There is a custom of often explaining downvotes, and there should be one of doing so more frequently.
I prefer not having downvotes explained. It is irritating when the justification is a bad one and on average results in me having less respect for the downvoter.
and there should be one of doing so more frequently.
I reject your normative assertion but respect your personal preference to have downvotes explained to you. I will honour your preference and explain downvotes of your comments while at the same time countering the (alleged) norm of often explaining downvotes.
In this instance I downvoted the parent from 1 to 0. This is my universal policy whenever someone projects a ‘should’ (of the normative kind not ) onto others that I don’t agree with strongly. I would prefer that kind of thing to happen less frequently.
About what fraction of downvotes have bad justifications? Is this a serious problem (measured on the level of importance of the karma system)? Is there anything that can be done about it?
I was certainly not aware of this problem.
My assertion of a norm was based on the idea that downvotes on lesswrong are often explained but usually not explained, and deviating from this fraction would bring, on average, less respect from the community, thus constituting a norm. I think the definitions of “often” and “norm” are general enough to make this statement true.
I don’t know how much of a problem it is, but there’s definitely something that can be done about it: instead of a “dumb” karma count, use some variant of Pagerank on the vote graph.
In other words, every person is a node, every upvote that each person gets from another user is a directed edge (also signed to incorporate downvotes), every person starts with a base amount of karma, and then you iteratively update the user karma by weighting each inbound vote by the karma of the voter.
When I say “variant of Pagerank”, I mean that you’d probably also have to fudge some things in there as well for practical reasons, like weighting votes by time to keep up with an evolving community, adding a bias so that a few top people don’t completely control the karma graph, tuning the base karma that people receive based on length of membership and/or number of posts, weighting submissions separately from comments, avoiding “black hat SEO” tricks, etc. You know, all those nasty things that make Google a lot more than “just” Pagerank at web scale...
IMO doing something like this would improve most high traffic comment systems and online communities substantially (Hacker News could desperately use something like that to slow its slide into Reddit territory, for instance), though it would severely de-democratize them; somehow I doubt people around here would have much of a problem with that, though. The real barrier is that it would be a major pain in the ass to actually implement, and would take several iterations to really get right. It also might be difficult to retrofit an existing voting system with anything like that because sometimes they don’t store the actual votes, but just keep a tally, so it would take a while to see if it actually helped at all (you couldn’t backtest on the existing database to tune the parameters properly).
I think they do store the votes because otherwise you’d be able to upvote something twice.
However my understanding is that changing lesswrong, even something as basic as what posts are displayed on the front page, is difficult, and so it makes sense why they haven’t implemented this.
About what fraction of downvotes have bad justifications? Is this a serious problem (measured on the level of importance of the karma system)? Is there anything that can be done about it?
It’s just karma. Not a big deal.
My assertion of a norm was based on the idea that downvotes on lesswrong are often explained but usually not explained, and deviating from this fraction would bring, on average, less respect from the community, thus constituting a norm. I think the definitions of “often” and “norm” are general enough to make this statement true.
I was responding to “and there should be one of doing so more frequently”. If you declare that the community should adopt a behaviour and I don’t share your preference about the behaviour in question then I will downvote the assertion. Because I obviously prefer that people don’t tell others to do things that I don’t want others to be doing. In fact there is a fairly high bar on what ‘should be a norm’ claims I don’t downvote. All else being equal I prefer people don’t assert norms.
I prefer not having downvotes explained. It is irritating when the justification is a bad one and on average results in me having less respect for the downvoter.
I reject your normative assertion but respect your personal preference to have downvotes explained to you. I will honour your preference and explain downvotes of your comments while at the same time countering the (alleged) norm of often explaining downvotes.
In this instance I downvoted the parent from 1 to 0. This is my universal policy whenever someone projects a ‘should’ (of the normative kind not ) onto others that I don’t agree with strongly. I would prefer that kind of thing to happen less frequently.
About what fraction of downvotes have bad justifications? Is this a serious problem (measured on the level of importance of the karma system)? Is there anything that can be done about it?
I was certainly not aware of this problem.
My assertion of a norm was based on the idea that downvotes on lesswrong are often explained but usually not explained, and deviating from this fraction would bring, on average, less respect from the community, thus constituting a norm. I think the definitions of “often” and “norm” are general enough to make this statement true.
I don’t know how much of a problem it is, but there’s definitely something that can be done about it: instead of a “dumb” karma count, use some variant of Pagerank on the vote graph.
In other words, every person is a node, every upvote that each person gets from another user is a directed edge (also signed to incorporate downvotes), every person starts with a base amount of karma, and then you iteratively update the user karma by weighting each inbound vote by the karma of the voter.
When I say “variant of Pagerank”, I mean that you’d probably also have to fudge some things in there as well for practical reasons, like weighting votes by time to keep up with an evolving community, adding a bias so that a few top people don’t completely control the karma graph, tuning the base karma that people receive based on length of membership and/or number of posts, weighting submissions separately from comments, avoiding “black hat SEO” tricks, etc. You know, all those nasty things that make Google a lot more than “just” Pagerank at web scale...
IMO doing something like this would improve most high traffic comment systems and online communities substantially (Hacker News could desperately use something like that to slow its slide into Reddit territory, for instance), though it would severely de-democratize them; somehow I doubt people around here would have much of a problem with that, though. The real barrier is that it would be a major pain in the ass to actually implement, and would take several iterations to really get right. It also might be difficult to retrofit an existing voting system with anything like that because sometimes they don’t store the actual votes, but just keep a tally, so it would take a while to see if it actually helped at all (you couldn’t backtest on the existing database to tune the parameters properly).
I think they do store the votes because otherwise you’d be able to upvote something twice.
However my understanding is that changing lesswrong, even something as basic as what posts are displayed on the front page, is difficult, and so it makes sense why they haven’t implemented this.
It’s just karma. Not a big deal.
I was responding to “and there should be one of doing so more frequently”. If you declare that the community should adopt a behaviour and I don’t share your preference about the behaviour in question then I will downvote the assertion. Because I obviously prefer that people don’t tell others to do things that I don’t want others to be doing. In fact there is a fairly high bar on what ‘should be a norm’ claims I don’t downvote. All else being equal I prefer people don’t assert norms.