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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45552 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Let me know if this is better suited for the suggestions thread, but as it stands Skylab's comment is at 20 downvotes. Is Skylab not contributing to the conversation? Not enough evidence of claims? Is TheMotte.org userbase already eagerly using downvoting as a disagree button?

Not that this necessarily applies here, but I always thought of a solution where mods could booby-trap unpopular but constructive comments - high-signal rule-conforming comments, and automatically warn or even temporarily remove voting privileges from users who downvote the tripwired comment to 'train' them. I probably would've already tripped this trap a couple times by now, fwiw. This might lead to accusations of mod-favoritism.

I'm a downvoter in this case; not sure if my motivations are generalizable but here we go.

Why downvote this particular comment?

  • It contains a fairly outrageous claim with no evidence, not even bad evidence, presented.

Why downvote any comments?

  • Comments like this reduce the value of the thread for me; stopping to consider whether it made any sense broke the flow and ultimately I discarded the claims without learning anything. A downvote is a cheap way of giving feedback (to a well intentioned writer at least) that they should consider trying a bit harder.

  • Readers are going to have varying levels of knowledge on a given topic, and varying levels of patience for reading (and evaluating) rebuttals. A big negative score will at least signal that a claim is controversial.

I would bolt from this place if any traps were set. That's a level of official hostility that I don't want to contend with.

Downvotes don't matter in the slightest here. They don't even reduce visibility. Caring too much about score is more of a problem than people just arbitrarily downvoting stuff and not following "reddiquette" (which has been a joke since the very start).

It's ridiculous to expect users not to use it as a disagree button, and downvotes come from the ether anyway. It's bad form to complain about them in any circumstance.

That said, I've never seen any opinion, no matter how absurd, receive downvotes that was even-keeled, explained coherently, and delivered with some sort of assurance that rebuttals would be taken in good faith. And anything with 2+ good links will be net positive as well.

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