OrphanWilde comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong
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Comments (105)
I agree with you that grudge-making should be discouraged by the system.
Hmm. I think downvoting a response to one's material is typically a poor idea, but I don't yet think that case is typical enough to prevent it outright.
I am curious now about the interaction between downvoting a comment and replying to it. If Alice posts something and Bob responds to it, a bad situation from the grudge-making point of view is Alice both downvoting Bob's comment and responding to it. If it was bad enough to downvote, the theory goes, that means it is too bad to respond to.
So one could force Alice to choose between downvoting and replying to the children of posts she makes, in the hopes of replacing a chain of -1 snipes with either a single -1 or a chain of discussion at 0.
I think it's sufficient to just prevent voting on children of your own posts/comments. The community should provide what voting feedback is necessary, and any voting you engage in on responses to your material probably isn't going to be high-quality rational voting anyways.
Blocking downvoting responses I could be convinced of, but blocking upvoting responses seems like a much harder sell.
My argument is symmetry, but the form that argument would take would be... extremely weak, once translated into words.
Roughly, however... you risk defining new norms, by treating downvotes as uniquely bad as compared to upvotes. We already have an issue where neutral karma is regarded by many as close-to-failure. It would accentuate that problem, and make upvotes worth less.