Maybe it shouldn’t but on reddit, and before than on slashdot, and everywhere else I’ve seen that’s how it ended up being used. Up = agree, Down = disagree. Now I want my time back, so down.
The hope is that we’ll be able to avoid this. For myself, I’m in the habit of upvoting well-argued comments that I nevertheless disagree with.
I would like to believe that’s what I’m doing, and I think I’m fooling myself. It’s enough if our thresholds for up/downvote are different for comments we agree and disagree, something like:
Somewhat annoying comment you agree = ignore
Somewhat annoying comment you disagree = downvote
Someone smart comment you agree = upvote
Somewhat smart comment you disagree = ignore
As most comments are in this not completely brilliant and not complete rubbish category, this is quite close to upvote on agree, downvote on disagree.
In principle, I suppose there could be multi-dimensional voting, with at least different dimensions for degree of agreement, for how well-argued a comment is, and for degree of relevance to the topic (or at least sub-thread). Of course, if one goes far enough down that road just choosing the multidimensional vote starts to become an energy drain in and of itself… (www.ted.com has at least 8 dimensions for rating their talks—which is enough to dissuade me from rating them...)
Maybe it shouldn’t but on reddit, and before than on slashdot, and everywhere else I’ve seen that’s how it ended up being used. Up = agree, Down = disagree. Now I want my time back, so down.
The hope is that we’ll be able to avoid this. For myself, I’m in the habit of upvoting well-argued comments that I nevertheless disagree with.
I would like to believe that’s what I’m doing, and I think I’m fooling myself. It’s enough if our thresholds for up/downvote are different for comments we agree and disagree, something like:
Somewhat annoying comment you agree = ignore
Somewhat annoying comment you disagree = downvote
Someone smart comment you agree = upvote
Somewhat smart comment you disagree = ignore
As most comments are in this not completely brilliant and not complete rubbish category, this is quite close to upvote on agree, downvote on disagree.
In principle, I suppose there could be multi-dimensional voting, with at least different dimensions for degree of agreement, for how well-argued a comment is, and for degree of relevance to the topic (or at least sub-thread). Of course, if one goes far enough down that road just choosing the multidimensional vote starts to become an energy drain in and of itself… (www.ted.com has at least 8 dimensions for rating their talks—which is enough to dissuade me from rating them...)