Upvote/downvote will fundamentally change Letsrun.com

I don't think it's evident this will happen.

For one, there is clearly a political divide on this site. It's not clear how you could pander to get upvotes.

Having feedback can also encourage people to be more thoughtful and less mean. I think that is good for discourse.

With anonymous users allowed to vote, and votes being private, I think in general good comments will get voted up and bad ones will get voted down.

There's a benefit for having feedback besides people's replies to you.

Agree on all points. Don't mind the upvotes, but would like to see downvotes disappear.

Over time nobody will us the upvote downvote button. This is so 2010.

I don't believe that it will get rid of free speech. I think that it will clean up the boards by helping rid it of unproductive posters and bomb throwers. Debate is fine and I think that most here are good with that. Where LRC goes wrong are the posters that offer nothing but insults and baseless invective. Claiming that conservatives are all racists or that all liberals have a mental disorder isn't debate. intelligent discourse, or helpful.

I attempted in the past to post in reddit. From my experience, only like 10% reddit users are serious. You can post an important subject but the "the victorious majority" overlook it and they upvote others threads more popular and technically way less important.

All depends on how legitimate the vote is and whether Dominion is behind the website.

The pandering happens in the post itself. You don’t need to do anything extra. And once one side tips the balance in terms of population, the other side gets tired of being belittled and downvoted, so they just stop participating. You can view any of the popular subreddits to see how one-sided things become when this reaches fruition. Again, this is what happens in all online forums that use the upvote/downvote system. Letsrun will not be an exception

I'm fine with political/social related topics being relegated to their own threads. I hate seeing something political pop up in the middle of a thread about running that derails the discussion. Downvotes will hopefully keep those out. In terms of running opinions, I don't think most people will get downvoted for their opinions unless they're needlessly negative or sound like trolling.

I'm fine with someone getting downvoted because they're telling a woman to lose weight (and adding nothing else), or saying they hope an athlete runs poorly, or something like that. I think for the most part, people won't be downvoting "I think Hocker runs 3:28-3:29 this year" posts, and will be downvoting "Hocker has peaked" after every race he runs well.

yes pretty obvious. up/downvote leads to echo chamber. very bad decision.

It won't change anything.

How can every response on this thread except one have negative “Likes”? They’re all different opinions! LOL

I think this is a valid concern, but posts and threads are only sorted in Chronological order, so it's not like minority opinions get buried.

The One problem with the previous system, where the "only reward is one or more replies" is that it encourages a trolly style, so I might try to bait people into replying instead of simply making a contribution to the discussion.

I think the forum is in a situation where it's worth taking a bit of risk to try to improve it.

maybe. but they first have to integrate or get shamed for white racism on facebook and twitter

Up/Down voting is abused to squelch opinions and persons.

Good discussion is not a popularity contest.

The majority of posts are from anonymous/unregistered handles, throwaway accounts, or second/third/fourth (etc.) registered accounts.

I guess let's run is worried people will eventually move over to reddit - apart from the anonymous posting, reddit is better in every way imaginable.

I don't think it will have a significant impact.

Because this is let’s run. 😂 Unlike reddit, the net downvotes will far exceed the net upvotes on any given thread. 

Unlike reddit where only non-groupthink posts are downvoted, you’ll just categorically get downvoted here by just posting.

Wow. I thought the up vote/down vote totals were supposed to only internal. I thought we were going to use them for us to find nuggets of wisdom we didn't see (Or see problematic threads/posts).

But I do know we don't plan on only showing you the popular posts so I don't think it will change too much.

Whatever can “upvote harvesting” folks do with the harvested upvotes? Get rich quick by selling them in the open market for NFTs?