Vote moderation standards are an overall benefit to the site

Argument 1: Moderation has helped Quality over QuantityBefore vote moderation was ramped up, users weren't fully expected or required to actually read an entire debate before they voted. In fact most of the time, members skimmed and gave very vague RFD's that didn't demonstrate clearly whether a voter read and understood all of the points in said debate. Let's take a look at some of the more "popular" debates on the site, that rank high in the search engine. In the debate titled: Homosexual acts are Immoral (1) Between WriterDave and Contradiction there were a total of 54 votes. There are plenty of other debates with similar votes, but I'll use this debate as a sample debate since it was a defining debate in DDO's history. vDavididit, Meatros, SocialPinko, Larz, stephen_Hawkins, KeytarHero, and 16kadams about the only members voting on that debate that even demonstrated having read the debate. Most of the rest were poorly explained RFD's that provided no evidence the entirety of the debate was read. A good majority were counter vote bombs, and overall just horrible votes. Basically one of the most popular serious debates on the website had only 7 decent votes. That's 12.96% of all the votes on that debate being "good". (2)Times have changed, so has voting; but for the better.When the most popular serious debate on the website accrues 7 real good votes that provide the debaters with feedback, that is still good. How does that compare to some of today's debates with moderation?Here is a debate on Legalized prostitution between Miss.Bailey and Izz220(3) where 6 of 7 serious votes were cast that demonstate the debate read the debate, and provided the debaters with quality feedback. Another debate from Kasmic and Blahmonkey on lowering the voting age gets 5 Quality votes. (4)These are just a couple recent examples that took place over the last couple of weeks. Both of these debates were not far in quality votes from one of the biggest debates on DDO, but are absent the spam of all the counter vote bombs, and horrible RFD's. So that is the impact with this point, that moderation has not severely impacted the physical number of the good RFD's. On average, decent debates will usually get 2-3 good votes which prima facie seems to be pretty consistent throughout July, where as some debates 4 years ago got plenty of votes, with no quality feedback. Essentially 0 votes.Argument 2: Mis-directing blameA common argument that poeople make is that the lack of voting is due to intimidation from heavy vote standards. It is assumed that the total number of 0-0 Tied debates is a result of vote moderation, when in reality, that number is due to the increased number of debates on the actual website. Let's check out a random date in 2011, and see there are currently 3 debates in the challenge period (5), and compare this to today's most recent capture (April 10th, 2016) where there were 28 debates in the challenge period(6). Now in order to actually provide hard stats on percentages of active debates in the challenge period now VS then, an actual study would have to be done. A study of that caliber would take an immense amount of time and effort, which I am not currently willing to do. Whether the trends remained consistant between lack of debates in the challenge period 4-6 years ago to the immense amount of debates there now, is left up mostly to an individuals memory. But with the influx of debates being instigated, there are plenty of them being created that are absolutely horrible debates. As one of the Mod's for the Voters Union that has to sift through the voting period section pretty often, I have found that I am lucky to find a quality debate worth reading on any given 2 pages of debates currently in the voting period. I'll task any readers of this debate to browse the challenge section to verify my claim. Site developments like the polls and the opinions section have drawn a bigger crowd to DDO, and unfortunately that crowd seems to be made up of mostly younger individuals with shorter attention spans. This results overall in lack of interest in writing long arguments, which then ends up in debates with paragraph long rounds, or forfeited debates, overall debates that no one wants to go out of their way to read. The influx of members combined with the much smaller community of members that care about good voting, is unfortunately a drastic ratio. The point of all of this is that there isn't a ton of evidence that lack of voting stems from vote moderation. Showing some of the current debates from my first argument demonstrate that poeople are still interested in casting good votes, just less interested in voting on crappy debates. Who is the real enemy here, the mods that do their best to encourage productive voting, or the site developers who focus more on bringing members that lower the content quality on their website to make the appearence of no voting prominent? Argument 3: Vote moderation Deterance? Good riddance!Kind of going into the first point about vote moderators being responsible for pushing voters away, this is the argument that I find the most proposterous, because if you are a decent vote moderation shouldn't be effecting you anyways right? I am not saying that vote mods haven't removed good votes (re-iterating this from my round 1 framework), but that overall have removed more bad votes then good ones, and have created an atmosphere that sets the standards of our voting community higher.But let's be honest, the vote standards aren't overly complicated enough to where all of the potential problems with a vote can't be solved by just reading the debate in it's entirety. That's what the standards encourage members to do. Do we really want members voting who don't want to put the time and effort into giving you feedback on a debate you worked so hard on? I say good riddance to any voter that quits voting because they think the standards themselves are "too strict" and happily welcome the new era of voters who care enough about the site and community to contribute to fixing the problems themselves. So the purpose of my opening arguments are to prove that 1. If anything, we have more "good" votes now then we used too, and that debates now have 80-100% chance of having every vote be a quality vote compared to the 12% on the biggest debate on the site, 2. That the problems caused by Juggle should be blamed on Juggle, not the mods who work hard to better the site, and 3. That anyone choosing to stop voting as a result of moderation standards shouldn't be voting anyway. In ragnar's voice I echo the question: Is voting for the debaters, or is it for the voters? Back to you Wylted.Sources:1. http://tinyurl.com...2. http://tinyurl.com...3. http://tinyurl.com...4. http://tinyurl.com...5. http://tinyurl.com...6. http://tinyurl.com...