiding votes does not remove the underlying sentiment though, it just makes it harder to pick up on, or delays discovery for the writer.
Looking through my own "top" and "bottom" comments I am not surprised or offended by their placement. My "bottom" comments are often my controversial mod decisions, or times when I have decided to defend viewpoints that are unpopular here on TheMotte (like race blindness, or open borders). The most hated "controversial" comments also seem to be ones where I am closing off avenues of discussion rather than opening them up. My top comments are usually me sharing information/perspective on a culture war topic that others might not have. And a few times of me writing good pieces about culture war stuff. I often find it helpful to look at other user's top/bottom comments when I have to do mod related research. Top comments often provide many reasons for exoneration, and bottom comments can highlight patterns of bad behavior. An important thing to note here is that votes are great for comparing comments within a single user's history, but not between users.
The agree/disagree critique
One common critique that I linked to above is that people just use the buttons as shorthand for agree/disagree and that this signalling of agreement or disagreement would lead to favored views being rewarded too much, and unfavored views being chased off.
However, this is a problem with and without voting buttons. At best your are simply delaying this discovery for a few moments before they get flooded with comments that very clearly indicate people disagree with them. I did not need to wait 24 hours to find out that people disagreed with me on race blindness or open borders. It was very quickly obvious from the responses (and I was aware before hand that these views would be controversial).
I also think votes, and especially visible vote scores can be a bit of a pressure valve. There are sometimes people that just feel the need to express in some way "I don't like your post/views". One way for them to do this is to downvote. Another way for them to do this is to leave a short comment to the same effect. Sometimes the comment might even look like they are interested in a discussion. When I am in the position of getting dogpiled for a controversial view I would universally prefer the downvote to a go-no-where comment that basically says "i don't like your post/views". This is also one of the times when I most wish I could see other people's vote scores. I'd prefer responding to what other people consider the "best" version of the counterarguments.
Finally, what is so bad about signalling agreement or disagreement? People have views and opinions, we don't need to fool ourselves on this. I don't think we are tricking anyone by hiding the votes that these disagreements don't exist.
Ending notes:
- I am writing this as a user stating my preferences. There has not been internal mod discussion about changes to voting. Status quo is likely to remain in place.
- It is probably a little rude to go through other people's history for examples an counterexamples to voting. I'm fine with anyone doing that with my profile, but its probably best to not drag other users into this discussion unless someone gives explicit permission.
- The rdrama codebase that the site is based on had more features and granularity around voting, we mostly do not have those features turned on or fully working on this website.
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Notes -
If what we care about is incentivizing good discourse then it makes sense to separate the singular vote into different metrics:
insightfulness
concision (& citation)
enjoyability
agreement
I think these are the top four. Perhaps the “singular vote” can be an amalgamation of these, if we even need the singular value. Each of these four has its own use. Agreement serves a polemic function, insight is the actual reason and telos of all discourse, enjoyability is a requirement for all reading due to human nature, and concision is the efficiency metric which benefits total discourse by increasing the amount of reading someone can do. By separating the singular vote into four, someone can see where his posts can be improved. The number can appear like the “cardinal directions” with a value on all four sides, and if we want a singular value it would appear in the middle. The numerals can be color-coded or gradiated by opacity/boldness so it stands out to the eye.
The current “singular vote” is not optimal. It weighs way too heavy toward agreeement and effort. Agreeability serves a function but it too easily becomes mob rule. For certain issues, only the most passionate people are going to vote, so it allows the impassionata way too much influence on the exact topics that should be dispassionately voted on. Effort is nice, but if the post isn’t insightful, concise, and enjoyable, then the effort is misplaced. By having four different metrics we can now sort comments in interesting ways: which are the most enjoyable? Which are the most insightful?
I disagree that “votes” don’t matter, as I have a feeling that all discourse invariability imitates the form of the discourse. Twitter isn’t just a medium, it is itself is a message, because its form incentivizes a particular kind of dumbed-down ”common folk” quip. There’s likely an invisible effect from all voting methods and all medium formats.
I also think a user shouldn’t have unlimited votes. There should be a set number of votes they can apply per week. If they want to vote more than that then their vote should be discounted. I think the kind of person who votes on every comment they read is a unique personality profile which doesn’t represent the total community.
With a multi vote system I'd just worry that all votes would tend to heavily correlate. You could tell people to vote a certain way, but they don't listen when told "dont just vote based on agreement" so why would they listen to the rules for another system?
We also have a two vote system sort of. Reporting things is kind of a mega vote. With lots of ways things can be 'negative quality' and just one way that they can be positive quality: AAQCs. These two voting systems do tend to often correlate.
How much do votes matter to you when writing things on here? Introspectively I like knowing the vote numbers, but I care more about the feedback coming from people actually responding and commenting. It was the same on reddit. If I ever had comments that got negative amounts of karma, but then one person saying "not sure where all the downvotes are coming from, i totally agree with you". My overall feelings about that comment would be positive not negative.
I suppose I feel that the form of this website is truly text and discussion based. The votes are there as an extra thing. They are akin to facial expressions in a conversation. They can say things, sometimes quite a bit. But you also need to do the whole speaking thing for the facial expressions to even matter.
I don't like limiting vote numbers, I feel the numbers are already low enough. And I feel that the reporting system is a way of having "limited voting numbers" its not limited strictly, it just has a sort of soft limit where reporting things isn't as low effort as voting, so people tend to do it way less. I also feel that limiting voting systems creates a place where there are big winners/losers and then a huge section of middle ground where nothing gets voted on at all. So asking for it kind of feels like just asking for no voting at all, but still allowing a reporting system.
What was the most controversial post that gathered the most AAQCs and "regular" reports?
I'd have to guess one of Hlynka's posts, but I'm not actually sure.
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TIL that while we don't have access to the reporting numbers, we can sort all comments ever by controversial, with the most controversial comment of all time being about communication styles.
I was not surprised in confirming that it's easy to sort all posts by controversial... or really in seeing that the most controversial post of all time was about philosophy of science.
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Yeah, multi-vote systems are a classic "I have a new system that if everyone uses it correctly will solve the problem of people using the current system incorrectly"
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I think in interest of actual usability, two scores could be used on a positive/neutral/negative scale: 'value' and 'agreement'. You could remove the neutral if you want since it's basically the default reading of a non-vote. So then you get +/- on value and agreement. Lots of times I can see value in posts that I disagree with and my usual habit has always been to prioritize that as the metric I use. Others prioritize agreement. Maybe you could separate them out. I have my doubts that it would work, but maybe.
This scheme assumes no strategic voting. And strategic voting under this scheme is just "always vote down both value and agreement", so it's pretty easy.
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A problem with “value” is that biased people will misconstrue agreement for value yet again. Value is too vague. Dunking on someone will be “valuable”. With something like “concision” and “insight”, it’s much harder to fib to yourself that you’re not upvoting it just because you agree with it.
Ultimately defectors with defect. But there must be some way to mechanism design theory our way toward to optimal discourse.
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