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by saurik 5479 days ago
...but then, what is the difference between an opinion you disagree with (a "dissenting view") and one that you believe to be factually incorrect? I feel like downvoting the former "factually wrong" comment leads to the behavior that ColinWright is describing: where people downvote anything they disagree with. (One might even argue that this is a fundamental bug in having downvoting as a mechanism.)
2 comments
ColinWright 5479 days ago
People do down-vote anything they disagree with, and there's nothing that can stop that. You can't change people's behavior.

However, removing the ability to down-vote won't really change anything in this regard, except that it will stop people from feeling attacked when they get a down-vote. What would change is that there would be no feedback about genuinely inappropriate comments, and I think that would be bad.

The only thing I can think of is to separate "down-vote" (meaning "of little value") from "inappropriate", label them clearly as such, and have the consequences of a "down-vote" less apparent and less severe. Then you can only trust that the behavior will sort itself as the "community" decides on the meaning of "inappropriate" and "of little value."

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JoachimSchipper 5479 days ago
I think the "canonical" solution is changing the audience by migrating to a new site...
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ColinWright 5479 days ago
That may yet happen/be happening.
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JoachimSchipper 5479 days ago
"Dissenting view" is "Ruby is badly-engineered", "the poor remain poor chiefly because of a lack of discipline" or "PHP is extremely useful": you may or may not agree, but there are serious arguments to be made for those positions (and there is some degree of truth to each of them), and reasonable people can and do disagree on these issues.

On the other hand, "int i = INT_MAX + 1" is factually wrong, and you could link to the standard to prove it. Similarly, "the Sun orbits the earth" is factually wrong (to the extent that it's meaningful, at least).

Yes, there are edge cases, and yes, people tend to think that what they believe in is "obviously" the only right thing to believe in; but that doesn't mean that there's no difference at all.

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