At this point, I'm becoming afraid that some of my phrasing is so clumsy as to lead respondents far from anything I'm advocating.

  1. My rationale is that before casting any vote, up or down, we should have made a careful judgement about the value of the node's content; that what appears to me to be random ('thoughtless') upvoting is per se, a bad thing for the Monastery's utility and reputation. That belief led to my attempt a desire to spark considered conversation and thoughtful assessment of whether what I think I see is anything we -- all of us who care about PM -- need to be concerned about, and, if so, whether some approach to discouraging 'thoughtless voting' is desireable and workable.
  2. I'm NOT "proposing" any of the "flawed" options listed in the OP; in fact, my real hope is that some wiser head will come up with an approach that provides better value for whatever cost it might impose on the Monastery and the Monks
  3. Nothing in my word "penalizing" is intended to suggest any more draconian remedy than is already applied to those who spend an excessive proportion of their allotment on downvotes. The notion of taking away "your right to vote" is more than a few steps beyond anything in my list.
  4. As to "advocating for constraints on how people should assess value..."

    Actually I favor conscientiously applied *personal* constraints (something we call those 'ethics' or the like), but definitely do NOT "advocate constraints" in the sense of favoring externally imposed limitations designed to prohibit or prevent people from assessing value for themselves.

    Rather, I note that we restrain ourselves from many actions; most agree that defecating in the street is something we won't allow ourselves to do; conventionally, murder is deprecated. So too, in some cultures, is offering disrespect to one's parents. Why should we not restrain ourselves from casting upvotes for nodes which fail -- for the voter -- some test of "goodness." If anything, my arguement would be, 'if it isn't affirmatively good, don't upvote it. Simply refrain from voting!'

And, yes, I do realize that many nodes with a few positive votes also have negative overall rep. But random upvoting -- like random downvoting -- dilutes the value of rep. (Personally, I don't check best nodes or worst very often. Mostly, if I pay a visit there its because there's a shortage of new nodes or threads (past day or so) so I'm looking for something to learn from... and higher rep suggests some large plurality of those voting regarded a node as very good... or very bad. I'd love to see the day when that's actually a valid metric.

In reply to Re: Thoughtless voting? by ww
in thread Thoughtless voting? by ww

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