Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
I&#x27;ve been in academia for awhile, I&#x27;m used to getting serious criticism. I&#x27;m a man, my whole life I&#x27;ve been told to toughen up. There&#x27;s really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.<p>But downvotes? I pretty much won&#x27;t post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I&#x27;ve got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I&#x27;m not sufficiently ideological, it&#x27;s fucking stupid, and it&#x27;s worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?<p>It&#x27;s not that I can&#x27;t take being told I&#x27;m wrong, I just don&#x27;t want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.<p>If downvotes don&#x27;t matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I&#x27;m tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.