Voting for forum posts

[tsbockman]

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 14:33:43 UTC, Q. Schroll wrote:
> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:40:15 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe 
> wrote:
>> Online voting is emotionally toxic and logically fallacious.
>
> You're wrong, like really wrong. If that were true, 
> [SO](https://stackoverflow.com) should be the pinnacle of 
> emotionally toxic and logically fallacious posts when it comes 
> to programming topics, but it's exactly the contrary: SO is one 
> of the best if not *the* best resource for programming 
> questions — and I'd claim it is because of their voting 
> system and not in spite of it.

Forum voting tends to works OK when an issue is reasonably clear, 
objective, and testable, or low-stakes, or when there is no need 
nor intention to force the majority's opinion on the minority.

If someone disagrees with the highest voted answer on a Stack 
Overflow question, they can just use a different one, or make up 
their own. By contrast, if someone disagrees with how their 
national government is run, they generally can't just go start a 
new one. Hence, people tend to be much more aggressive or 
manipulative in their use of voting in political discussions.

Threads in D's "Learn" forum, most bug reports, and most pull 
requests are mostly the former sort of content, where voting 
isn't a problem.

However, the long debates in the D's "General" forum concerning 
the future direction of the language are sometimes closer to the 
latter sort of content, where anyone who wants or needs to 
participate in the ecosystem just has to live with the 
consequences of whatever decision is ultimately made. Hence, 
passions run higher, and the risk of abusive voting is much 
higher.