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'm planning someday to write an entire post of my own proposing an alternative to the up/down vote system, but here I will provide a basic sum up of my thoughts on it: I agree that it's a good way to convey accurately the overall opinion of the community on the post/comment, it's just that this leads to biased interpretations of people of whether it's right or wrong.
Take for example the post here about Café Américain's article questioning the mainstream climate change narrative. I thought the article made some good points, most people didn't agree, that's okay. The problem is that the voting itself kinda warps the perception I already had; just seeing it made me feel the article had some problem or was mostly based on faulty reasoning/evidence. If it's downvoted, must be for some good reason, right?
Of course, you may scoff at this and reply "Oh hoho, we're rationality aspirants here, buddy, we're able to understand disapproval of someone's opinion does not mean anything regarding whether that opinion is solid or not!" However, this entire community is made (supposedly) of people who think that way, so that sampling leads to an not so subtle bias whether we like it or not: "since the community is made of people who try to be above bias and interpret opinions in a way that is unaffected by public opinion or peer pressure, any voting sample of those same people of an article must convey whether that article was well argued or not".
If we're going to be a rationality community, we can do better, and we might as well at least try having a review system for posts/comments that conveys how much light it brings. I'm thinking of something like Reddit's awards system along the lines of this SSC article on levels of disagreements: basically, the post/comment gets an award based on whether there was a genuine attempt to disagree in order to find some truth, or whether it was just made to boo some point of view and generate a negative response towards it, with an award that categorizes the post/comment as a meta-debate, an (bad) award for social shaming and gotchas, one for at least avoiding that and making an argument or a series of ones, one for high level disagreements over facts/meaning of words, and one for value disagreement, where there isn't any attempt to claim the other side is factually wrong, but states to have another moral framework.
Prone to improvement? Absolutely, but I consider it a step in the right direction.
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