I'm confused. You think making up- and down- voters public will turns things into /less/ of a popularity contest, and /discourage/ vendetta voting? I think it will make possible people looking at who downvotes their nodes, and put them on an "enimies" list. You can't have reprisals against downvoters if you don't know who they are. Keeping the voters private is essensial to keeping the system about nodes, and not people...

...and I don't think downvoting is that common. There are currently 4,609,507 upvotes and 421,744 downvotes known to the system. That means that about 11% of all votes are downvotes. I suspect that that's about right. Do the nodes that deserve downvoting get downvoted, and those that deserve upvotes get upvoted? I really don't know. There's certianly no way to determine that with something as simple as select count(*) from vote where weight=-1. In fact, there's no way to determine that at all. I can mearly determine if those nodes that /I/ think should be voted on purticular ways get voted that way. I could even, if I wanted to, make sure. But doing so would impose /my/ thoughts on what nodes are good and what nodes are bad, and I that's not what the monestary is about, or what being a God is about.

The voting system isn't perfect by any means. But I think your first suggestion would make things much, much worse. The second I'm not sure about, but I'm beginning to suspect that making downvotes harder to give would result in not enough negitive feedback, and sometimes negitive feedback, rather then a lack of positive feedback, is just what the Dr. ordered.

making the identities of downvoters publicly evident to everyone

It sounds to me like censoring. Imagine going to the polls and a bell rings when you cast a ballot against the government. Sort of an Orwellian situation.

It would surely discourage downvoting, but it would undermine the spirit of the voting system as well.

losing XP instead of gaining it for a vote cast to the negative

Why should I be punished for servicing the community? Either you don't understand the voting system or I have a peculiar view of it.

The voting system is a game that encourages you to post high quality contents. If you knew in advance that nobody would downvote your post, you would be tempted of posting the most shabby things that pop out of your head. As the system works now, most people try to post something decent because they fear the community reaction, which is expressed both by downvoting and by pointed answers.

Downvoting, like upvoting, is the feeling of the community. If you perceive these downvotes as being "given in spite", then I am afraid you don't have a clear view of the Monastery yet.

Let's say you got downvoted once. It means one person is telling you that there is something wrong in what you say, e.g. your code is poorly written, or you are suggesting something against the generally accepted rules.

If you get downvoted many times, it means that many people don't agree with you either because your code is wrong, or because you are shouting. If the mass downvoting happen in a thread with a deep level of nested answers (what some people call "a flame") it means that you are debating strongly against the beliefs of many people. It should not surprise you that, in such cases, many people downvote your nodes to express their feelings. That's part of the game as well, IMHO. It helps keeping this site quite more elevated than /.

BTW, I downvoted your proposal, to express my disagreement. Now, what should I do? Wear a "I --ed a node" T-shirt?

Take it easy, pal. It's a game. And very often when a node shows up in PM discussion asking to change the rules, it gets downvoted. The majority of people here like the rules as they are.

I guess this has something to do with the thread led by Musing on Monastery Content.

Nobody is happy when get down voted, but don't take it too close to your heart. Lots of time things are not black and white, so different people could hold different views, and sometime the views just go totally opposite. The fact that you get down voted means that there were quite a few people disagree with you, and they did express their disagreement. Well, you don't expect everyone agree with you on everything you said, do you? Everybody has the right to cast the votes according to their belief, not yours. This same principle applies when you vote on others' node ;-)

It is true that "PerlMonks Discussion" is little bit more sensitive than other rooms, which is quite obvious and normal ;-) So take it easy. As the room is much less technology related, it is quite normal that the votes casted in this room actually is more about the popularity than other rooms do.

If you believe that you were right, you are not forced to drop your own view. That's your freedom of thought. On the other hand, you could well be right.

However there is always a chance that you might be wrong, just like anyone might. Don't close the door, think about it. When I use the words "right" or "wrong", keep in mind, don't view things "black" and "white", which means don't take things "100 percent wrong" or "100 percent right".

A small hint: Considering the Monastery voting system is always a pathologic sign of XP addictiveness.

Don't be afraid of it, this is just the proof that the incubation period has been reached and you're a real perl monk now... ;)

Here and in the last bit--Musing on Monastery Content--you have written about the quality and appropriateness of votes; and implied that those who can't vote properly, as defined by a long, opaque set of rules, shouldn't be allowed to vote. A vote is a symbol of an opinion. If you assert, however indirectly, that no one has any right to have an opinion unless they arrived at it by an approved process, you'll get downvotes. It's not a mystery.

The flip-side of discouraging vindictiveness is the difficult to accept but often valid understanding one's subjective, meandering, and off-topic provocations.

To the person who shows the people of earth a voting system that prevents people from "vindictiveness" ... this person is due a Nobel Peace Prize.

People are *constantly* letting their opinions be influenced by their opinions of someone elses "popularity". It's the reason why ad hominem attacks are effective, it's the reason why used car dealers always try to act like "your friend", it's the reason why politicians invoke the name of a "favorite bad guy" to criticize the policies they dont like.

"teaching art in public schools should be banned because Hitler got his start as an art student"

People *constantly* make silly statements like that. Part of honing your own critical thinking skills is the ability to recognize this tendency, and filter it out of your own decision making process.

Judge by the content of their character, not by the XP on their home node.

Here's a suggestion: When a downvote is entered, you are kept anonymous, but in order for your downvote to be registered, you must enter form data, explaining why you downvoted.

This would server 2 purposes:

1. It would slightly discourage downvoting by requiring "effort" to do it.

2. It would eliminate "spiteful" downvotes, by listing the reasons for the downvote.

You could even have "voting" on the reasons for the downvote. :-)

root says Your Re: discouraging vindictiveness was downvoted because: You suck. You're an idiot. Please go away or just kill yourself.

Yes, providing an anonymous way to heap abuse onto people would be a wonderful addition to the site. (:

- tye        

Ok, how about a filter on the formdata to remove obvious personal attacks, and only allow real reasons? Or checkboxes that only list the common reasons.

By the way, downvoting isn't anonymous anyways, because "vroom" knows who sent that downvote.

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

It would be nice with voting (both up and down) if there was a comment part - yes, it's always nice to be upvoted and always a little disheartening to be downvoted but in both cases sometimes it's nice to know why it's been voted a certain way.

This is definitely true of downvoting. Okay, so if you've but an obviously flame-baiting post up then the reason for the downvoting is pretty apparent; but sometimes you express an opinion, or attempt to post an answer and you get downvoted... but you don't know why. It's fair enough that someone thinks that what you say is wrong or is flawed in some way, but unless they back it up with a reply to your post, how are you going to know where you went wrong?

We learn from our mistakes; but if they're not pointed out, how can we do that? I know that sometimes I'm wrong (maybe because my knowledge has a holes where I don't expect them or because I maybe replied too fast and missed something or maybe just because I'm plain wrong) but I for one would like someone to actually point out where I was wrong - not just anonymously downvote me. Show me and I shall learn.

Even with up-voting it would be nice sometimes to know why someone thinks your post / reply is good. Perhaps this doesn't have as much value as identifying your mistakes, but nice nonetheless.

Still, all that said, the voting system does work quite nicely given it's simplicity and certainly gives the incentive to want to contribute to the community and makes you feel more part of it.

As for showing who's voted for / against posts, this could be a good thing, but I think each person should be able to choose whether to have their name shown with their votes or not, and/or only people of a certain rank (or rank AND number of posts) should be able to view the names. Someone who's been here a while and posted a lot is less likely to take downvotes personally than someone new.