I’ve posted some controversial stuff, and I understand why I would be getting down voted for that. But I see some of my posts and comments are in the negatives for seemingly no reason at all? I don’t really care about the karma because I can’t see it anyway, but I’m worried that comments and posts here are gonna get downvoted and dismissed without further consideration solely because of the negative score, like what would happen on reddit. I suspect someone, a troll, a bot, or a misclick downvoted my comment or post and people just followed along downvoting in turn. It’s either that, or I genuinely said something bad but I can’t figure for the life of me that it is indeed bad. My prime example is my support post for commenting under certain posts, why did that get the downvotes? And I see this kind of thing sometimes on other people’s comments as well, and I’m baffled, is it me who can’t understand why something is bad, or hive mind came here too?
Honestly it’s a problem with binary ranking systems across the board. Maybe if there were additional axes you could vote on, like “agree/disagree”, “quality/low effort”, “nuanced/trite”, etc. I don’t know how one would go about implementing such a thing, but until someone does, we’re stuck with having a simplistic system that doesn’t adequately reflect the complicated responses real people have to content.
Slashdot had something like this back in its day, you could upvote for Funny, Insightful, etc, and it worked quite well. No idea what it’s like these days though.