Thanks! (Speaking the silent majority is indeed tricky)

I think the useful low hanging fruit would be to allow you to select a section of a post with your cursor and up/down vote that section.

What would that actually do? (This most definitely is not low hanging fruit.)

I think an implementation is easier than you might expect (but I'll try to do more to prove it). I haven't looked at the code on the site yet, but here's my guess: when you click up, for example, javascript is triggered to send an AJAX message to the server with the particulars (who clicked?, on what?). If the event handling code is changed so that it queries for the current selection if any, and adds that information to the message it sends the server, and if the server logs that additional information in its database, then the biggest part is already implemented.

To make this useful the information needs to come back out somehow, and making a nice shiny implementation of that involves more work, I admit. A bare bones implementation would be an additional icon on a comment (next to permalink, say). Click the icon and it gives you details about comments on the post. E.g. it dumps the time ordered (anonymous?) list of up's and down's together with anything that was selected at the time.

Edit: maybe you just meant "can you tell me how that would function as a social dynamic?" Sorry if so; let me know. see also my rant

Thanks. To really do it, I'll probably need a test server. I'll see what I can do and report back by next weekend, hopefully, unless somebody has something like that sitting around.

The current points on this post are 19. I happen to remember that the count used to be higher (not sure how much higher) so I think that the recent arguments have brought the total down some [fair enough]. This is all side information that I do not have direct access to except by memory. It tells me that the voting is mixed, but isn't very precise.

What decisions would having more precise information impact and how would it change your decision?

Questioning votes is a way to get answers that can lead to self-improvement and not just to "faction-based" outcomes. Again this is a question of balance.

Questioning net downvotes can to self-improvement. But individual votes are really noisy by themselves. People vote for all kinds of reasons, few of which need to impact what kind of comments. And unless you get a lot and they are unexpected it's unlikely that learning why someone downvoted you is worth the time, page space and distracting everyone else.

<Actually, don't you see how ironic it is that you're using this argument at this particular point in the thread? This post is subordinate to a comment I made that said:

Why is this downvoted twice? No wonder he's concerned about it. Sheesh.

Which was on behalf of wedrifid's point, which is largely your point. Wedrifid's post now has "+4" points. I think this represents a dynamic of social thinking that is unhealthy without policing. [I have something drafted about policing, but based on what I've learned in this post, it's not ready for mainstream consumption on this site. This is another pertinent kind of inhibition, really.]

Wedrifid can correct me if I'm wrong, but I really doubt he cared that much about the -2 (or if he did care he didn't want to care). It's hard to when you have 20,000 in total karma. Policing of any kind requires effort. Karma, like anything else, can be over-policed. And like other things that are not of great significance any policing is often more trouble than it is worth. The point of karma is a) a collective moderation tool (mainly this involves downvoting spammers and trolls), b) a loose indicator of status to encourage effortful and intelligent contributions.

Wasn't the first sequence post about a "dojo"? This site is, as far as I can tell, the public dojo.

Yeah, this is a good point. The problem is, it isn't just that. And that's part of why individual upvotes and downvotes in many cases don't signal much-- people want different things from the site and vote accordingly. If enough people see a comment that noise will get lost and you'll get a pretty good estimate of the quality of the comment. An individual comment that is net downvoted can be noise as well. I have plenty of negative comments, as does wedrifid. Much of the time I deserve them but sometimes it's just a matter of my having information community doesn't have and not communicating it well, different priors or talking about something others don't care about. Overtime that noise gets washed away (think of all the comments that are voted up way more than they are worth, i.e. this)

I'm not at all against discussing changes to the site structure to make it better. I think there are a lot of things that people have agreed would improve the site but are slow to come about for coding reasons. You might try looking through some of the older meta threads and see what was discussed then.

That seems like a new and valid way to make wedrifid's point.

I have an undeveloped intuition that building the site that way hurts the content of the site, not just me. But I'm not sure about that.

Gah! these older posts cited by matt may make everything discussed here irrelevant (as action items; not as discussion for it's own sake or some larger purpose perhaps). I think we have a serious information liquidity problem on this site.

I deserve some of the blame for not "doing scholarly due diligence" to find this post sooner, but come on, I'm a newb. (~30 days maybe, most of them idle; the last couple ridiculously active) and "prior work" is something I repeatedly asked for.

Hmmm. I was about to conclude there's a newbie orientation problem and a lack of information liquidity (I mean the property that what's known over here becomes known over there on the site). But then I got some data:

This is the 48th comment and it took ~2 days.

In the scheme of things, that's not that bad. I learned a lot. Hopefully I didn't waste too much of everyone else's time. I enjoyed the interaction. Rediscovering things can be instructive.

Thanks matt! I'm going to edit the initial part of the OP to reflect your information.

I'm making a swift change of judgement here. Please let me know if it's wrong.

To me it indicates how showing derived facts instead of direct facts can be more confusing than helpful. I make an exception for showing the net point total because the current dynamics at least give some kind of rough notion of overall response and I don't want to introduce confusion, just add a bit more of the information back.

EDIT: the notion of direct I'm using here is not precise, which is part of the problem with this issue.

Hmm. That really should have been Addicted. Anyway, Thanks Vincent! (I had no idea either bbleeker, and I think that's exactly the right question.)

Of course. I'm excellent at making true but useless statements.

I don't think this would even be all that hard, just data + math intensive.

Actually it would make a kind of fun programming/statistics project. Tempting!

(The contents of this post aren't relevant to OP at all or even germane to this thread except that they are a "reaction" to them)

having some metric for how controversial a post is would be useful... (other comments)

Thanks for this sequence of ideas. More... later.

(Bakkot) (The contents of this post are no longer relevant to OP except insofar as both discuss changes to the voting system.)

Interesting disclaimer technique: Is there an etiquette about disclaimers FAQ? [This time I mean the implication TheOtherDave.]