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ArisKatsaris comments on Please do not downvote every comment or post someone has ever made as a retaliation tactic. - Less Wrong Discussion

39 Post author: Will_Newsome 21 August 2011 12:35PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 21 August 2011 10:20:02PM 6 points [-]

Downvoted, for seemingly seeking to force everyone to waste time and space, just so that a very rare and very slight abuse of the system doesn't have the chance to occur.

Either you have other additional reasons to make you favor this suggestion (in short you'd want an explanation of downvotes to be made mandatory regardless of such incidents) and thus your suggestion improperly disguises itself as a suggested solution to this problem -- or you've just not bothered to make a cost-benefit analysis in regards to the repercussion of your suggestion. Or both.

Comment author: shminux 22 August 2011 12:57:28AM 2 points [-]

Thank you for your comment, but sorry you missed my point, which was to consider technical solutions before social ones (e.g. locked gates work better than "no entrance" signs). The one I suggested was an example (as clearly stated in my post), not a request. Of course it goes without question that one should consider ramifications of any solution, technical or otherwise.

Oh, and please feel free to provide the cost-benefit analysis of mandatory commenting for downvoting, or a link to such, I'd be quite interested. Some issues I can think of is that loss of anonymity would deter people from downvoting, or might lead to retaliatory behavior, but the latter can be easily dealt with, since it would be rather transparent.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 22 August 2011 01:12:41AM 6 points [-]

One problem is that each troll post causes an instant flame war.

Comment author: prase 22 August 2011 08:45:34AM *  5 points [-]
  1. Unbalance between upvoting and downvoting. If downvotes had to be explained but upvotes not so, upvotes would become much cheaper, although they have the same nominal value. A fairly bad post which now earns 4 downvotes for each upvote could easily be in the positives then, with consequent encouraging of low quality posting.
  2. If several people downvote for the same reason, they would nevertheless have to spell it out. So they would either refrain from downvoting if somebody had already stated their reason (and therefore posts with one substantial error would be in unfair advantage over posts with several different slight imperfections) or we would earn lots of nearly identical comments.
  3. People would learn to overcome the technical solution. For example, after dowvoting, one can write simply "disagree". Or "no". Others could, of course, downvote such comments, but it would cost them much more effort, because they had to tortuously explain what's wrong (I assume answering a "no" by another "no" is silly).
  4. Sometimes a troll or a crackpot appears, and then downvoting without explanation is really the appropriate tactic.

These are the costs, you have already stated the benefits.

Comment author: lessdazed 22 August 2011 09:22:00AM 2 points [-]

(I assume answering a "no" by other "no" is silly)

Yes

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