Although I love Ozbargain, I have not always been a fan of the voting mechanism. I have observed that as soon as a post or comment is negged more than once, there is a tendency for others to "jump on the bandwagon". I am talking about situations where people "neg" because they want to "join the fun of putting someone down". I find this a bit disappointing and somewhat similar to bullying. What's worse, I think it discourages people from posting or commenting.
Could this perhaps be avoided by not displaying the tally for neg's? Of course a tally must be kept for the sake of knowing if the balance is + or -. But while the balance is '-', maybe don't show how many people actually negged. Just display a red "-" while the tally is below 0.
I know that this may be hard to implement, and people could perhaps still have a guess at the number of negs for a post, given that each neg is associated with a comment marked as negative. However, for votes on comments at least, I expect it would mitigate the "bandwagon" negging and keep the Ozbargain community more positive. It will also make votes less biased.
Feel free to neg this forum topic though ;)
Not at all actually. We've played around a bit more with the whole negative voting thing a while ago and most of the time we have to revert back. I can see what you mean when people pack-neg'ed comments. And to some degree deals although since it's required that you post comment to vote neg on deals, it's rarer there.
I agree what you've said though. Sadly the mentality of most people here is that since it's Internet I don't have to play nice with people. Negative votes were there to reduce trolls and people posting mis-information, but sometimes have been incorrectly used for attacks.
Thanks for the suggestion and we'll think a bit more on the solutions.