That’s actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons: 1) Not good use of my time 2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me—I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that’s not what I do for a living and I shouldn’t allow my mental attention to be diverted. 3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss—with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
That’s actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
Data Point (of questionable value):
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons:
1) Not good use of my time
2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me—I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that’s not what I do for a living and I shouldn’t allow my mental attention to be diverted.
3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss—with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
It seems conceptually easy to create a script to return sets of votes that satisfy the following conditions:
1) Occur fairly close together, time-wise 2) Are made by the same user 3) Are down-votes 4) Decrease the post’s score by ⇒ a fraction
This would likely make it easier for mods to review things like this. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time+skills to do this.