@EmmahSue said:
I was working with the idea that we'd discuss it, and then... trust each other to follow it, more or less. If only a few people do otherwise for whatever reason, whether purposeful jackassery or accidental or whatever, it isn't going to off-set the roughly 350 users total.
ES
That might be true. I don't think it is though.
Upvoting is obvious. Agree, like, whatever. Downvoting though should be used more sparingly, I think, especially if it's anonymous. It's incredibly difficult to see if it's just that one asshat following you around downvoting all of your stuff, Without that in place, I'm not sure that the reasons for downvoting are really a substantial discussion, as anyone can justify nearly any anonymous behavior for any rational reason that they choose, even if it wouldn't make sense to most other people. WIthout some way to monitor that, you could very well have those two or three people who engage in chronic retaliative downvoting, and as a whole, they could easily have a far greater impact on the reputation system than the occasional upvoter.
Reputation systems might seem like a popularity contest, and maybe they are, but popularity/reputation serves something of an important function. It shows who is established, and gives a baseline for how well-respected people's opinions are for new users. One of the first things I did here was look at by-post and by-reputation user lists, @arkandel and @coin being in the top two spots in both places. And then I found out that I knew both of them later, and understood why. Their opinions are ones that I respect even outside of the forums, so it makes sense to me that they would be highly ranked.
With that in mind, without some kind of way to force people to take credit for downvoting someone, I would take the suggestions from the NodeBB people. Either set the downvote threshold very, very high, or simply hide the downvote button in the custom CSS field.