in reply to Encouraging comments for downvotes

One thought I had considered before is forcing a reason to be entered with each vote. This may put too much strain on PM system resources, though.

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Re: Re: Encouraging comments for downvotes
by diotalevi (Canon) on Apr 05, 2004 at 15:50 UTC
    It would also cause me to never vote. It'd be too much trouble. Who'd want to look at all the notes anyway? Yuck! There'd be jillions of them all over.

      It'd be rare that I would look at notes for upvotes, but if one of my nodes has a significant number of downvotes, I want to know why.

      This is just an idea to help people think before they vote. I fully expect that there would be fewer votes cast. That may also mean that XP becomes a more meaningful indicator of community acceptance of a node.

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        I'd be unhappy if my participatory node-resorting feature were removed to replace it with your acceptance-metric. This brings up the related question - most of the time the vote total on any node is hidden anyway. Most people don't sort nodes on reputation (I do). This means that neither of our outcomes are helping these two other populations (people who don't vote / can't vote (the other 2/3rd of the population that is anonymous for instance), people who aren't logged in and haven't chosen to sort by rep).

      I am voting neither up or down on your post because you have a valid comment, but you do not offer any other solutions. ;-)

      Maybe you can help figure out a way that would provide more information to the people reading the nodes? As a reader I would like to know if someones post is incorrect.

        As a reader you typically don't know what the vote totals are and even with the vote totals they won't tell you anything about the quality or accuracy of the comment. I have not heard an idea about this "problem" which won't be a royal pain in the general case. I don't want to have to send people private messages when I vote. I don't want to have to write public messages when I vote. I don't want my access to positive or negative votes restricted because I'm not interesting in justifying my every action.

        Generally I vote because I liked/disliked something, agreed/disagreed with, am annoyed with the person, am annoyed with the thread, am being deliberately contrary to someone's expectations (this is usually a -- vote for people who complain about -- voting), or most commonly am just exerting some control over the sorting of the nodes in the thread.