People have their own standards for upvoting and downvoting, but I wouldn’t say it’s trivial. Nearly everyone would intuitively agree “I think more people should see this” is a reason to upvote and vice versa and so act accordingly.
With a controversial default sorting order, you would be incentivised to downvote a popular, quality comment and also downvote unpopular spam to affect visibility appropriately. The difference between high updates and downvotes disappears. The current default sorting order doesn’t incentivise changing your vote based on a comment’s current score to influence its visibility, which is nicer.
People have their own standards for upvoting and downvoting, but I wouldn’t say it’s trivial. Nearly everyone would intuitively agree “I think more people should see this” is a reason to upvote and vice versa and so act accordingly.
With a controversial default sorting order, you would be incentivised to downvote a popular, quality comment and also downvote unpopular spam to affect visibility appropriately. The difference between high updates and downvotes disappears. The current default sorting order doesn’t incentivise changing your vote based on a comment’s current score to influence its visibility, which is nicer.