Voting for forum posts

[tsbockman]

On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:40:15 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:26:48 UTC, Andrei 
> Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I wonder how difficult it would be to add a voting system for 
>> forum messages. Votes wouldn't be available in the NNTP 
>> interface but would be accessible in the Web interface and 
>> would allow sorting and filtering by votes.
>
> I'm sure this wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement, but 
> I also don't think it is a good idea. Online voting is 
> emotionally toxic and logically fallacious. We're better off 
> without it.

I agree

Filtering or sorting by votes usually creates echo chambers. It 
is a pretty effective way to kill any possibility of fruitful 
debate: anyone who doesn't *sound* right to the majority of 
voters at the beginning quickly becomes invisible, largely 
eliminating the possibility of ever changing the majority's mind 
about anything.

Even without filtering and sorting, voting turns discussion into 
a popularity contest, attracts politicians, and creates new ones. 
In general, it's only really good for things that aren't 
controversial.

All that said, many websites make it worse than it needs to be 
with bad systems. (Bad for users, that is - maybe not bad for 
ruthlessly manipulating public opinion.) Up votes and down votes 
should always be tracked and displayed separately. Combined net 
counts are stupid and misleading: 0 upvotes and 100 downvotes 
means something very different from 10_000 upvotes and 10_100 
downvotes.