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ThisSpaceAvailable comments on A few remarks about mass-downvoting - Less Wrong
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The mere existence of the "downvote" mechanism is social and emotional poison.
It's like you're sitting around a table chatting with friends, and everyone has their hands under the table, with an annoying buzzer in one hand and a friendly chime in the other hand. And everyone is chatting politely, and then people realize that they can give "anonymous feedback" by pressing the annoying buzzer when they don't like what someone just said, and the chime when they approve of what someone just said.
But as soon as people start to do this, it is clear that, whatever the intention, the only possible actual outcome is noise. You say something and receive two chimes and a buzzer. What does that mean? What do you do with that? Alice responds, and then Bob responds to her, except he precedes his response with a buzzer, so he might as well have preceded the whole remark with "hey, asshole!" even though his comment would have been perfectly constructive without the buzzer.
Basically my point is the buzzer ruins everything. If you went to a party and people were using these buzzers you would leave.
The downvote option does make it easier to be negative, but it also gives people an option in between ignoring trolls (and risking people thinking that other people don't have a problem with them) and engaging them (and rewarding them). It also lets people express disapproval of a post without wasting another post saying nothing but "I disagree". Of course, people still do downvote and then also post a comment that has no semantic content other than "I don't like you".
At a party, there are all sorts of feedback: smiles, laughs, nods, frowns, awkward silences, glares, etc. The upvote/downvote is a rough analog of that.