Hello everyone!
As most of you know, you can downvote or upvote comments, blogs etc. However, many CF users tend to downvote comments/entries without a purpose, so you can see (what most of us know) a valid comment having e.g. 20 downvotes. What I'm thinking is, it could be fixed at least a bit.
For example, let's say 'Alex' comments on something. There comes 'Vasek' and downvotes Alex's comment. Then, there could be 2 improvements:
1) Out of all Vasek's votes, let's say at most 40% can be downvotes, else he can't downvote. There are lots of people who are striving to downvote most of the time. This would prevent them to "always" downvote.
2) Votes should NOT be to visible to 'Vasek' until he votes on that comment. That prevents other users to "automatically" downvote without even reading the comment, judging it just by the current votes.
3) Let's combine these 2 ideas into one. 'Vasek' doesn't see current votes on that comment. After 'Vasek' tries to downvote, if out of all of his votes, downvotes are 40% or more, he CAN'T downvote.
In addition:
-it might be a good idea NOT to allow unrated people, and/or people with contribution<=0 to vote
-people who downvoted too much (40% or whatever percentage you think is good) shouldn't be allowed to (down)vote for some period of time
-it should be possible to delete your comment whenever you want, but it's affection on your contribution stays the same.
I hope you agree with me, and some actions will be taken by MikeMirzayanov.
As for number 1), at the very least, don't force people who upvote most of the time (like me) to downvote something just to maintain some arbitrary quota (in other words, if someone wants to upvote 100% of the time, let them). Besides, with such a system people are still free to downvote perfectly ok comments, and what would you do with comments that went below the downvote threshold? Would you still hide them?
As for number 2), that's actually a fantastic idea. Reddit already does this with posts to some extent and it seems to work.
I think that, to combat this problem, the first thing is to make clear that downvotes are meant for toxic comments, not those that are slightly inaccurate or those that you disagree with.
Oh, my mistake. I've edited it and added some additional ideas. Check it now.
Quota is a terrible idea. I barely vote at all, and have maybe 50/50 ratio, but if someone doesn't like something, then it's their responsibility to click down.
Having vote results not visible until you vote is a good idea. But there should still be an option to hide low rated comments.
EDIT: I also agree that comments should be capable of being deleted at any time, with all subcomments deleted as well.
The problem is that there are haters whose life purpose is to just downvote comments, so if they create an account and go to a blog and just downvote everything, it wouldn't allow them to do so. Just a few days ago I've seen a blog whose 95% of comments were downvoted for... NO reason.
Yep, I forgot to mention deleting subcomments too.
Putting a quota on downvotes is stupid, and does nothing. To get around it you could just open a random blog, upvote everything, and then continue your downvoting spree. And not only can you downvote as normal, a lot of comments just got a random upvote.
Why should you be able to delete your comment? You should think before you comment so that you don't post something that you will feel like deleting afterwards. You can edit "Deleted because XYZ" on top of your comment anyways, which doesn't erase the context of replies.
But not allowing unrated people to vote sounds like a very good idea, especially with the recent incident where someone with multiple accounts downvoted everyone in the blog.
People can always click the back button on revisions, so editing over the comment is pretty much useless.
Well, it's true you could open a random blog and upvote everything just to go be able to downvote later, but only so desperate people would do it.
Many of us have written some comments that we used to think are good enough, and then we just get downvoted after we realize we missread something, or in that moment we thought it's alright.
The worst thing that happens is that problemsetters get downvoted. Creating a good contest is a great contribution to the CF community itself. A reasonable idea would be increasing contribution to problemsetters just for preparing a contest (though the contest author's contribution might still depend on feedback from the community — based on the upvotes on the announcement/editorial). The other reason is that all the authors will get contribution points, not only the one who posted the announcement.
And I am against mass downvotes of contest authors. Remember the story with round #444 by Denisson. After the contest he appeared on the last page on contribution top. I don't think this situation is adequate. This may discourage problemsetters to make contests (why create a contest if there is a risk that something goes wrong or people dislike weak pretests, and you will get downvotes). Today this story repeated, though in a softer form.