If someone has stated they won’t do it if someone asks them not to, and his goal was for there to be fewer such comments in the future (which is the general goal of downvoting things), then it would be more efficient in terms of achieving that goal to lead by simply asking politely not to, and maybe add the “and I’ll downvote anyone who does” as a postscript.
Leading with the downvote threat seemed needlessly belligerent.
I think the idea that you are grasping for (and which I don’t necessarily agree with) is that calling someone disingenuous is a dark side tool.
In my own opinion, I think it’s more grandstanding than anything… of the same sort as “are you actually claiming”* - it’s an attempt to put the other person on the spot, and make them feel as if they need to defend their opinions.
*No offense… I don’t like the karma system either, but the comparison to soviet era repression was a bit much. But, then, maybe I don’t feel a loss of karma as acutely since I don’t write articles.
I concede the win to you, even though I still think the objection is silly, and that you should have simply asked him not to do it instead of the high-handed passive-aggressive “I will downvote any future comments that do that”.
For some people it would be tempting to say that a third party is more likely to correctly predict the other’s voting pattern, simply because people have plausible incentive to lie. I thank you for your implied expression of confidence in my honesty! :)
Well, no-one else can see your votes, anyway, can they? ;)
Does it really signal that, any more than using the word “you”? Will wedrifid downvote comments that do that, as well? (Who other than wedrifid is qualified to answer that last question, I wonder? I won’t tell anyone they can’t, but I do reserve the right to assign a low probability to them being correct if wedrifid makes a statement on the issue that contradicts someone else’s, and such an answer will have lower value to me and I suspect anyone else reading it.)
There is? Oh, there it is. It could stand to be a little more visible.
I think at this point I have to ask when you consider it to be rational to make a declarative statement, and what is “nothing” vs “enough”. And in particular, why you must have direct knowledge of the subjective experience to say they are being insincere.
If someone is here, on a site filled with reasonablly intelligent people who understand logic, and demonstrates elsewhere that they are reasonably intelligent and understand logic, and in one particular argument make obviously logically inconsistent statements, I don’t need their state of mind to say they’re being disingenuous. I don’t know how well that maps to this situation or what has been claimed about it.
(I don’t suppose you’d be enlightened if I said “Yes, that’s incorrect”)
Do you consider it irrational to say the sky is blue when you are in a room with no window?
Well, maybe it’s a bit too fancy to be stretched into “lying”. But the point is one of dishonesty, of a difference between actual intent and visible signs, and, what’s relevant here, it does imply a model of someone’s actual intentions (for “disingenuous”), or actual beliefs (for “lie”).
I don’t agree with HT that it’s irrational (his basis for this seems to imply that any declarative statement about anything ever is irrational), which is why I drew a comparison between it and something I assumed he would be unlikely to consider irrational in the sense he meant when saying it of calling someone disingenuous.
I wonder if an algorithm could be invented to reduce the front-loading in time of negative karma from downvoting that is meant to offset later potential upvotes. Such a thing might have headed off the whole incident in the other thread (he’s stated that he was “ready to fight” out of anger from seeing half his karma gone)
Let me rephrase, it is irrational to make a declarative statement about the inner workings of another person’s mind, seeing as there is no way for one person to fully understand the mental state of another.
Is it irrational to call a statement a lie? As I had understood the word, “disingenuous” is a fancy way to say “lying”.
As far as he knew it was gone. I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes, and I’m not sure if you’re not being too optimistic to expect it of the others who downvoted.
I was responding to the general idea that downvoting is “curation”. I don’t see why the specific context is necessary for that. Are you suggesting he wouldn’t have said the same thing in the other context? That posts already at or below −2 and posts in collapsed subthreads get downvoted shows that people downvote with non-curation purposes. Maybe the site would benefit from an explanation of what purposes they do have.
The story doesn’t actually say “and they put armor where Blackett suggested and everyone lived happily ever after”, though.
Curation already feels somewhat like work; it doesn’t need to get harder.
I haven’t seen a credible argument how downvoting a post that’s already at −11, or one that’s under several layers of collapsed posts, is “curation”.
“Is “get thicker-skinned about downvoting” an option?”
Not at zero karma, it’s not.
How long have you been lurking here? You seem to have a lot of opinions about how good the existing mechanisms are for someone who hasn’t been commenting for very long.
A couple weeks. Am I really less qualified to examine the current system’s actual effect on new and low-karma users, though?
It means “so-called” or “self-proclaimed”.
My assumption is that disagreement is one of several reasons that people downvote, and that people are more likely to volunteer explanations (especially to new users) for the other reasons than for disagreement. Therefore, I assumed that the downvotes I got with no explanation were for disagreement. The one person who provided an alternate theory of why I was getting downvoted denied being one of the downvoters, and when I took his advice and clarified something from an earlier post, the new comment was also downvoted.
When I said I had observed a spoiler being stated “numerous” times in the thread, as evidence that the spoiler policy wasn’t preventing this effectively, someone replied asking for a list of links to specific comments; I replied with nine, and that post was downvoted three times.
Providing [even sporadic] explanations for downvotes will allow people who are downvoted for good reasons a clearer way to adjust their behavior.
Exposing downvote reasons to community moderation will allow bad downvoting to be punished and good downvoting to be rewarded (this last one has the additional effect of raising the user’s downvote cap so they can continue making good downvotes.)
What I expect the second one to provide is obvious: remove the problematic incentives discouraging people from providing clarifications if the original post has been downvoted.
The “passive-aggressive” bit, in my opinion, was where he solicited people’s opinion on whether it offends them, and you skipped past actually saying it offends you and went to threats.