Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
For one thing, it makes newer users feel a bit too scared to start contributing, especially if everything slightly below quality standards get removed immediatedly. And given that a community depends on new people as its lifeblood, the result can easily be an ever dwindling pool of site veterans talking among themselves til everyone loses interest and stops visiting.
So you want to remove the obvious idiots and poor contributors, while not scaring away people who might otherwise become decent users in the process.
There's also a related issue you need to consider here, and that's that to some degree, you need to avoid being too strict in terms of what's 'relevant' to the community. If you've got a programming forum, it may seem tempting to shut down any 'low quality' conversation about unrelated matters like TV or films or sports or whatever else, since they're not related to the site. But people don't purely talk about one thing over and over. It's best to have a place to discuss these 'unrelated' things (with some semblance of quality control) so as to bring the community closer together and to see other members as friends and associates rather than just virtual colleagues.
In other words, keep quality up, but don't brutally remove anything that's even the slightest bit dodgy or shut down everything not 100% related to the topic, otherwise you'll likely end up with a perfectly immaculate ghost town.
(I have absolutely no idea what I need to plug into the search box to find this post. Sorry.)
Five years on Reddit (and a few more on HN) has proven beyond any possible doubt for me that downvotes are used "9 times out of 10" more for disagreement rather than an honest value judgement on quality.
It's simply far too easy to mentally conflate "this comment is wrong (because of my own biases)" with "this comment is low quality", especially in the midst of a heated discussion.
Speaking of biases, the author here clearly has his own. He lives in a world where groupthink/hiveminding/circlejerking (pick your favorite term, they are all synonymous) doesn't exist, where astroturfing never happens, where moderators never abuse their power, where karma is always used for its stated purpose, and where censorship isn't a documented and heinous thing.
..which is pretty hilarious when you remember this is an article about moderation apologia.
Even the guideline for posting here - "anything that good hackers would find interesting" - assumes that 1) you should be a "hacker" (a subjective term, especially on a site with as diverse a community as this) and qualifies this with "good" (another subjective term.) Are we to assume that stories which are popular (high karma) are necessarily posted by better hackers than those which aren't? One should post "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity," implicitly provided one has the correct sort of intellect. While this is designed to bias the site in favor of high karma posters (and, obviously, whatever the mods happen to want) the end result is that quality is in the eye of the beholder.
It's all arbitrary and it's all subjective.
If you're in a heated argument with someone, most any human's first reaction given the ability to "punish" their opposer will be to click the downvote button.
The mental heuristic, in our case "anything that good hackers would find interesting", just never gets run. It's effectively dead code, because the stack of "do I agree with this" if/then blocks happens a few hundred lines up.
It takes a lot of effort to override that reflex.