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nazgulnarsil comments on What bothers you about Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I feel such complaints are justified. downvotes without comments are counter productive.
I agree comments are more useful, but are you saying someone should never downvote without leaving a comment? Why do you think it is actually counterproductive?
because it often seems that the person actually doesn't know why they've been downvoted.
There is an incentive to downvote without comment if you feel that your peers are better off if they don't see the post. If you're downvoting someone who happens to regard this as a political exercise rather than an intellectual exercise, they're likely to find an excuse to downvote you on one or more or many unrelated issues, so your karma is better if they don't know who you are. If you comment they will know who you are.
This incentive would go away if we had a reasonable measure of agreement, and only let votes from the 90% or 99% or so of the people closest to the consensus affect what other people see. That might require significant CPU and thinking to implement, though, so I don't know if it's worth doing.
Allowing cliques that are less than 50% might let the community fracture into halves that don't perceive each other, but if the clique size is 90% then the only consequence would be to ignore votes from the outliers, which is probably a good thing.
Also, there is a disincentive to downvote bad comments that you want everyone to still see.
Somebody voted the parent comment down without replying. Given the context, that may have been a strange joke. I voted it up.
In the present system, downvoting a comment causes fewer people to see it, since the system by default doesn't show you comments scoring below a user-settable threshhold. I like that feature.
I can't presently imagine a plausible interpretation for downvoting that yields things I'd want to downvote but still would want my peers to look at. Can you give an example?
You post a detailed reply to a low-value comment, and want your reply seen even though you don't like the parent.