I’ve deleted this post, in the hopes that it will stem the tide of my recent set of downvoting. I apologize to anyone that this collection of posts offended or annoyed, and will try to not post such things here in the future.
Given OP’s complaint, I assumed OP would be unusually sensitive to even small amounts of discouragement (as magnifying small negatives is a frequent habit of people with depression/anxiety problems). As such, when I saw a −1 in the comment thread where I was directly conversing with the OP, I voted them back up to zero. This is because I do not want to discourage someone reaching out for psychological help, even if they are probably asking for help from a community that might not be focused on providing appropriate help.
That doesn’t mean that we should encourage it (signal-to-noise ratio is a thing), but someone with depression may well see −1 as evidence that they should shut up and leave the world alone, because several other people may have read through the thread, decided that granting −1 karma for that post was appropriate, and didn’t vote back up to zero. (For the record, I do not think that is what actually happened. Random downvotes from anon trolls are fairly common on the Internet.)
Don’t retract your comments just to prevent them from being downvoted. The resulting strikethrough text is ugly, and I would downvote this behavior if it were technically possible.
I’ve deleted this post, in the hopes that it will stem the tide of my recent set of downvoting. I apologize to anyone that this collection of posts offended or annoyed, and will try to not post such things here in the future.
I hope you don’t mean that. Caving to one anonymous bully is pretty sad.
Given OP’s complaint, I assumed OP would be unusually sensitive to even small amounts of discouragement (as magnifying small negatives is a frequent habit of people with depression/anxiety problems). As such, when I saw a −1 in the comment thread where I was directly conversing with the OP, I voted them back up to zero. This is because I do not want to discourage someone reaching out for psychological help, even if they are probably asking for help from a community that might not be focused on providing appropriate help.
That doesn’t mean that we should encourage it (signal-to-noise ratio is a thing), but someone with depression may well see −1 as evidence that they should shut up and leave the world alone, because several other people may have read through the thread, decided that granting −1 karma for that post was appropriate, and didn’t vote back up to zero. (For the record, I do not think that is what actually happened. Random downvotes from anon trolls are fairly common on the Internet.)
Don’t retract your comments just to prevent them from being downvoted. The resulting strikethrough text is ugly, and I would downvote this behavior if it were technically possible.