Okay, so this topic comes up pretty frequently, so I'm going to go at it again. I, for one, completely support what pg is doing.
The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site.
I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site.
If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job.
Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't.
That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.
The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake
If I understood the OP, their issue is not that they don't feel like a special snowflake - it's that this is a site that is driven, among other things, by the warm fuzziness of user contribution, predominantly expressed by voting, and that if users get the feeling that voting is irrelevant this might cause a lot of users to stop contributing.
While one can always say, correctly, "It's PG's site and he can do what he like with it", I think it is fair to comment on things like "if my vote doesn't count, showing me the button regardless and eliciting my vote seems unfair". If The Great Algorithm In The Sky has decided my vote doesn't count, I think it is fair to indicate this to me in some way.
My comment average is 4.24 right now so I am presumably not affected - who knows?, but I sympathise with the essence of the OP's argument. I also sympathise with PG's attempts to maintain the integrity of the site in the face of increasing popularity. I think the issue is not the why, it is the how.
Largely speaking I agree with you. My problem here is that I don't know what I've done wrong. If those responsible (PG and his editors) want to communicate a message to me, they've failed.
I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently.
I'm just confused.
Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.
Yeah, it looks to me like pg is a lot more subtle than most of the techie-types who come here. He is not loud or brash or confrontational. He expects people to observe and figure things out, rather than being told explicitly. That goes against many people's expectations.
On the positive side, he is very responsive to people with problems who are sincere about working with him. Almost everybody who has ever been banned and made a good-faith effort to work with him has gotten unbanned. From what I've seen, this pretty much always happens via email. As others have mentioned, that's the go-to communication method for people with problems.
The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site.
I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site.
If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job.
Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't.
That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.