Part of the value of reddit-style votes as a community moderation feature is that using them is easy. Beware Trivial Inconveniences and all that. I think that having to explain every downvote would lead to me contributing to community moderation efforts less, would lead to dogpiling on people who already have far more refutation than they deserve, would lead to zero-effort ‘just so I can downvote this’ drive-by comments, and generally would make it far easier for absolute nonsense to go unchallenged.
If I came across obvious bot-spam in the middle of the comments, neither downvoted nor deleted and I couldn’t downvote without writing a comment… I expect that 80% of the time I’d just close the tab (and that remaining 20% is only because I have a social media addiction problem).
Part of the value of reddit-style votes as a community moderation feature is that using them is easy. Beware Trivial Inconveniences and all that. I think that having to explain every downvote would lead to me contributing to community moderation efforts less, would lead to dogpiling on people who already have far more refutation than they deserve, would lead to zero-effort ‘just so I can downvote this’ drive-by comments, and generally would make it far easier for absolute nonsense to go unchallenged.
If I came across obvious bot-spam in the middle of the comments, neither downvoted nor deleted and I couldn’t downvote without writing a comment… I expect that 80% of the time I’d just close the tab (and that remaining 20% is only because I have a social media addiction problem).