Back in the mists of time when I signed up here I remember reading downvote etiquette is to bury comments which don't add value to the discussion. You can disagree sure, but you don't down vote based on just that.
Did I imagine that?
I fear that ever increasing downvotes are going to discourage reasoned and wide ranging discourse from both sides of the spectrum. It would be a shame if we ended up as another one sided echo chamber and we'll certainly be the worse off for it.
Am I the only one seeing this?
Downvoting for disagreement has always been allowed here.
When someone says something you agree with (say, we need testing) then you automatically think of all the reasons you believe it and fill in the gaps in reasoning. If someone says something you do not agree with (we need more testing), you automatically summon the counter arguments to each point the person has laid out, and you roll your virtual eyes at this person for not thinking through "basic" things you feel you know.
In short, none of our intuitions on what constitutes reasonable or reasoned are innocent.
The two voting buttons on every post are:
Agree vs. Disagree
Important vs. Not important
Disagree/Important means that even though I disagree with this comment, it makes an important point, and I recommend others should read it.
Agree/Unimportant means that even though I agree with this comment, it doesn't add anything significant to the conversation, and you can safely skip reading it.
Any web site with only one voting mechanism will surely have different people with different opinions on what that one voting mechanism means.
It's an honest question, 34 points in under an hour, 28 on-topic comments of people interested in and discussing the topic.
Plus, we already have the flagging mechanism for auto-collapsing flagged comments, why are there two mechanisms to make comments unreadable?
I usually upvote grey comments even if I disagree, unless they are offensive or very wrong. I also try to avoid downvoting grey comments, unless they are very offensive or extremely wrong.
As a result, discussions boil down to relatively inoffensive and well-accepted opinions as those who disagree with the hivemind's consensus are either downvoted or are afraid of being downvoted because they know their contribution won't be accepted.
The only online spaces I've seen where this isn't a problem are those that are strongly moderated, for example Reddit's /r/AskHistorians, and spaces where the community is small, tight-knit and known to each other.
In the former case, the responsibility for determining what has any value and what doesn't is left to the moderators, who follow strict, publicly visible rules. Anything left is required to be high-quality.
In the second, either people assume the best of each other or they're more averse to conflict. I like to believe the former.
Wonder what would be the repercussions of that.
I have a greater issue when a well-written, even if brief, comment gets down-voted heavily and nobody leaves a reply to explain why than when someone down-votes for disagreeing.
Is it always valuable to hear "both sides"? I'd argue that's a bad idea in practice. For example, if an anti-vaxxer came in and started commenting, I don't feel we owe them equal time or comment space. I'm OK with down voting and moving on.