What does a downvote indicate? I have never understood.
Does it mean:
1. I don’t agree with you
2. Your post is spam
3. I don’t like you
4. You’re factually wrong
5. Your content made me upset or sad
6. This doesn’t contribute anything
All of these things are better served as a reply or not vote at all.
Karma doesn’t really give you much. When you see a post you’ve made get -n votes, what are you to think? Are you to change in some way?
Some different implementations of voting that I would like to see tested are:
1. upvote only. Let the bad stuff filter to the bottom.
2. gas. Assign a cost to upvoting or downvoting. Especially with downvoting and flagging. Require the user to really think about what they want to downvote. For example this cost might be: a point system of which you get limited number of points per time period, or more interestingly you loose an upvote for every downvote.
Yes to all of it. pg decided years ago that if it was permissible to upvote for any reason, it was permissible to downvote for any reason. All that matters is that signal gets separated from noise - by any definition of noise - as aggressively as possible.
Also downvoting is preferred to replying because replies tend to either lead to arguments or else pollute the thread with uninteresting tangents.
In my experience, if you manage to get more than two downvotes and it persists, or you've been flagged, it's obvious why. Everything else tends to either be corrected or else settle at 0.
Does it mean:
1. I don’t agree with you
2. Your post is spam
3. I don’t like you
4. You’re factually wrong
5. Your content made me upset or sad
6. This doesn’t contribute anything
All of these things are better served as a reply or not vote at all.
Karma doesn’t really give you much. When you see a post you’ve made get -n votes, what are you to think? Are you to change in some way?
Some different implementations of voting that I would like to see tested are:
1. upvote only. Let the bad stuff filter to the bottom.
2. gas. Assign a cost to upvoting or downvoting. Especially with downvoting and flagging. Require the user to really think about what they want to downvote. For example this cost might be: a point system of which you get limited number of points per time period, or more interestingly you loose an upvote for every downvote.
3. Back off times. One cannot mass cast votes.
4. Votes are public.
5. Downvoted require a comment.