Removing Vote Soliciting Guidelines

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AidaBaida

November 24, 2015 15:57

I just was thinking that if the purpose of making vote-soliciting against the guidelines is to prevent people from focusing on votes, then it is having the complete opposite effect. Having a hard and fast rule saying you can't say, "Vote up" or "Please vote up" is encouraging people to care way more about votes than they would if that rule was not in place.

People also treat it as if saying, "Vote up" is endangering people's lives and causing global catastrophes. I've seen when one person has "power" over another, they tend to abuse it, and this "vote-soliciting" has provided away for others to be mean to others, especially since they feel 'justified' in what they were doing.

One example of how silly it seems is a person's bio, which said, "I am hated for soliciting votes from those poor, innocent, underage civilians" This made me laugh because it revealed in a rather satirical way that no one is going to really get hurt if you allow saying "Vote up".

For the first year or two of KACS, there was no rules about vote-soliciting, and it certainly wasn't just a complete mess, people figured things out fine. I think adding rules to it caused far more drama about votes than there was when it was gone. I think removing vote-soliciting rules will ultimately have a positive effect and cause much less interest in votes in the first place.

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Jett Burns

August 07, 2019 16:08

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Good point AidaBaida. :) I kinda agree with you, what is wrong with asking for votes? It's not like it will end the world.

I will pass this on to the KA staff, and I'll see what they think.
Nic Hanes

February 19, 2019 15:50
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Where do I sign up to join this revolution?
Jett Burns

August 07, 2019 16:11
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I don’t remember what they said, but seeing as how this rule is still in place, the KA staff didn’t change their minds. =)
Regina Litman

August 07, 2019 16:37

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I also agree with the long ago original poster and Jett Burns. For a low self esteem person, getting voted up, and not getting voted down, is a major accomplishment, as long as that person is not shy about asking for something. I am both a low self esteem person and also one who is not shy about asking for what I want. I don't do the programming projects here (45 years of doing this professionally has made me want to try other things), but here in the support community, I love to see that I got voted up and hate to see that I got voted down.

I know that what I just said is going to get some people to downvote this comment intentionally, just to make me angry. And I hope that Khan Academy's Support Community will see that what I wrote was just meant to be an example, not an actual solicitation for votes on this post and won't take action against me.

I noticed that one of the other rules prohibits people from soliciting votes on behalf of another person. I also think this is a bad idea. Suppose there is a person who is insecure and struggling with programming projects but finally gets a simple, rudimentary project to work! Most experienced users wouldn't even think of upvoting that project, and may even downvote it because it's not up to their standards. But suppose also that a friend of this insecure, struggling person is aware of what he or she went through to create his or her project. I think it would be great for this friend to post something like, "Taylor [choosing a name that has become popular for both boys and girls in the U.S. lately] has made many attempts to get a project to work. [He or she] finally got one to work! I know it may look simple to you, but Taylor is very proud of this accomplishment. I think it would be great if you upvoted Taylor's project to encourage [him or her] to keep going."

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Removing Vote Soliciting Guidelines

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