Penalty for Downvoting
The Problem:
There's a lot of proposals that have many downvotes with no comments or any reason (I'm talking about well written, well thought out proposals) as to why they were downvoted. This greatly discourages people from creating proposals with new/drastic ideas.
Proposed Solution:
To fix this I think that there should be a penalty for downvoting. For example, if I downvote a proposal then I would lose 1 karma. That way, if I don't like the proposal then I would be better off leaving a comment explaining why instead of losing karma with a down-vote.
Note: If you don't agree with this proposal and feel the urge to downvote, please consider leaving a comment to express why you don't agree.
6 Comments
Isn't this kind of a duplicate of this one : rightclickselect.com/p/meta/0jbbbc/change-down-voting-mechanisms
It is, and my reply to that post is about the same. Karma doesn't currently mean much in this system. If this site ever gets to the point where Karma is meaningful, it'll likely be calculated differently altogether.
I don't think it's quite a duplicate because that proposal is about penalizing down-votes under certain circumstances, whereas my proposal is about penalizing down-votes under all circumstances . But yes, they are very similar :)
As far as karma not meaning anything, from a technical standpoint that is true, but I would argue that from a psychological standpoint it has a huge impact. For that reason, I think it should either be disabled or reworked so that it actually does affect a users interaction with the site (e.g. users with negative karma have to have all their posts moderated before they go public, users with high karma can edit proposals, etc.)
Well written or not ideas can be redundant, not practical, or just too application specific. Penalizing people for saying no biases us to say yes to everything or simply ignore and let not so good suggestions gradually rank up over time. After all, what about well written no votes?
The main idea is to discourage passive down-voting I.e. down-voteing without leaving a comment saying why (the irony is that the proposal for solving this problem is itself a huge victim, at the time of writing this, there are 11 down-votes and really only 3 comments disagreeing) If you truly disagree with a proposal (I.e you don't think that it should be implemented), you can pay the very small penalty to down-vote it.
As for redundant proposals, @Fweeb has already said that a tagging system was planned. Once that's implemented, you could tag a proposal as duplicate instead of down-voteing.
IMO, down-voteing should only be used when you actually disagree with the proposal, not for redundant or poorly written proposals.
I would agree about preventing passive voting. Then perhaps providing a reason should be a requirement of voting. It would be easy to filter out votes with no reason provided.