in reply to discouraging vindictiveness

making the identities of downvoters publicly evident to everyone

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. :-)

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: discouraging vindictiveness (reasons?)
by tye (Sage) on Oct 24, 2004 at 15:23 UTC

    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        

[reply]
      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
[reply]

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