The crook is probably tired though.

It’s under ctrl now.

It has similarities though, as pointed out in orher comments. For one, a user might be more careful with downvotes if they are afraid of negative consequences e.g. harassment. With piblic votes, there would therefore be a bias towards upvotes and and people abstaining from downvotes, i.e. less interaction in total.

Downvotes serve a purpose today, letting us quickly scan which comments are controversial or even harmful to the conversation. I, for one, usually sort most threads by votes and then skip the comments with many downvotes but for controversial topics, I instead seek out the comments that have both many upvotes and downvotes.

These would be harder to find given the above bias.

That’s the usual open source way. The config probably came later so they just added the option without changing the default because that would break backward compatibility.

And there would be too much boring work to build a migration.

I have done 14k edits over six years. I too like it for being therapeutic. I’d rather do micro-edita on osm than play another level of candy crush. Same kind of reward but you are also helping out creating something larger!

Honestly though, I don’t think osm will ever catch up to the commercial alternatives. Mostly because their harsh stance against automatic edits (and lack of version control). Also the lack of standardization is a problem. It’s very hard to create client applications because the data is structured way different in different regions.