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I think it's clear that people frequently (though certainly not exclusively) use votes as a way of expressing agreement/disagreement, despite constant exhortations not to.
People are more forgiving of combativeness when they agree with the actual content of the post. There were posts where Dase really laid into Hlynka, and those posts were still upvoted, because Dase's views are popular here and Hlynka's views are not.
On the flip side, I think this post was written tactfully, but it still ended up in the negatives - in fact I was surprised to see how many downvotes it had given how anodyne it was. Certainly posts that were much less tactful have achieved far higher scores.
I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that the vote button functions as a general boo/yay reaction in many instances. Lord knows that's how I use it a lot of the time. I think it's unavoidable. If you give people a big "I don't like this" button, and they come across a view that they find deeply objectionable, then they're liable to press the button, regardless of how well argued the post is.
It seems to me that a big part of the frustration with hlynka was his refusal to engage with certain points routinely made by his opponents, and not his views per se. Really, I don’t perceive hlynka’s views as particularly unpopular here; I’m something of a poor man’s hlynka and it seems like I’m agreeing with people more than disagreeing. Hlynka had trouble interacting with actual, literal, honest-to-God Nazis and white supremacists in a civil and constructive manner and that’s why he was such a source of frustration.
Well, that, and he couldn’t help but lump us all together and combine us with the Left racialists.
He would not recognize that a fair number of us here combine race realism with a desire for race-blind classical liberalism/individualism.
If he would have engaged with actual arguments made, instead of constantly dodging and misrepresenting them, and only been pissy with the actual Nazis and white supremacists he would probably still be around here.
It sure was a trip to watch him contort his arguments against the descriptive evidence for race realism with his anti-elite/academia views.
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I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite. There's a good point to be made about singling out Democrats being unfair given the behavior of the other party, but that's not a tactful way to make it. This is the kind of behavior I tend to see out of people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place, that, at best, they're passive aggressive in an obvious way that's harmful to the quality of the discourse, instead of taking the effort to contribute their views in a non-combative way to produce good discussion.
We might subjectively disagree over how tactful or not it is to call someone's post "weird" in this context. But the point is, I don't think 16 people downvoted that post because it called the parent post "weird". I think 16 people downvoted that post because it questioned how committed Republicans were to the principles of the anti-lockdown cause.
Posts with sharper personal insults than "weird" still manage to accumulate upvotes, if the content itself is popular enough. I already linked one. It's not that hard to find others (from multiple different users).
But these people are simply correct in many cases. In every community with reddit-style voting, posts that disagree with the consensus viewpoint are more likely to be downvoted. This is simply obvious to me based on 15+ years of watching how different internet communities behave, and my knowledge of how I personally use the voting buttons, particularly with posts that provoke a strong emotional reaction from me. I can't recall any significant counterexamples, and TheMotte is no exception.
I want to reiterate that using the vote button as an agree/disagree button isn't a bad thing. It's natural and unavoidable. The solution is to simply not have any punishment associated with a low comment score. It's already a good first step that TheMotte doesn't hide low scoring comments like reddit and HN do, and I think we should remove the rate limiting as well.
The thing that would tempt me most to downvote that (I didn't) was the following sentence:
I think there are other factors besides density and poverty: most importantly, policing.
That said, I agree with the overall thesis that people downvote for disagreement, and more than I would prefer. I would be happier with downvoting for disagreement when what is going on in someone's head is closer to "that point in that comment is wrong" than "I don't like their team."
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I have no disagreement with your opinion on the pattern of upvotes and downvotes in this case specifically, at The Motte more generally, and in places with such systems even more generally. If anything, I'd say it is a bad thing, but it's indeed natural and unavoidable. Which is why I find complaining about it to be silly and pointless. It's like whining that the Sun rises in the east.
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I didn't call anyone weird. I actually said "Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post." and went on to explain why I thought that was the case. As opposed to this post. which is dripping with condescension and outright insults such as "Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do." and has 20 upvotes to my 6 downvotes for a much milder and reasonable post that should have produced some discussion if the other party was willing.
To not accept that there is certainly a large and growing hardline conservatives only need apply culture on this form is to not see what the votes are telling you.
This post is literally a drive by insult and has 27 upvotes; 27 people thought it added to the discussion, that is what we are talking about right now...
To say that this is in any way meaningfully different from, "claiming the person [who made the post] is being weird [by making the post]" is pretty absurd in my eyes. The person who made the post is obviously the one responsible for what the post was focusing on, and you claimed that the particular focus in the post was weird. If you believe that making a post that has a weird focus isn't "being weird," then your skills at splitting hairs are greater than mine.
I also have no interest in up/downvotes in general and specifically find the idea of comparing downvotes between one's own posts and those of other people to be silly and rather narcissistic, so I won't comment on any particular comparisons.
It isn't absurd. We should be able to seperate a bad post or one that seems misdirected from the poster themselves. Not everyone is going to write a banger everytime. The post did have a bit of a weird fixation. We are supposed to be a bit objective here and perhaps have our arguments called wrong, or weird, without letting our ego's get too damaged in the process. If anything, I thought that is what this place is for.
It is nice that you don't care about upvotes and downvotes, but they do impact the discourse, especially when your posts wind up in mod que.
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