Suggestion: Should a comment require a vote whether that be up or down
This would limit 2 problems that I perceive.
- Comment spam
A lot of users have realised that while there is a 'cost' to over-voting, where you reduce the power of your vote, there is no cost to commenting. If you have a look at some of the generic comments a post gets and cross reference them with the author with the voters you will find that a lot of the time they have not voted, despite their comment of
great point, couldn't agree more
well you could agree more you could've voted on the post!
- Lack of engagement with the report/downvote
I am not sure if there are any studies done on what is a healthy mix of upvotes to downvotes but I think steemit has missed the mark. While people are happy to comment on a post they dislike they do not feel willing to downvote it. A required vote may help fix that, and increase acceptance to the idea of downvoting.
Thanks for reading, any thoughts?
I don't think there is downvote option as such, only flagging a post which is a bit different. I kind of partly agree with your suggestion, but then again there are a lot scenarios (like now) where I only feel like commenting, but not voting (because I don't fully agree). My two cents is that you should put more thought and research into this thing, and if you still think it would benefit the platform, then rewrite the suggestion on stronger grounds.
Ah but if it engaged you enough to comment it must of had some worth, maybe another option could be for people to be able to give a partial vote. There may be problems with this if the person were able to vote more than a whole vote.
As to the downvote, if you hover over the flag icon it will say downvote. And I think downvote is a better term for it as flagging implies it is being brought to someone's attention and they will deal with it. While downvoting merely cancels an upvote, one thing that makes steemit's system offset is the fact that there is a reward to upvoting and none to downvoting.
@dantheman did a series of posts on negative voting
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/negative-voting-and-steem