Rating without fully understanding is almost as dumb as buying something and not know wtf it does.
Not understanding is not limited to the feeling of confusedness, there’s also something called misunderstanding. Because you misunderstand an argument, you may be against it. Because you misunderstand a blog, you may downvote it.
And let me tell you, this is not about why would you change your mind. It’s about the feature being arbitrary and superfluous.
Also, vusys, if you wanted to give the “likes” feature more impact, you wouldn’t have let authors vote their own blogs. It is either that, or you being an hypocrite here.
Joa, I speak only for myself, but I’m pretty sure I mirror Vusys’ feelings when I say I welcome constructive criticism. However, the entitled, arrogant way you go about addressing anything you don’t like is immature and inappropriate. You want to be taken seriously? Don’t try to talk like you own the damn place. It just turns people off to you and whatever you’re trying to say. Try talking about stuff in a mature manner, that is, one that is cool and respectful.
There are a variety of reasons the system is set up like it is.
1) As Vusys said, it gives more impact to the voting process. Getting this community to take stuff seriously is kinda hard. We want voting to be an important part of the site. There’s an increased likelyhood that people would dick around with their votes if they could change them at any time. *random person logs onto MSN group* Lol, let’s all downvote Nass’ blogs and make him rage, then we’ll tell him to relax cause we’ll tell him we’ll change it later. I’m not saying that would happen, I’m just given an extreme example of how something loses its importance if it can be changed at any time.
2) It’s easy to mess with the number of likes to various effects (i.e. wait till someone gets on the front page, and then change your upvote to a downvote).
3) QotW. It would be chaos should people ever get competitive. One guy downvotes the other guy who’s right there with him for the most number of likes, despite initially enjoying his blog. Of course, that situation could get worse from there.
4) Similar to 3, people could use their vote for things other than judging to blog. Say somebody gets in an argument with someone else, rages, and changes all their votes to downvotes on all their blogs.
5) It encourages people to write better blogs. If somebody throws out a random three sentence string, they’re going to get downvoted for it, and that’s that. “Fixing” a blog shouldn’t be a viable alternative to writing the blog how it should have been the first time.
6) It encourages people to read the blogs better. You vote can’t be changed after 15 minutes, so you have to make sure you really want to up/down vote something when you go to do so. Liking/disliking isn’t about whether you necessarily agree with the person, it’s about how they presented their thoughts, how they recounted their story, etc. (i.e. David might dislike one of Nass’ blogs because he sees him as bragging about his pot exploits, not simply because it has pot in it).
There are more reasons we talked about that I can’t remember. TL;DR Bryan didn’t just pull this policy out of his ass. Just like the decision to move the sidebar to the right wasn’t arbitrary. The site hasn’t even been live for a week yet, and you’re already complaining about stuff you haven’t even gotten used to. Give it a chance, and if you still don’t like it, you can complain in a couple weeks. Next time, though, please do so in a more respectful manner.