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 -
No, voting patterns do not necessarily reflect value, truth, or even provide useful information for that matter. I recall recently on reddit's quant forum someone asked about about which strategy an individual was using, and I answered exactly and was still downvoted a lot even though no one objected or responded to how I was wrong, nor did anyone supply a better answer. My explanation was almost verbatim as the guy's strategy. Same for dieting/weight-loss subs where people get downvoted for perfectly good or useful advice. There are many instances like this, where perfectly good, well-worded responses get downvotes.
Not just Reddit but also Hacker News has this problem. Early on during Covid, for example, commenters who questioned the official narratives about the origins of virus and mask/social distancing efficacy were downvoted heavily; fast-forward four years and even the NYTs is writing full-featured articles entertaining the possibly of a lab leak, because no better explanation has been brought forward.
Just because voting patterns sometimes convey useful information does not mean they do often enough to be considered objective or reliable. If people did downvote out of disliking something personally, that would still convey information compared to voting on things even if there is no evident reason as to how or why it is bad, only that it is. For example, downvotes on comments promoting capitalism on a Marxist sub would be expected, but imagine if pro-Marx posts got downvoted a lot too. That would be confusing, but that is what happens a lot too.
I think there should be a delay before votes are visible to prevent possible bandwagon effects but I think votes should be shown to the individual in-real time so as to be able to better-ascertain the quality of a comment. If something is getting heavily downvoted, in light of the above, it may still may me pause and think if I am epistemologically blind to something. A few comments which explicitly and strongly state where I wrong is reason enough to know it will be downvoted a lot without having to see the number.
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