Dear Policy Makers,
I feel that the decision to not allow down-revoting was a bad one, on a UI design level as well as a violation of our rights as voting noders.
There are two main arguments I can conceive to disallow down-revoting. One of them is that down-revoting might happen, but happens so rarely as to not be worth coding for. In fact, a recent discussion with Swap even said as much (verbatim from the archive):
So you downvote something, the person makes corrections, you revote it upwards. People seldom or never work on a writeup to make it worse to merit a downwards revote. This is just the rationale given, btw. Not necessarily my opinion, but the argument went (archive cuts off -GA)
This is not kosher. I feel it's a violation of our right to downvote at all. As a voting noder, I feel that we should have the ability to negatively impact a writeup whenever we want, for whatever reason we feel like. In a sense, this is akin to being able to smoke or drink whenever we feel like: though you may never actually exercise your ability to take in mind-altering substances, you still possess that ability. Not allowing the ability to revote downwards is a direct refusal to allow us our free ability to downvote in the manner we are accustomed to, even if we might never exercise it.
Second, I feel that not allowing us to down-revote discourages voting in the first place. To draw from the same policy decision quoted above: the intended end result seems to be that the only votes on a writeup will only ever be upvotes. If this is the case, why bother downvoting at all? If the exemplary writeup will eventually reach a state that merits an upvote, there's fundamentally no reason to vote anything than an upvote, since that's what it's going to reach anyway. I admit that this is possibly a flawed argument, since in practice, a node that merits a downvote due to the views described within the writeup are not likely to change, but downvotes of that sort cannot possibly be the only downvotes cast within the system.
In addition, this is a bad decision from a user interface standpoint. Shortly after my quote above, another noder mentioned that he was now unable to revote downwards after accidentally upvoting a few writeups. The recommended solution (albeit from a non-staff noder) was to turn off quickvoting.
This is a ridiculous notion. If the user has a problem with a feature, then it is the feature that is broken, not the user. This is even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that addition of revoting essentially allows the correction of accidental downvotes. If revoting is even partially intended to be a way to correct accidental quickvotes (which, regardless of intent, it is certainly going to be used for), then only implementing half of that accidental voting protection is Bad Design.
Let me speak as a member of chanops for a moment and ask, what the hell am I supposed to tell a new voter when he misvotes by accident and discovers he cannot change it to what he actually thinks? Because as of right now, the only thing I can think of is that they're out the vote, and that the writeup they didn't like is forever stuck that way. What sort of message does that send?
Give us the ability to down-revote. The decision to not allow it was made on faulty reasoning and is both bad interface design and a violation of our privileges as voting noders.
5/16, 14:43 PST: Edited for clarity.