I mean, that depends on what you view the purpose of downvotes as. If it’s purely for sorting content, then they do still have a purpose. If it’s meant as a deterrent from posting low-quality posts, though, that would severely hamper their usefulness.
I do think it does need to be at some level a deterrent, no matter what “reason” you’re downvoting for… which means it does need to have some sort of negative effect on the poster.
This is one reason we have discussed anonymous and signed downvotes, at the downvoters discretion. Anonymous downvotes still effect answer score and thereby sort order, but don’t harm the author’s rep. This limits what vandals and revenge voters can do with them. Signed downvotes have more weight. They leave a reason, and it is possible to determine who cast them. Basically, if you’re willing to publicly stand behind your vote, we’ll take it more seriously. But you can still cast a quick and dirty anonymous vote that says “this answer is wrong, misleading, or badly written”.
That’s proposed, not agreed.
Personally, I think a downvote is a downvote, and publicizing it is only informational.
Sure, we’ve all received undeserved downvotes sometimes. It’s part of the cost of doing business. Systematic voting problems can be addressed through moderation tools. We need to not be so precious about a stray downvote here or there.
How could there be non-well-received posts if downvotes don’t affect the trust level? Everything would be either neutral or positive, and that would negate the entire trust system.
In SE downvotes don’t affect the trust levels/privileges once you get over 20,000 points on a normal site and 10,000 on beta sites.
I think, what they mean be well received is positive scoring,non- deleted, non closed posts.
While I agree with you, it’s only fair to point out that the mere fact of being downvoted, especially if it’s visible to anyone else, without any other penalty whatsoever, is itself a significant negative effect to most posters. A codified mark of intentional disapproval is not a no-op to normal human psychology.
The problem comes in with people who are desperate enough to shrug off the slings and arrows of outrageous good sense and site norms, because they need an answer now no matter what. For those people, deterrents are no good, since they aren’t focused on the future at all. The only thing that works is forcibly cutting off their posting ability via something akin to SE’s automated post ban.
That’s easy for you to say. You apparently haven’t been the victim of multiple deliberate downvote attacks. I have.
Personally, I think all votes should be public. If you’re not willing to publicly stand behind your decision, then it can’t be worth much. However, I realize a lot of people disagree with this. Having votes be public/private at the voters choice, but having public votes be more meaningful is a compromise it seems I have to live with. Hopefully you and others can too.
I have. To be honest, many moderators on SE have. I agree with @cellio that this is a problem of moderation tools, not of publicising voting - SE doesn’t have great tools for dealing with voting fraud, which is a huge area we can do better on (particularly since we have the expertise of a number of SE mods here). If we can improve on that, we can reduce the problem of serial voting to the point where we really don’t need to worry about those stray downvotes.
What are we leaning towards? As someone who really likes stackexchange’s voting system and is not convinced stackexchange is unwelcoming, the voting system is kind of important to me. Has anything been decided?
IMO sometimes users don’t know what they want. The voting system is part of what makes stackexchange so popular.
It has happened to me dozens of times in about 8 years. The revengers were usually reasonably clever. They learned that just downvoting a handful of answers every day for a month kept it below SE’s automated detection systems. Since the mods can’t see votes either, they couldn’t do anything about it.
It would be better to remove the incentive and means to commit the vandalism and retribution voting in the first place. The revengers just want to hit someone while hiding under the cloak of anonymity, thereby knowing there will be no repercussions on them. If all they can accomplish anonymously is to re-arrange the sort order of answer, then it’s not as much fun or satisfying, and doesn’t really bother the target user that much.
Then there is also the quality issue. A vote that someone is willing to public stand behind is going to be more reliable. We has discussed some sort of expert “stamp of approval”. A signed vote by an expert in the particular domain (ignoring for now how that is determined) is the mechanism for the “expert approved” stamp, and conveys extra rep to the author and a higher sort order to the answer.
Despite your assertion to the contrary, I have been the victim of (apparent) targeted voting by people who knew what they were doing. It sucks.
But you are proposing to use a sledgehammer to swat a fly. We are not going to make all votes public just because a few people have misused votes without a compelling case being made. You are the only person arguing for this, your argument is not compelling, and we need to stop burning time on it.
Votes are private. We are talking about an option to make selected votes public, controlled entirely by the voter. If a specific community wants to experiment with an all-votes-public model, we can discuss that after MVP and for that community. Part of that discussion would be about messaging to users, so that people coming from the rest of our network who know how voting works everywhere else won’t be taken by surprise.
Votes will not be public globally. We will strive to make the moderation tools as good as possible, and we must also acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world and sometimes mildly-bad things happen to good people.