I mean that the new display treats users like children by assuming that they are better off not having certain information because they "can't handle the truth."

To some extent, I suppose. But it was more that we treat users like children because a bunch of us were quite tired of the many years of endless whining like little children that users were doing over and over again (but that still misses much of the picture). But I suspect that proof of childishness won't ease your annoyance with perceived paternalism. After all, surely you aren't a child. I don't actually personally think you are a child. But your node actually demonstrates how you are likely a very good example of somebody who should not be obsessing about details about these very small numbers of downvotes on many of your nodes.

But, before we get into that, let us dispense with the most important point:

You used to be able to see the exact vote totals; now you can't.

Utter bullocks. In point of fact, the public call to avoid showing "insignificant" downvotes predates the implementation of the ability to see anything but the singular sum by years. The only site change that was made was to show more information (and that change was made years ago).

[ Just a bit of a wild guess, but it is possible that you saw a different increase in the information shown more recently. It is possible that you only recently started seeing the link to Display of Node Reputation. But the least-contrived sequence that would lead to that would be:

  1. You enable "Show reputation spread"
  2. You see the annoying "no significant downvotes" disclaimer
  3. You follow the link to Display of Node Reputation
  4. You click the "suppress it" link there
  5. You spend years not seeing the annoying disclaimer and happily forget going through several of the previous steps
  6. You stumble upon Display of Node Reputation and click the "display it" link
  7. You start getting the disclaimer and want to return to the world where you didn't realize that insignificant downvotes were being hidden from you
  8. You complain loudly about this new discovery of yours
I wouldn't suggest that except that there is prior art in the whole "Steps 1..5 and 8" above, except covering a much shorter period. Perhaps Step 6 was actually a more contrived occurrence of some kind in your case. ]

So, now that your primary thesis has been declared in error, are we done? I guess not.

This is annoyingly paternalistic

The frequent whining was more annoying, IMO. If you can get everybody to always act like mature adults (which means no whining, IMO), then we can start treating everybody like mature adults in more ways. Or, if you can devise a clever CAPTCHA to distinguishing those "who can handle the (useless and misleading) 'truth'" (adults like you) from those who will whine about it...

In the mean time, one of the things I'm most happy with in regard to site changes is that it feels to me like there is much less whining about downvoting in the last couple of years (most of the mentions of downvoting in the past 2+ years have been actually due to complaining about trolling and spam, not whining resulting from tiny numbers of downvotes). And I think some of that is the result of a quite a few mostly quite minor changes that I have helped to make that I guessed could reduce how much the site encourages such whining. I'm actually a bit shocked at how well it (and other things) seems to have worked on that front.

I have a lot of insights and data and rebutting to add, but organizing it and editing parts of it into actually useful text has exceeded my available time commitment for now. If you are really keen on learning about these "insignificant" downvotes, then you can dig and find some prior talk about them. And you can even go to significant effort to capture the requested information yourself already (but please don't, since the result is likely a large waste of server resources).

- tye        

In reply to Re^3: Make it possible to see vote totals again (adults) by tye
in thread Make it possible to see vote totals again by educated_foo

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