Hey! Thanks for responding :D
I think I see what you mean, and I understand how controversial this idea is with regards to the boards.
Disclaimers:
I'm not going to say my solution is the be-all-end-all for them. I understand that my perspective is limited and I probably don't know what's best any better than most other users.
I'm very passionate about this and I've got lots of ideas, so I'd like to request that you take the time to read the whole comment that follows. And I'd like to apologize in advance if it is a bit long.
Now personally I don't think the whole voting system should go. Just the ability to downvote (or at least the ability to downvote without commenting).
To demonstrate why I think this is practical, I'd like to analyze use cases for the voting system to try to identify it's core purposes and why people like to use it the way that it is. Please feel free to correct me or suggest items I've forgotten, I'd be happy to alter the lists if I've misunderstood something important.
legitimate upvote use cases:
- To show support for an idea or question
- To demonstrate agreement with an idea
- to represent how popular an idea is
legitimate downvote use cases:
- To oppose an idea (can be done by commenting)
- To represent how unpopular an opinion or idea is (unnecessary IMO because offensive or low-effort content is already reportable and can be removed by Moderators)
- To filter out bad content on the boards (again, can be done by reporting and by moderation)
I've shown my bias here, I don't see benefits to downvoting when generally the same functionality can be had from other existing systems. Popular ideas already take off with upvotes and will rise above others. Controversial ideas can spark discussion more easily if they cannot be downvoted into oblivion. And offensive content can be reported and dealt with that way.
That said there's nothing wrong with using downvoting for the above reasons. The issue is when users misuse the downvote system to manipulate threads or other users. These are the actual problems I'd like to talk about, so let's look at some problem cases:
Illegitimate downvote use cases:
- To bury other comments in a thread so that one's own comment appears higher up in the "best" filtered view, essentially manipulating the system to appear higher in the thread.
- To antagonize a user into reacting badly to another user by leaving an anonymous downvote and making them think their discussion opponent/partner is petty or rude.
Now removing downvoting completely would be extreme, but it would solve both of these problems by preventing the aforementioned manipulations.
Other possible solutions that I'm aware of:
- Separate upvote and downvote scores
-This would better reflect how popular AND unpopular a comment or post is. Posts with high scores in one, both or neither could be filtered appropriately under categories like "best," and, "controversial"
- Require comments to downvote, or otherwise implement a method for moderators to identify who is doing the downvoting.
-This would make it painfully obvious if a user were doing either of the two abuse cases I outlined above, and would make it much easier to reduce that behavior on the boards.
