I've always felt like the reddit thread style upvote/downvote trend is extremely unhealthy for a discussion board. Upvotes and downvotes do you let you know why people agree/disagree with you or what they agree/disagree with - they're not constructive in any way.
So how about tying popularity votes to commenting? Force people to actually take part in the discussion if they want to vote on it.
The reality of this situation is either the moderation team gets a lot more comments to moderate for value, or we get a lot of non-constructive comments: "I upvoted 'cause I agree." "I down-voted 'cause this is dumb and unbalanced."
There's not really a sweet spot where the community responsibly comments enough that moderation doesn't have to intervene, and even then we'd need to find a way to retroactively remove the vote if the comment isn't sufficiently adding to the discussion. It just isn't plausible.
I mean that would only apply if someone were to disagree with a post. What are people going to say when they like the post? Say "I agree" in the comments?
I downvoted because I feel like this would be tedious and add very little to the discussion as many people would be downvoting you for the exact same reason, additionally if you got some sort of notification when you were downvoted most people who were at least slightly active on the board would get a lot of unnecessary spam
No.
I think a better solution may be to hide upvotes/downvotes for a certain amount of time after it posts, to help curb mob mentality, as a lot of people tend to assume a post is good because it is upvoted and thus upvote themselves, or assume it is bad because of downvotes and downvote themselves. Not a crazy amount of time, but make it where only the OP can see the vote count for 15 mins or so.
I am not completely sure on what the limits are though, so that may be an impossibility.
Force people to actually take part in the discussion if they want to vote on it.
I saw "force people into arguments when they'd rather not engage." When we make a post, we're not entitled to comments, nor required to participate in the discussion if we agree or disagree.
I believe the original purpose of reddit-style post organization was for Q&A threads, for when people were looking for an answer to their problem. Posts that were upvoted the highest generally received a “best response” tag and was placed at the top of the comments to make it easier to find.
No because it doesn't add anything to most discussions. Kinda like this post.
I only want votes to not be anonymous. A little list with voters on the bottom of the thread.
This way I know which people I have to kill
Voting should be a more responsible decision.
I also don't think that witch hunts would be much of an issue.
