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Downvoting Update  

There has been much discussion on CreateDebate about the use / abuse of downvotes on the site and certain participants getting “mass” downvoted, causing their efficiency score to drop dramatically.  In order to combat this problem and provide greater transparency around voting, we have decided to implement the following:

  1. Each downvote now costs the downvoter 1 Reward Point.
  2. The downvote is now displayed in the User’s Reward Point history.

In our opinion, the main problem isn’t downvotes, per se, but rather encouraging responsible downvoting.  We believe that flawed logic or inherently poor arguments should be downvoted, but that participants should not mass downvote a person with whom they disagree.

In our opinion, downvoting should be reserved for poorly thought out, offensive, stupid, or totally-off-base arguments.  If you disagree strongly with someone’s argument, then we encourage you to rebut their argument, citing logical fallacies, incorrect information, or poor argumentation.  In this way you can help maintain the integrity of CreateDebate and help that participant to understand what you disagree with in their argument.

If you need some reminders on how to write strong arguments, check out our previous blog post on this exact topic.

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Written by Bryan

March 16th, 2009 at 7:47 pm

Posted in New Features

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