I don’t mind the downvotes—most of my upvotes were for rubbish reasons, so downvotes for rubbish reasons are hardly anything to complain about—but I do care about the message sent to other users, that groupthink is more important than information.
Did somebody send that message? The OP? Me? Western Union?
You.
What did that mean? You want to discourage topics that some people feel strongly about?
No, I desire to support the community norms against said topics, because Chesterton’s Fence and also my early experiments into political discourse here, while they didn’t go as badly as some people expected, also didn’t go well, either.
I don’t mind the downvotes—most of my upvotes were for rubbish reasons, so downvotes for rubbish reasons are hardly anything to complain about—but I do care about the message sent to other users, that groupthink is more important than information.
You may not mind them, but the effects of upvotes and downvotes are not symmetric, particularly for newcomers.
Did somebody send that message? The OP? Me? Western Union?
This brings to mind another reason for my response:
What did that mean? You want to discourage topics that some people feel strongly about?
You.
No, I desire to support the community norms against said topics, because Chesterton’s Fence and also my early experiments into political discourse here, while they didn’t go as badly as some people expected, also didn’t go well, either.