Why do you 'vote' on the "Anarchy" question site?

Question

Further still--  Why does your site track and recognize me as 'me' when I look at my question as an anonymous, and unregistered browser?  This seems creepy.


edited by dot to add tags

Answer 1

i agree that the fact that the software recognizes your ip (or something else) when you're anonymous is creepy. it is only one of many many creepy things about a) computers, b) technology, c) modern life.
welcome.

as for why people vote on an anarchist site, i agree that this is yet another indication that the infrastructure we exist within is not of our choosing. it would be awesome if we had a more complex feedback system that enabled us to be both clear and nuanced in our responses to various posts and portions of posts. luckily, there is the option of responding with language as well as with clicks. of course that does require you to register, which may be outside of your security comfort zone.

the world is full of choices.

Comments

Dot.  Hmmmm... ???  It seems that there is a better response than " Oh well, the world is fucked, so join us...."  when it comes to the creepiness of modern life.  To address this and the issue of voting being something that is not of our choosing:  I disagree.   We ( as radicals and anarchists) must know someone that can write code and program a custom made program that has the features that we desire.  
Why not create a program that prevents tracking of IP (or whatever it is) and counter some of the fucked mentality of modern life?  

My point about voting in an  'anarchist' environment has more to do with the failings of voting in general and it seems to only detract from the conversation and in essence dumb things down in a major way.  ( Dude I'm gonna down vote your ass,  or dude Im into it- so Im gonna up vote-- seems to me as a slippery way of promoting democratic thought in an 'anarchist' environment-- I have similar feelings about the 'poll' section on news sites such as Anarchistnews.)
 So why not do away with the feature in the program or find another that suits the desires of everyone?  

The language option works good for me, but in the context of other questionable attitudes, my interest in using it may be limited.  

Up until now, I have been largely in favor of your opinions, but this post shifted that quite a bit.  It felt sad, resigned, and more in line with the things I hate about our world than a direction that I would like to see it go.  Thanks for the reminder about the multitude of choices surrounding us.  I will be off to explore them now.

---

ah, a year later i see this response. :(
for anyone else stumbling upon this old thread - i will respond to brown dog that it would be wonderful if for every compromise with the world we live in there was a willful, intentional non-compromising response that was open to us.
but i don't in fact know someone who can write a program that would work better than this one. and if i did know such a person, i'm not sure that i would want them to focus on such a program to the detriment of other, more significant things that they could be doing with their skills (for example - creating a user-friendly interface for email encryption).

and yes, of course binary/polarized responses (down voting and up voting) are not nuanced, but voting is not required on this site, and further, to lionize this site as being particularly significant seems sort of odd to me. a website is not life. the options on a website are of limited relevance to the world or our imaginations. pretending that that is not the case would perhaps be *more* detrimental to anarchists than the reverse.

and i in particular have No Desire to attempt to meet the desires of everyone. what a thankless, pointless, and exhausting task that would be.