I've posted some controversial stuff, and I understand why I would be getting down voted for that. But I see some of my posts and comments are in the negatives for seemingly no reason at all? I don't really care about the karma because I can't see it anyway, but I'm worried that comments and posts here are gonna get downvoted and dismissed without further consideration solely because of the negative score, like what would happen on reddit. I suspect someone, a troll, a bot, or a misclick downvoted my comment or post and people just followed along downvoting in turn. It's either that, or I genuinely said something bad but I can't figure for the life of me that it is indeed bad. My prime example is my support post for commenting under certain posts, why did that get the downvotes? And I see this kind of thing sometimes on other people's comments as well, and I'm baffled, is it me who can't understand why something is bad, or hive mind came here too?
EDIT: it seems i wasn't clear enough. a) I'm not worried about getting the actual downvotes. I'm worried about downvotes stopping to be a tool to gauge content. b) I'm not worried about controversial opinions' downvotes, I already said I'm not surprised I got downvoted there. I was talking about totally mundane posts, like that one support post. c) I'm not talking about people simply disagreeing, I'm talking about people immediately disregarding a post because of the downvote count. it's not correct to say this doesn't happen, it totally does and... how am I supposed to prove that? all it takes on reddit is see a comment on 0 for no reason and see it quickly drop to -5
@6mementomori
Voting is garbage. It's a cancer on all these type sites. Deciding the value of a post only requires basic literacy, and someone else's opinion is irrelevant. I only upvote posts as a reward to the author. It isn't for anyone else. Others should read the post and decide for themselves what value it has.
Voting is an easy way for someone to share their approval or disapproval if they don't have any further comments. I would rather retain voting than have a chain of "+1", "agreed", etc. replies under every comment.
+1
despair
If someone writes a well worded, well thought out opinion that I disagree with what is the proper way to respond? Up vote because it's a high quality comment? Down vote because I disagree? Reply with my own comment? What if my opinion is already expressed in another comment thread already?
Upvotes/downvotes are usually for the approval/disapproval of the comment itself so it would be best to upvote a comment expressing your opinion or write your own if there isn't any.
Voting is a good thing. People need to hear that their opinion or their post is garbage, twitter and Facebook only allow you to leave positive signals which leads to people having over inflated ideas of self worth
It satisfies a human desire so that's why they retain voting.
Much prefer old school bulletin forums where you just comment and nasty comments are removed and you may even get a ban.
At a infrastructure level the voting system is distributed content moderation. So that you don't have to rely on a core group of moderators to flag bad content
Guess it seems to work in very large communities.