| I would say this meme is incredibly harmful for various social news sites. The problem is it seems reasonable enough...it's certainly more reasonable than downvoting someone because you don't like them... However, it's is absolutely not an appropriate use of downvoting and is harmful to discussion quality. To begin with, someone being "objectively wrong" is MUCH more rare than you probably think. Purely in terms of mathematical probability, I can pretty much guarantee there was a time you thought someone was wrong on the Internet when in fact you were the one who was wrong. There are many times when LOTS of people thought Joe Shmoe was wrong, but Joe Shmoe was in fact correct and everyone else is wrong. Many times even though what the person is SAYING is wrong, but there is a mis-communication somewhere. You may be reading it the wrong way, or they may not be expressing themselves clearly. This brings up the main problem with what you are talking about: it shuts down the conversation....and that is incredibly bad for a community that is supposed to be build on discussion. Let's say someone's wrong. You downvote them. You've accomplished effectively nothing. Some people might not see this wrong information....but that's neither here nor there. A MUCH better solution is to reply and explain to them how they are wrong. That way the discussion continues, and they are educated (whether or not they decided to take advantage of it). More importantly, if one person thought this wrong thing....there are probably many others who also thought it but didn't post it. If you reply with a correction, those people are also enlightened. This ties in with my earlier point...you may have prevented some people from seeing the wrong information, but there's no reason to believe that it balances with the people you could have educated by responding. Keep in mind, none of this is even taking into account abuse of such a feature, which would occur. All around it is by far better for the community to correct wrong information than to censor it....not to mention the latter is impossible to do effectively. |