I like to scan the newcomments page to see if there is anything worth commenting on.
Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit.
The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.
Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?
I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.
BTW on just the beginning of your comment: This might explain why I sometimes get "correct" replies that totally miss the point: they've seen it in the newcomments page.
It's really baked my noodle a few times, that a seemingly intelligent person could be so self-confidently blind. Now it seems likely that it simply was because they were blind.
I didn't see your comment until now, but I'd guess it was downvoted for 'feeding the troll'. While the comment you responded was reasonable, the grandparent was a bad joke that was rightly being beaten down. I'm not sure how the page placement algorithm currently works, but I'd assume, and I think others assume, that downvotes on the children help to move something down the page. In other words, you were a victim of collateral damage.
I understand what you're saying, but my initial reaction is WTF! Now I need a freaking methodology to surf the net?
I like to think of users as always being right, even when they do things I do not expect or would not approve of. So in this case, even if it weren't me we were talking about, I'd have to take the side of the user poking around at the system, trying to get it to work as well as he can.
Sorry, I was trying to be less blunt than ending that sentence with "is a bad idea."
"I like to think of users as always being right"
Here's the problem - you weren't a user being resisted by software in that context. You were a person interacting with other people. You weren't poking at a system, you were having a conversation.
Yes. Of course you are correct. I made the mistake of not being fully informed about the conversation before responding.
But I still think overall this process works fine. I just need to take some time to check out the entire thread first.
I view the board more like IRC -- a conversation can start one place and end up somewhere else. So as long as you have 2-3 parents in mind when commenting, you're free to go in a slightly new direction. Some folks, I imagine, view the topics more hierarchically. The site design encourages both views, actually.
I actually think that the newcomments page is part of the problem. My theory is that people reading newcomments tend to downvote something that seems even a little bit controversial, without seeing the context in which it was made.
I notice that after a few hours the scores seem to settle into something more fair. A lot of people will fix unfair 0s and -1s.
Doing that, I noticed a long-time poster making the point that the community has changed and asking if anybody else has noticed it. So I said yes, it has changed, and quite a bit.
The reward for my comment was several downvotes. As it turns out, his comment was part of some Rand thread. My comment was viewed as supportive of his position, so I was punished. Everybody who took one position was getting upvoted, and everybody who took another was getting downvoted.
Now was that what really happened? Or was my comment simply empty and a pointless waste of bandwidth? I honestly don't know. All I have is up and down scores to go by. So for all of you who think the up-down arrows enforce community behavior, I have a simple question: how can the community push me to conform when I don't know if it's giving me a "we disagree" or a "poor quality" message?
I know I can (and have) made the same comment in other discussions and actually got voted up, so I don't think the quality of my comment had much to do with it. It looks a lot like context and opinion matter the most to me. Probably also the time of the week and time of day.
In short, the voting system is broken. A lot.