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  • Aaron215
    +6

    "So to the people saying that downvoting because of disagreement is against the rules, that's all good and well but how do you enforce that? And when snapzu grows and has tens/hundreds of thousands of users, how do you police people's downvoting?"

    You enforce it by assimilating newcomers into your community. At the beginning it is very important to establish culture, and as it grows you have to exponentially increase that effort. When a community grows rapidly, the newcomers outnumber the established folks and sometimes will even out-participate them. As a single newcomer on a forum like this one, you see the actions of everyone around you in the form of those little numbers next to their names, so if you see 50 downvotes on a comment that doesn't break the rules, but seems like what you'd consider an unpopular but at least potentially a reasoned argument, you assume that downvotes are for things that you disagree with. Most people aren't going to read the rules, so if the established community believes strongly that downvotes should be used as intended, they need to push hard to make sure the downvote's purpose is known to the new users.

    So can it be legitimately enforced? Not easily unless you want to assume you know what the person who downvoted was thinking when they clicked the button. But can it be socially enforced, to an extent? Yes. By leading by example when growth is not rapid, and by calling special attention to it when growth is rapid. There will come a point when that is not enough either, and that will require UI changes that have been suggested in this thread: moving the downvote button, changing the graphic, and including a dropdown box for you to give a reason for every downvote (which will make very clear that if you don't have one of those reasons, then there shouldn't be a downvote given).