@SocDev
/mlp/ probably believes we love PT because we come down on people who’ve attacked her using transphobic slurs, but that’s only because we don’t like anyone attacking anyone with transphobic slurs, or racial slurs, or homophobic slurs, or anything else. Judgement of PT for her personal qualities is a different matter.
/mlp/ probably believes we love SJWs because we don’t like anyone attacking anyone with transphobic slurs, or racial slurs, or etc. and because when I’m active I’ve been pretty up front about thinking that social justice is an important thing (the fact that I believe the discussion is dominated by vocal reactionary extremists on both sides resulting in complete polarisation of opinion and I spent most of my effort trying to explain one side to the other in the hopes that more moderates might actually be able to understand the subject and have rational debate is probably lost on them).
But that doesn’t really have anything to do with this change.
At any rate, we experiment, we make changes, and we listen to feedback. On more than one occasion we’ve conducted site-wide polls to try and get feedback on what we’re doing and have taken action based on this feedback, even when it wasn’t what we personally had hoped for or wanted to do. We have been known to revert changes when they proved unpopular or didn’t have the effect we intended. Part of this change is an experiment to see whether or not it is effective at discouraging people from downvoting content they should be filtering (because as TSP observed, we do have a significantly sized group of users who mass-downvote content purely on the grounds that they hate a particular character or similar) - the
intention of the voting system is that it is a measure of the quality of the content, not how many people hate a ship, and we want to see if this causes the system to be used in the way we had intended rather than in a way we consider an abuse of the design. We’ll get data and feedback and see if this actually works out or not.