> It's harder to understand why someone should withhold their personal opinion, simply because they were later to vote.
You can think of it as a strange and illogical tradition of this particular community if that helps. However, I think there's a good reason for it: "beating up" on unpopular comments, or even wrong ones, is "unneighborly". In a conversation amongst a group of people, if someone says something wrong, and one person corrects them, it would look pretty weird if all the others took turns saying "yeah, I think you're wrong too".
Personally, what I would love to see is this: I see a comment that is from someone, say a regular who I respect, that is flat out factually incorrect. It's already at -1, where I think it should stay, and someone has already responded with a comment citing correct information. It would be ideal to have a "hold at -1" button that adds my downvote if anyone else happens to vote the comment up. But it really doesn't matter all that much. The most important thing is the community spirit of the thing.
You can think of it as a strange and illogical tradition of this particular community if that helps.
Oh, I understand it.
But I suspect it's hopeless, long term, to try to convey that subtle idea as usership grows. The mod-up/mod-down is an 'attractive nuisance' that will always attract agree/disagree piling-on, because you can't untrain people of their expectations of what 'voting'/'polling' means, and it's just so darn easy, when you've only got one bit worth of reaction to a comment, to use a click rather than a reply to express yourself. (It'd even be better for the site, if that one click didn't trigger karma resentments and feelings of censorship.)
A river finds the sea; simple agree/disagree sentiment is flowing into mod-up/mod-down because that's the easiest path for its expression.
You can think of it as a strange and illogical tradition of this particular community if that helps. However, I think there's a good reason for it: "beating up" on unpopular comments, or even wrong ones, is "unneighborly". In a conversation amongst a group of people, if someone says something wrong, and one person corrects them, it would look pretty weird if all the others took turns saying "yeah, I think you're wrong too".
Personally, what I would love to see is this: I see a comment that is from someone, say a regular who I respect, that is flat out factually incorrect. It's already at -1, where I think it should stay, and someone has already responded with a comment citing correct information. It would be ideal to have a "hold at -1" button that adds my downvote if anyone else happens to vote the comment up. But it really doesn't matter all that much. The most important thing is the community spirit of the thing.