Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage
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Shout out to @Groaner, whose complaint a while ago got me thinking about this idea. Also cc @remi and @djls45 who I've been talking to in the past day or so about this kind of stuff.
I think we should bring back named downvotes in the Garage. I think this will help the site by making the Garage less toxic and by making it more likely that people from The Left will participate in The Garage more often in the way that people from The Right participate pretty freely now.
In order to make it work, we'll all have to be pretty mature about what a downvote means. Specifically, it means (or should mean): "I disagree with you, but didn't write an entire post explaining why." It's OK (or it's supposed to be) for people to disagree, and you're not entitled to a debate opponent.
But by giving people a one-button way to express their disapproval of a post, you're giving people the ability to engage with a post without necessarily needing to type out a wall of text.
This even helps the downvoted person by cutting down on the number of posts they feel they have to reply to. There's a lot more right-leaning posters in the Garage right now, so that if Some Lefty posts something Lefty, they'll probably get three or four posts from Righties making basically the same point. If we allow downvotes, they'll probably get one or two replies actual replies and one or two downvotes from people who chose not to retype the same point someone else already made.
Obviously, this will work better if downvotes are named rather than anonymous.
What do we all think?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
we'll all have to be pretty mature
You can't make me!
No seriously, it's points on the internet, who cares? If anything, I vote to disable upvotes in the Garage as well.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
I think this will help the site by making the Garage less toxic
With people who celebrate being downvoted? Lolnope.
In order to make it work, we'll all have to be pretty mature about what a downvote means.
Garage? Maturing? Lolnope.
There's a lot more right-leaning posters in the Garage right now, so that if Some Lefty posts something Lefty, they'll probably get three or four posts from Righties making basically the same point. If we allow downvotes, they'll probably get one or two replies actual replies and one or two downvotes from people who chose not to retype the same point someone else already made.
Based on the empirical evidence from the time we did have public downvotes in garage - lolnope.
You know what has an actual (although still minimal) chance to work, though? Disabling upvotes.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear I'm confused as to how this reduces toxicity. In fact, I recall there being a lot of grief over people who would "downvote and run." If someone makes a point and comes back an hour later to see no replies to the post, but -20 votes... how is that at all productive or helpful?
more likely that people from The Left will participate in The Garage more often in the way that people from The Right participate pretty freely now.
I don't think downvoting (or upvoting for that matter) counts as "participating." To me it's more like people looking at a discussion and just giving certain people the stink eye or a thumbs up.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear I'm not sure I like any option concerning upvotes and downvotes. If you know who upvoted or downvoted, it will change your perception of them based on what they up- or down-voted, even if ever so slightly.
If you don't know who upvoted or downvoted, you might suspect any number of people of doing so for any number of reasons. (We kind of already know how most of the regulars will vote, and in particular that certain people will almost always upvote or downvote certain other people, almost regardless of the contents of what they post.)
I think perhaps a maybe better option for debates would simply be a named neutral "vote" that indicates simply "I have seen this post, and I have nothing to add or counter." In practice, though, named or not, it would probably just become an upvote meaning "I like or agree with this post" or worse "I like or agree with this poster."
Perhaps removing all voting in the Garage might be best. If anyone feels like supporting or countering a post, they'll have to write a post in response, not just stick a +1 or -1 on it.
This would break @Tsaukpaetra's bookmarking method, though, so maybe a blind vote with no displayed counter could work.
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@djls45 said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
If you know who upvoted or downvoted, it will change your perception of them based on what they up- or down-voted, even if ever so slightly.
I'm ok with that. I know that my voting record (at least the upvotes) on the forum is public, and if I don't want my agreement or disagreement with a particular opinion associated with me, I don't vote.
certain people will almost always upvote or downvote certain other people, almost regardless of the contents of what they post.
I usually upvote them because I agree with them. (I rarely downvote anyone, because almost anything I'd downvote is in the Garage, and of course downvotes are disabled there. But even before they were, I generally reserved downvotes for posts that were intellectually dishonest, or personal attacks, or otherwise violating what passes for
rulesthey're more what you'd call guidelines around here.) Sometimes I don't agree with people I usually agree with, or the post is just kind of meh, and I don't upvote those posts. Sometimes someone I don't usually agree with says something thoughtful or clever, and I'll upvote those posts — it's rare, but it happens.
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Another vote for “no votes of either kind.”
The current situation results from Alex’s conception of the garage, one which nobody else seems to share. The reasoning behind no numbers in the new salon is, well, reasonable, and in light of how the garage is actually used, the new-salon policy seems sensible for that too.
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@kazitor said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
Another vote for “no votes of either kind.”
Just to clarify, I wasn't voting for it. I'm strictly of an opinion Garage is wholly irredeemable and
config is the least of its problems. I was just pointing out disabling everything has a marginally higher chance to have any effect at all.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
I think we should bring back named downvotes in the Garage.
Meh. Maybe. I'm rather "for," mostly because anonymous downvotes is the unexpected behaviour (so more from a consistency point of view than anything else).
But then again, you may have noticed that I never vote, and I also care very little about them (I'd be lying if I said I don't care at all, though). So that by itself tells you how much I think votes matters one way or the other.
In order to make it work, we'll all have to be pretty mature
Yeah, no, won't happen. You're still working on the assumption that the problem can be solved with purely technical solutions (=rules). I've been clear in that other thread that I think it's a people's problem and the only way to change things is some massive influx of new blood, at which point we will find out which rules changes are needed (not saying we don't need rules change, but that the changes we discuss may turn out to miss the point when we actually happen to have more people around).
Or, said otherwise, I agree with a lot of what @Gąska is saying, such as:
config is the least of its problems.
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@remi said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
I'd be lying if I said I don't care at all
@Tsaukpaetra, you know exactly what it reminded me of.
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@djls45 said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
I think perhaps a maybe better option for debates would simply be a named neutral "vote" that indicates simply "I have seen this post, and I have nothing to add or counter." In practice, though, named or not, it would probably just become an upvote meaning "I like or agree with this post" or worse "I like or agree with this poster."
I just had a new thought. There's that bot thread "Tell me a secret"; what if we similarly blinded the authors of each post? So instead of "A posted X", "B posted Y", "C posted Z"; we would have "B posted X", "B posted Y", "B posted Z"... (And maybe we'd still be able to see our own posts, or not; it might work either way.)
We'd still likely be able to identify each poster by the style and content of their post, for the most part, but there would still be a slight question that maybe someone else was just copying their style. The goal would be to get people to vote based on content instead of author. It wouldn't fix it entirely, but it should mitigate some of that.
This could also be used in conjunction with blinded votes, so all we'd know is how "popular"/"unpopular" each post is on its own.
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An old forum I went to had a special category for anonymous posts: Any identifying information was replaced by a generic/randomized version that would be consistent within each topic, but not the overall category or the rest of the forum. So you wouldn't be able to identify who any of the participants were, but you could see which posts in any particular topic were from the same poster.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
I think we should bring back named downvotes in the Garage.
I'd go the other way, and disable all voting there. I know
supports that (from screenshots of the admin controls).
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@hungrier said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
An old forum I went to had a special category for anonymous posts: Any identifying information was replaced by a generic/randomized version that would be consistent within each topic, but not the overall category or the rest of the forum. So you wouldn't be able to identify who any of the participants were, but you could see which posts in any particular topic were from the same poster.
No matter how anonymous, we could all identify a proper
immediately. I would venture that we could identify most of us within a few posts.
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@Dragoon Maybe, but people could theoretically be careful about their posting style if they wanted to stay really anonymous
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@hungrier except for that they can't. Whitening away the word choice, sentence structure, and fitty other nonsemantics is really hard...
EXCEPT IN LOJBAN.
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@Gribnit said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
EXCEPT IN LOJBAN.
If you post in Lojban, we know you're really Ben.
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@dkf said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
@Gribnit said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
EXCEPT IN LOJBAN.
If you post in Lojban, we know you're really Ben.
Hey, there are other people who use Lojban. Like maybe 3. On the whole planet.
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@hungrier said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
An old forum I went to had a special category for anonymous posts: Any identifying information was replaced by a generic/randomized version that would be consistent within each topic, but not the overall category or the rest of the forum. So you wouldn't be able to identify who any of the participants were, but you could see which posts in any particular topic were from the same poster.
This old forum you were on. It was at a place that Didn't Exist, right?
Because I was on a forum at a place that Didn't Exist that implemented an anonymous section of the forums in the same way, so it was probably the same place.
The reason that place worked is because they had thousands of users and you could plausibly actually be anonymous.
There's like, what, 20 of us?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear Got it in one. For a PHP hellstew forum from the early 2000s it had a lot of good ideas that I either haven't seen anywhere else, or that I've seen done poorly
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
There's like, what, 20 of us?
Regularly active on the whole forum, a little more than that. Active in the Garage, fewer.
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@HardwareGeek said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
There's like, what, 20 of us?
Regularly active on the whole forum, a little more than that. Active in the Garage, fewer.
There are a few more lurkers.
There are always a few more lurkers.
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@PotatoEngineer Of course, but they're hard to count (or even notice) without overcoming the
a lot more completely than I was willing to do. My statement was based on, maybe a month or so ago, having scrolled through the user list, sorted by last post date, and counting the names I recognized (i.e., not drive-bys) who had posted within the last however far I was willing to scroll back, which was probably a couple of months.
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@hungrier said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
An old forum I went to had a special category for anonymous posts: Any identifying information was replaced by a generic/randomized version that would be consistent within each topic, but not the overall category or the rest of the forum. So you wouldn't be able to identify who any of the participants were, but you could see which posts in any particular topic were from the same poster.
Now that's an idea worth considering. Though it'll be fairly obvious who's who after a while. Also, a lot of
to overcome.
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@HardwareGeek said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
@PotatoEngineer Of course, but they're hard to count (or even notice) without overcoming the
a lot more completely than I was willing to do. My statement was based on, maybe a month or so ago, having scrolled through the user list, sorted by last post date, and counting the names I recognized (i.e., not drive-bys) who had posted within the last however far I was willing to scroll back, which was probably a couple of months.Oh, I was being self-referential. Sure, I post on this forum, but I lurk a lot more than I post.
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@djls45 said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
I think perhaps a maybe better option for debates would simply be a named neutral "vote" that indicates simply "I have seen this post, and I have nothing to add or counter."
Yeah. Do this. Everywhere. Even if only to help out @Tsaukpaetra who apparently suffers from anterograde amnesia.
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@HardwareGeek said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
Hey, there are other people who use Lojban. Like maybe 3. On the whole planet.
The other person has multiple personality disorder?
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@HardwareGeek said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
@dkf said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
@Gribnit said in Bring Back Downvotes in the Garage:
EXCEPT IN LOJBAN.
If you post in Lojban, we know you're really Ben.
Hey, there are other people who use Lojban. Like maybe 3. On the whole planet.
There's 1 person who made it up as a joke, the 1 person who fell for the joke and the 3rd person is just a rounding error.
