Downvoting posts that prompt significant debate
Procedural question:
Is it fair and useful, that a comment or a question here can raise a debate of, say, seventeen or more individual contributions but attract only a negative score?
It looks to me like the comment in question was flagged. Lacking elements such as examples, rationales, analyses or an interesting story may have caused people to find it uninteresting. By being only tenuously related to the issues around laptop privacy, others may have found it low quality. It is plausible that one or more people felt that a likely result would be sparking two sides to talk past each other. The ;) does little to argue against such an interpretation.
That's the core problem. Something can be unpopular but still inspire conversation, or conversely popular and inspire none.
Sites like this and Reddit need three buttons "like" "dislike" (both of which aren't tied to moderation, and don't add or subtract from a total score), and a "unconstructive" button which is directly used to attack low effect/trolling/unacceptable comments.
"Unconstructive" tags should be PUBLIC. Meaning if you abuse it as a "super-downvote" it will be obvious from your profile.
I think most posts that are flagged are flagged because they are dupes (or blogspam/derivatives of existing dupes).
A great example would be reddit - try posting something there praising a conservative candidate and see how well you do. Then, try posting something praising Bernie Sanders and watch as you ride the wave of upvotes to the front page.
Nothing to do about the correctness of the content. Everything to do with whether the hivemind agrees.
We should all work on cultivating an internal locus of control.
Tim Ferriss and Josh Waitzkin recently spoke about this issue (fwd to 50:00) http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/03/23/josh-waitzkin-the-pro...