| Secondly, being told why doesn't help as much as you would think. That itself is another meta discussion. People won't take the why as given. They will want to argue it, challenge the qualifications of others, and you can go down the list. It all happens. People I see taking that feedback to contemplate is rare. The number one reason why people want to be told why so they can argue their case. And that's what's going to trigger The Meta. On Quora this problem happened and a bunch of us created a court where someone could appeal downvotes, and sort of argue their case. That discussion would involve feedback to the person who got downvoted, and if it all didn't warrant being downvoted, a whole bunch of people would up vote, basically correcting a wrong. It was a super interesting exercise in the genuine ambiguity text communication has. The fact is we really can't determine intent from text. People can, and we'll take things all sorts of interesting and crazy ways. And whether they are correct in doing that or not, the discussion to sort it out is laborious and time-consuming. Now I will tell you, a bunch of people working hard on this problem and sort out a disagreement or downvote that shouldn't have happened. And maybe a third of those were worthy exercises in that the person who initiated the process took away something that genuinely help them to improve. Another big percentage, were just fixing bad down votes. But it cost a lot to do that. The rest were fairly painful meta discussions. Unproductive. No the reason that all made some sense on Quora was the downvotes had Fairly severe consequences and fairly rapidly. Here, it's not such a big deal. Anyone who makes more good decisions about what they say and not will gain karma. That's all that's required. So rather than Stones, it's more like little Pebbles. Frankly, the easiest way to get past this here is to just not worry about it, and try to be a good human. In a lot of cases, people who get some downvotes here probably weren't trying their best to be good human. If they try harder they get less downvotes. Good As It Gets. |