The names of the commentors who down-vote should be visible.
That would probably be an improvement (though there’s a risk of increasing focus on meta); However -
If a person down votes a comment, it should cost them karma points to do so unless an explanation why they choose this action is made.
… would be quite bad: adding more tedious and repetitive explanations would just increase the noise, especially if the OP then answers to the explanations with even more nitpicks.
(unless you mean that downvoting would include an interface with a set of choices, but that would be cumbersome and probably incomplete)
Well, for example, in this very thread. The post I made bringing up the idea is down to −2.
Why is this?
Is the idea irrational?
Is the idea so impractical that I should have immediately realized it was a bad one and avoided a low SNR post?
Did I make spelling or grammar mistakes?
Did a particular person spot other posts of mine they disagreed with and then search for more posts to troll-moderate?
Does someone simply disagree with the idea of there being any accountability at all?
Now, given I’ve tried to enumerate each of the major possibilities, and the first 3 seem unlikely, I have to conclude it is possible the reason is one of the last 2. If so, the downvoting system is not doing it’s job.
Having thought about downvoting your post (but not, −2 seemed low enough): the problem is not obviously one worth solving. Your idea does not obviously solve the problem (if your comment had lots of downvotes with the reason given as “troll”, would you feel more informed?). There are obvious downsides to your idea, as discussed by the other replies, that you should have addressed. Any benefit from your idea, when it has been implemented on other sites (see e.g. Slashdot) is dubious.
Actually, “troll” does offer some information. It means the downvote was because the comment was perceived as an effort to stir up pointless conflict, rather than for it being wrong, poorly proofread, redundant, or a multitude of other possible reasons.
I downvoted your comment because you seem to be trying to solve the problem that your first post got downvoted, not the problem posed by the OP. Do you have an argument why requiring explanations for downvoting will reduce trolling and increase the signal to noise ratio on LW? Note that the founder of LW has argued for being more downvote-happy.
I intended* to downvote the comment to express disagreement. It seems pretty standard to vote this way on proposals for changes. The reasons why I disagree with obligatory downvote explanations are
It brings heavy asymmetry between downvotes and upvotes, making downvoting much less convenient. A comment which ten people find worth downvoting and two find worth upvoting now stands on −8 (within the most naïve voting model) which shows that it is very probably a bad comment (we already vote more up than down on average). After the suggested change the comment could easily be at zero or positive as the change wouldn’t affect the upvoters while most potential downvoters would be lazy to explain.
The best strategy to deal with trolls is to downvote without explanation, which your proposal would make impossible.
If a comment is stupid for one reason, most downvoters vote down for that single reason, but there is indeed no benefit from stating the same reason n times while the comment sinks down to -n.
There is no practical way how to automatically verify the merit of explanations. Therefore it would be easy to game the system, by voting down and posting an empty explanation, or, less explicitly, saying e.g. “the comment is stupid”.
The more general idea, i.e. visible names of downvoters, I oppose basically because it introduces a pretty dangerous social dynamic into the forum. There is a good reason why political voting is usually secret and the reason extends beyond politics. Not knowing who voted us down makes us less likely to succumb to the typical failure mode of debating to win and supporting our allies instead of debating to find the truth and supporting good arguments.
Note also that your enumeration is very incomplete, as you can see from my reasons not overlapping much with any possibility you have listed. Furthermore the last one is unnecessarily polarising and practically comprises a false dilemma of only two possibilities—either agreeing with your proposal, or disagreeing with the general idea of accountability.
*) In the end I have retracted my downvote because I wanted to reply to your comment and voting it to −4 would cause me to lose 5 karma points in my reply. So I tried to vote it up to −2, then reply, and after having replied retract my upvote and vote down. Which I haven’t managed because you have retracted your comment in between, but still this illustrates one rather bizarre feature of the new anti-trolling “improvement”.
That would probably be an improvement (though there’s a risk of increasing focus on meta); However -
… would be quite bad: adding more tedious and repetitive explanations would just increase the noise, especially if the OP then answers to the explanations with even more nitpicks.
(unless you mean that downvoting would include an interface with a set of choices, but that would be cumbersome and probably incomplete)
Well, for example, in this very thread. The post I made bringing up the idea is down to −2. Why is this?
Is the idea irrational?
Is the idea so impractical that I should have immediately realized it was a bad one and avoided a low SNR post?
Did I make spelling or grammar mistakes?
Did a particular person spot other posts of mine they disagreed with and then search for more posts to troll-moderate?
Does someone simply disagree with the idea of there being any accountability at all?
Now, given I’ve tried to enumerate each of the major possibilities, and the first 3 seem unlikely, I have to conclude it is possible the reason is one of the last 2. If so, the downvoting system is not doing it’s job.
Having thought about downvoting your post (but not, −2 seemed low enough): the problem is not obviously one worth solving. Your idea does not obviously solve the problem (if your comment had lots of downvotes with the reason given as “troll”, would you feel more informed?). There are obvious downsides to your idea, as discussed by the other replies, that you should have addressed. Any benefit from your idea, when it has been implemented on other sites (see e.g. Slashdot) is dubious.
Actually, “troll” does offer some information. It means the downvote was because the comment was perceived as an effort to stir up pointless conflict, rather than for it being wrong, poorly proofread, redundant, or a multitude of other possible reasons.
I downvoted your comment because you seem to be trying to solve the problem that your first post got downvoted, not the problem posed by the OP. Do you have an argument why requiring explanations for downvoting will reduce trolling and increase the signal to noise ratio on LW? Note that the founder of LW has argued for being more downvote-happy.
I intended* to downvote the comment to express disagreement. It seems pretty standard to vote this way on proposals for changes. The reasons why I disagree with obligatory downvote explanations are
It brings heavy asymmetry between downvotes and upvotes, making downvoting much less convenient. A comment which ten people find worth downvoting and two find worth upvoting now stands on −8 (within the most naïve voting model) which shows that it is very probably a bad comment (we already vote more up than down on average). After the suggested change the comment could easily be at zero or positive as the change wouldn’t affect the upvoters while most potential downvoters would be lazy to explain.
The best strategy to deal with trolls is to downvote without explanation, which your proposal would make impossible.
If a comment is stupid for one reason, most downvoters vote down for that single reason, but there is indeed no benefit from stating the same reason n times while the comment sinks down to -n.
There is no practical way how to automatically verify the merit of explanations. Therefore it would be easy to game the system, by voting down and posting an empty explanation, or, less explicitly, saying e.g. “the comment is stupid”.
The more general idea, i.e. visible names of downvoters, I oppose basically because it introduces a pretty dangerous social dynamic into the forum. There is a good reason why political voting is usually secret and the reason extends beyond politics. Not knowing who voted us down makes us less likely to succumb to the typical failure mode of debating to win and supporting our allies instead of debating to find the truth and supporting good arguments.
Note also that your enumeration is very incomplete, as you can see from my reasons not overlapping much with any possibility you have listed. Furthermore the last one is unnecessarily polarising and practically comprises a false dilemma of only two possibilities—either agreeing with your proposal, or disagreeing with the general idea of accountability.
*) In the end I have retracted my downvote because I wanted to reply to your comment and voting it to −4 would cause me to lose 5 karma points in my reply. So I tried to vote it up to −2, then reply, and after having replied retract my upvote and vote down. Which I haven’t managed because you have retracted your comment in between, but still this illustrates one rather bizarre feature of the new anti-trolling “improvement”.