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What exactly is the ill effect of downvoting an article because one dislikes it? Of course I’m new around here and I haven’t actually downvoted anything, but I seem to have missed this tidbit of information in the new user orientation packet. I would love to have this cleared up, and I reckon others will read this and learn, too.
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Articles should be downvoted for a concrete reason (e.g. the article is badly-written, incorrect, spam, etc.) This idea is specifically attempting to target downvoting due to the article not being in your taste but otherwise being fine. This latter use of downvote is supposed to instead be covered by article hiding.
Why should personal preference (instead of concrete fact) not qualify for downvote? The answer is differing preferences. You might like an article that I don’t, but if I downvote it (and prevent it from appearing to you) before you have the chance to see it, then ultimately the voting system has failed as you’ve now lost out on an otherwise-good article, it’s just that I didn’t like it.
Here’s my understanding on how various opinions on articles are intended to map:
I liked the article => upvote.
I neither liked nor disliked the article => no vote.
I disliked the article => hide.
The submission was spam, inaccurate, or otherwise had severe problems => downvote with appropriate reason.
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The thing a downvote should should say for “didn’t like reason” is, “I don’t like this, and I want to tell the submitter that AND I don’t think others should see it.”
Which when I first click downvote, I didn’t realize that was the reason. So I couldn’t in good conscience downvote articles w/o having a non-opinion reason.
Downvote for “didn’t like” should hide and redirect people to a philosophy page.
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In this case, the “upvote” and “downvote” paradigm doesn’t seem to fit well. Someone is likely to correctly assume that upvoting means “I like this article”, and then incorrectly assume that downvoting means “I don’t like this article”. This isn’t exactly an unjustified assumption when given what seems to be a binary option.
Another approach would be to decouple “I like this article” from the voting system. There could be a “star” or “favorite” option next to “hide”, to allow someone to indicate that they liked it. Then, the “upvote” and “downvote” could mean “this belongs here” and “this doesn’t belong here”, respectively.
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Because downvoting a story prevents someone else from gaining new information. Why is that ever a good thing?
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