We have votes, and we have flags. We have rewards, and we have reputation. It seems to me that to make negative voting more "fair" in more people's minds we need to make these things distinct. Starting with
- Flags. Flags are not downvotes! Flags are needed for the things that people have come to associate with flagging: BAD BEHAVIOR in all its forms. This deserves to be separated from a
- Downvote. We need the "upvote" and "downvote" options to be re-branded with more focus on their purpose of saying "I think this post deserves a greater percentage of today's rewards than it is currently set to receive" and its opposite. So a downvote is not about the content itself (or the generator of the content) but about the size of the piece of today's pie that it is set to receive. In other words (borrowing from your earlier post) it is a statement about the voting. But in order for this to take place we would need to
- Separate "reputation" from being a function of the upvotes and downvotes received.
To be perceived as "fair", negative voting (with voting being about how others have voted as opposed to the value of a particular piece of content) should not negatively affect the reputation of the person who created the content, and voting in general should be rebranded as the slicing of the pie.
Those are my thougts. Sorry for using "we" while talking about your system.
Thank you for voicing this here, @jsteck. As you know, I've been thinking about this the same way: up and down votes as setting value and not to be taken at all personally.
There are articles I've read here that I wouldn't downvote at any price. Other times, a good posts's overwhelming success creates an wave of copy-cat posts of varying quality that trend due to speculative voting on the topic. To me, that seems to disincentivize exactly the type of behavior that will add value while rewarding a game-the-system attitude. Maybe that's for whales to handle or a downvote isn't the solution for some other reason.
But, couldn't it simply be understood that downvotes have nothing to do with who wrote it or what it's about? Couldn't we educate ourselves to expect a rise and fall of post value with no cause to be butt-hurt?
I know I'm a dreamer...
Then I'm a dreamer too. I think that first we need to make a leap of faith and arrange the system the way we want it to be in our dreams and only when this proves to be an illusion (because of the flaws of human nature) we can reconsider and possibly go back to what we have now.
But let's not throw away a possibly valuable idea just because of our fears. It's our dreams that should drive our actions, not fears.
This is exactly how I would like it to be.