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 -
I think the dogpiles for valuable comments is good information to receive. The information in that case is that the value system of the subreddit has heavily diverged from your value system and you should leave. And you can feel free to trash talk them elsewhere where you know that people do share your value system.
I don't like capping. It loses information to spare feelings. But again the votes are generally representing a true underlying sentiment. In a place like TheMotte that sentiment will just come out via comments.
Yeah but values systems can change with the introduction of new information. For example, early on during covid in 2020 comments on Hacker News that diverged from the Official Narrative were heavily downvoted. Now the pendulum has swung 3/4 the other way. I think it's valuable keeping these people around. They were not wrong but early.
Their values (downvote anyone with socially-disapproved views) haven’t changed; the only thing that has changed is which views are socially-disapproved.
For the open-minded HN commenters, sure, it’s nice to have people of opposing views stick around, since odds are some subject will come up where they’ll end up being right. But for the ones who were right about Covid and were downvoted into oblivion, why exactly would they want to stick around? Votes are information. In the case of Covid skepticism, the crowd at HN was opposed to hearing from anyone who questioned the Official Narrative. If the skeptics left and the site is now poorer for it, the user base has no one but themselves to blame. As with voters a democracy, they deserve to get what they want, good and hard.
Because there will be no communities remaining by this criteria . There will always be some issue where there is friction for any community no matter how compatible your values are.
Maybe so, maybe not. If your primary value is truth-seeking/learning and you find out that the community you’re participating in has conflicting overarching values (social conformity, for example), then the mismatch will cause friction. To me, that seems like a cue to move on and to try to find a different community with values that more closely match your own.
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Well yeah, that's exactly my point. I'd say that capping to prevent excessive dogpiling is a retention measure of sorts -- the idea is exactly that for a forum like this you want to keep people who have heavily divergent value systems around still, right? Perhaps inorganically limiting vote information is just slightly harmful to the individual but the benefit to the community is of some substance in comparison. And to some extent, all our online structured interactions already have inorganic limitations, so I don't see why capping would be off limits or a violation of some special principle.
We're already making compromises for the sake of many things. If you wanted maximal value + information exchange/interaction you'd be like, hopping on a Discord call directly with someone, but the nature of the forum is that many don't have time for that and also that this more limited form allows broader viewership and participation beyond a bilateral exchange. And text-based communication, I'd argue, is inherently more likely to result in hurt feelings than other types where you have tone and nonverbal cues and trust etc etc so attempting to set limits on drive-by casual sources of emotional hurt is completely logical. Dogpiles are like, a negative externality rather than a deliberate and attributable decision of any one person or group.
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I thought people with heavily diverged value systems leaving, is exactly what we want to avoid?
Depends on the value systems we are talking about. Divergent political beliefs, we'd like to keep.
But divergent value systems related to discussion are not what we'd like to keep. For example, if you think its a good idea to insult everyone you speak with that disagrees with you then I don't want you here.
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I suspect there are different groups here with differing attitudes on that point. Some of us like having a diversity of views (this is one reason I upvote posts that I disagree with), while others are happy to see this place turned into an echo-chamber. Votes come from both groups.
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