What if replying to a comment forced upvoting of the comment being replied to?

Tenlock
2018-08-08T22:16:53Z

This would help, but not completely fix, two issues that seem to be inherent in the Tildes design:

\1 Voting is mostly treated as an "I agree" button. You'll see this in pretty much any thread where there's back and forth discussion. When you reply to a comment you're implicitly saying "this comment is worth engaging with," in which case an upvote is warranted.

Same thing for topics: leaving a top-level comment should force an upvote for the topic.

\2 It encourages non-engagement with comments that maybe shouldn't be engaged with. For example, one hot topic of this week has been the calling out of low-effort posts and how the community ought to chill out a bit. By forcing an upvote, it discourages replying to said posts, which makes it more likely that such comments will be ignored and drift to the bottom of a topic.

Edit: Whether this idea is implemented or not, as long as Voting = "I Agree" this site will become an even bigger echo chamber than Reddit because there are no downvotes to balance out the "I support the message of this topic/comment" crowd.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes/4n7/what_if_replying_to_a_comment_forced_upvoting_of_the_comment_being_replied_to

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Comments: 26