Thumbing up and down: Abuse already?

Depends how you define abuse, I guess.

How would you define abuse in this situation? I am genuinely interested...this isn't a smart-arse question.

"Abuse of the Thumbs" sounds like a film title, by the way.

I suspect, in this case, it's spillover from another thread, though I may well be wrong.

Hmmm.... define abuse..... I guess I just mean voting up or down not based on the guidelines craven set out. Letting it get personal by either targeting the poster or the topic.

the whole concept is based upon emotional response, it has nothing to do with validity of the argument. Craven wanted a sanitized a2k, as in a Disney experience, however he killed what was special about a2k. Life is messy, the raw honesty of the old a2k is what made it useful, however it made for a messy a2k. Craven, and some of the more squeamish a2k members, could not deal with the honesty.

I would expect that there are some people who might give the topic a "thumbs down" for one of two reasons:

They disagree with what I said, but don't have the guts to offer an counterargument.

They don't like me!

In any case, it really does not have to matter.

Personally, I don't care for the ratings stuff, and I said it before this happened.

Interesting view on what makes Craven tick.

Completely wrong, of course, but interesting in a King Charles' head, Rorschachian, projectingish sort of waty.

You have read my mind.

Yeppers....be interesting to see how that all pans out. I suppose it is inevitable, but will hopefully get evened out by community-as-a-whole-responses, and stuff built into the voting system.

Isn't the problem that we can't move topics of little or no interest--like many of the game/trivia things--out of the queue without voting it thumbs down. In the old A2K, if you posted on one of those threads one time and then decided you didn't want to continue, it was nevertheless at or near the top of 'your posts' forever after. It would be great to come into the site and see all the topics that are of interest specifically to you be at the top without having to vote down other equally worthy threads that are of less or no interest.

Indeed.

Hopefully we can be mad at someone without voting down all their topics, though.

I remember spending a lot of time on afuzz voting up and down (mostly up) to tamp the effects of abusive voting. More time than I liked to have spent doing so.

Or alternatively, they're simply not interested in the topic, and to avoid having to wade through a million threads to get to the ones they like, vote down the ones they're not interested in so they will collapse out of view.

Which is also a perfectly legitimate use of the thumbs, the way I understand it.

It's not just about spam and offensive stuff, it's not just an equivalent of the "Report" button. (If it's something you used to click "Report"on, you should now vote it down and still report it.)

I may be wrong, but I see the use of the thumbs up and down system as two separate, legit things:

• Weeding out the truly obnoxious or offensive. If enough people vote it down, they will collapse out of view by default. Plus, the mods will be able to easily find them, as they will be at the bottom of the listing by vote.
  
  
• Sorting topics by those considered most interesting or relevant, so that new visitors to the site find the most instructive/interesting/etc threads on top.
  
  E.g., Craven has (I read somewhere) been voting the word games down, and judging on the minus-something ratings many of them have, he's not been the only one. The logic, I suppose, being that the standard listings of the old A2K were quite dominated by these word games, when, in the view of those voting them down, they are of only limited, niche interest.

And of course, if you dont like the consequent effect of "popular" topics rising to the top and "inpopular" ones (that many have marked as not of interest to them) sinking to the bottom, you can just adjust your preferences so that you can just see threads according to which have the newest posts, etc.

That's the way I understand it, anyway...

So a person interested only in word games won't have access to them on the top of the list but could easily find them by using the tagging function, or by the sort function.

But, if the word game people got together and voted them all up, Craven's vote would be overruled and the games would be high on the list?

Basically, Foxfyre hit it, the way I understand it. The thumbs down can now be used to move things out of your sight that are of less or no interest to you, so you can customise your view of the threads to fit your interests.

So no personal slight intended, at all.

I thought that was one of the intended purposes of them too - but littlek, you wrote:


Where can I find the guidelines you mention?

Yes, we are already having abuse of the thumbs. The first instances of this showed up just after the new site started. Some people vented their frustration by starting "I hate it" threads, which is a legitimate thing for them to do, and they were voted down immediately -- one of them so far down it became invisible. A few hours later, people apparently to be using the thumbs down as a substitute for "I disagree with your political opinion". (I wrote a post about the observation, which was voted down, too.)

I imagine that's what you had in mind when you said, "I see a lot of Afuzz in this site." Did you? Anyway, I see it, too.

I see afuzz in the voting, but not just there.

I take the attitude that no matter what anyone else does, I refuse to play, "gotcha". I will only give negative ratings to the kinds of things that Craven described.

http://able2know.org/topic/120756-1

That's fine as far as it goes. But you're forgetting that the site is now designed, on purpose, so that ratings have consequences for how everyone sees the site. It affects how your posts are positioned on the lists for the relevant tag. And if enough people disagree with your initial post, and vote their hearts out on your threads, it affects whether people see them at all.

This is no longer about "I don't care about popularity contests." Personal vendettas against one correspondent now diminish everyone's experience of being on the site.

Why am I the only one with a green thumb?