I think more provocative and deeper issues are great. Only problem is: how do you do provocative/interesting when you have a system where people vote you up or down based on how much they like what you are saying?
If this were pre-copernicus Europe and we were discussing astronomy, some of the most interesting (and as it turned out later, easily verified) ideas would be voted through the floor. Neat discussions about neat topics turn into popularity contests and mob rule, even with a generally neat audience like this.
Perhaps sticking your neck out and taking a position which is uncomfortable and posting and engaging in provocative subjects requires a level of trust that doesn't exist in up-down social sites? It seems the format encourages being interesting and challenging, but only up to a point. I think lots of people confuse being snarky and asinine with having something interesting to say.
So count me in on the more deep questions -- as soon as we don't start voting people up or down based on which clique they are in and instead vote them up or down based on how interesting and thoughtful their comments and articles are. I remain skeptical that's going to happen anytime soon. How about going from up/down arrows to a dropdown with positive and negative attributes? That would at least start telling you something about what the raters were thinking, and might lead to some more interesting insights.
I doubt that you can really influence the depth of a debate with any voting system. Voting is good for filtering large amounts of information. For everything else we'll have to use our brains for the time being. I agree that fear of getting downvoted is a very bad motivation in a debate. Downvotes are just unnecessary in my view. They only create bad blood and don't help to filter information. I've decided to never downvote.
But, you know, the day I really start to worry about downvotes is when the karma to $$$ conversion rates are announced ;-)
I agree that downvotes are much less useful than upvotes. That's why there are so many restrictions on them. There are no downvotes on submissions; you don't get a downarrow on comments till you get a certain karma threshold; and even then downarrows are missing in some places.
I'm becoming convinced that vote-oriented threaded commenting is harmful to discussion, except of a more limited, conversational kind. I haven't had time to properly think it through, so forgive the sketchiness of the rest of this comment, but my instinct is that this approach favors narrow, isolating, unnatural and oppositional discussion.
Dynamically-ordered threading divorces comments from the context they were written in (i.e. the rest of the thread, and of the natural linearity of conversation), and forces an awkward, artificial pattern of replying. This is a marked contrast to the sort of all-in-this-together, synthesizing discussions that can be found on sites like MetaFilter, and indeed of the natural conversations people enjoy in groups in real life. Voting and non-linear threading encourages and rewards simplistic, emotional, bias-confirming comments, while discouraging and often punishing any other kind of comment, leading to fragmented individualistic comments, which seems to me like the opposite of discussion.
I'm sure there are big problems with traditional linear comment threads, but if you want interesting, intelligent discussion, dynamic threading+voting seems to me the worst solution. (I might add that the generally high quality of comments here reflects the community, rather than the commenting system)
If this were pre-copernicus Europe and we were discussing astronomy, some of the most interesting (and as it turned out later, easily verified) ideas would be voted through the floor. Neat discussions about neat topics turn into popularity contests and mob rule, even with a generally neat audience like this.
Perhaps sticking your neck out and taking a position which is uncomfortable and posting and engaging in provocative subjects requires a level of trust that doesn't exist in up-down social sites? It seems the format encourages being interesting and challenging, but only up to a point. I think lots of people confuse being snarky and asinine with having something interesting to say.
So count me in on the more deep questions -- as soon as we don't start voting people up or down based on which clique they are in and instead vote them up or down based on how interesting and thoughtful their comments and articles are. I remain skeptical that's going to happen anytime soon. How about going from up/down arrows to a dropdown with positive and negative attributes? That would at least start telling you something about what the raters were thinking, and might lead to some more interesting insights.