<p>I generally favour experimentation because sites can fall into a rut and let's face it, most online communities are pretty resistant to any site changes, however minor. But I really wish these had been separate initiatives. I'm less bothered by the removal of the upvote limit than the downvote limit &amp; rep cost changes. Whatever tools they have developed for the inevitable consequence of the latter - a few annoyed new users mass downvoting people posting critical responses - surely this creates a lot of new and unnecessary work for the volunteer mods.</p>
<p><strong>More importantly</strong>: <strong>the plan is NOT to revert the changes after the experiment unless there's a strong reason</strong> to do this, though this is not made very clear in the linked post.</p>
<p>Relevant text in the main post:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because our test includes regular monitoring and clear guidance on
when reverting the change is the best course of action, our plan is to
retain these changes unless we see evidence they're causing negative
impacts that we can't address quickly by making changes to tooling or
automations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then more explicitly in the comments:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/393127/if-more-users-could-vote-would-they-engage-more-testing-1-reputation-voting-on?answertab=scoredesc#comment1314805_393148">Our plan is to only roll back if we meet the guidance for doing so or
if unexpected negative outcomes cause us to determine that rolling
back is the best course of action.</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This bothers me. I don't really trust the company's judgment of whether the effects of the experiment are negative or not.</p>
