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Is it really that aggravating to get a secondary signal for your post quality?
This forum is extremely well-mannered when it comes to downvotes. Everything I've ever seen under 0 deserved it.
It's not a signal for post quality. I make posts which meet quite a few quality standards, but they get downvoted for making left-wing arguments.
I have seen that happen, and many of my posts have been downvoted because they also went against the hive-mind.
Very rarely do they drop below zero, though. More likely, they are "ratio-ed" by simplistic quips that align more with others.
From my point of view, compared to the perpetual abuse of fucking idiot pre-teens on Reddit and inevitable negative karma, this is still a big step up. It's, of course, easier said than done, but if you don't view votes as a symbol of quality, you can just ignore them instead of the site being changed for it.
My posts do go below 0, especially if I make my kind of arguments. I don't know what specific arguments you're making that get you downvoted, but it was a consistent pattern in on Reddit that left-wing arguments took hits only on the basis of their position.
I would argue that downvotes don't help us - they encourage people to signal their approval of an argument instead of actually engaging with it. Better to remove them and force people to respond or move along.
I will chime in and say yes, sufficiently blue opinions are more likely to get downvoted.
But I’m still tentatively in favor of keeping downvotes. My reasoning is that expressing disapproval is going to happen, and it’s better done through (initially hidden) downvotes than through reports. I’m not very confident in this; vote buttons do feel pretty tribal, which is reason enough to be suspicious.
Abuse of the report function can also be modded. Reddit, for example, bans people who abuse the Sucide Prevention Bot. Set a few examples and people will learn.
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