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Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad, downvoting things you disagree just ends up looking like "they hated him because he spoke the truth".
That is, a downvoted post be such due to it being wrong, or due to it being heterodox with regards to the majority opinion on this site. A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.
[1]Apocryphally:
The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.
No, they weren't. Many people pushed back against that claim. The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.
You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?
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this comment has a nice "to be fair you have to have a high IQ to understand themotte" type vibe to it, which comes across as pseudointellectual at best.
more seriously though, just because a comment is highly downvoted doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently garbage or that it was a "low IQ" opinion. a lot of very smart opinions or ideas were not deemed to be very popular in the past, and I think it'd be foolish to think that what we think is objectively correct.
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just 100 years ago, high IQ people had consensus that smoking was good
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I'd say I covered that with "Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad".
Strong disagree. Even if you're right about the IQ and what it means (I personally lean to us not being as smart as we think we are), high-IQ does not mean unbiased, and so we are not a representative sample of all high-IQ people, which means we are perfectly capable of downvoting comments just because we don't like them, rather than them being wrong.
To expand on that, a +35 comment is easily in the top 10% of most-upvoted comments on any given thread. Most comments are +10 or less. Community consensus with such a small group means very little.
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