| > Who is served by the downvote? I’m served by the downvote in knowing that what I said was downvoted. Usually, I don’t need a substantive conversation from everyone who dislikes my comment. The signal that someone dislikes is useful enough. It’s like in a conversation, sometimes I’ll see a frown or drawn up eyes. I don’t want, or need, every time I say something stupid to have the other conversants stop me and say “well prepend, in that usage...” I think there’s a mismatch of conversation goals. The school of thought that downvotes shouldn’t be used seems to value engagement over value and content. My goal is to learn and teach the most through comments. To convince and be convinced. As efficiently as possible. Looking back at comments that are -n the downvotes are usually enough to understand what I did wrong and how to improve. Not always, but usually. And I would have hated it instead of that score I had n+2 comments engaging with me for how they didn’t like it. Or worse, no comment and no downvote. I think the latter is more likely as while I will downvote things I don’t like, I’ll rarely comment unless I have something substantive to say. I think one of the main defects in Facebook, Twitter, etc is that there is no downvote, only upvote. So there’s no social norm to signify displeasure so we get into this weird cycle where people only know what works and it’s harder to know what doesn’t work. I think social medial would be better off if we could distinguish the 1million upvoted content vs the 1million up, 1 million down, net zero content. But social media doesn’t really care about providing great content, they only want content good enough to keep me screaming and clicking. |