Sorry to hear about that experience. I think that “downvote” should be a power you unlock when you’re well-established on LW (maybe at 1k karma or so) rather than being universally available. The sting of a downvote on something you think is important is easily 50x the reward of an upvote, and giving that power to people who have little context on the community seems very bad EV.
Especially with LW becoming more in the public eye, letting random internetgoers who register give any LWer negative feedback (which is often painful/discouraging) seems pretty likely to be detrimental. I’d be interested in takes from the LW team on this.
Edit: Man, I love the disagree vote separation. It’s nice people being able to disagree with me without downvoting.
I think this would train the wrong habits in LessWrong users, and also skew the incentive landscape that is already tilted somewhat too much in the direction of “you get karma if you post content” away from “you get karma if your content on average makes the site better”.
hmm, I both see the incentive issue and also that the current widespread downvote marginally mitigates this. Not sure if it helps a lot to have lurker downvotes, and expect there are notable costs. Do you think there is a karma bar below which the EV of a downvote from those users is negative? My guess is at least totally new users add painful noise in a net negative way often enough that their contribution to keeping things bad things low is not worthwhile, and pushes away some good contributors lowering average quality.
I suspect you might be underestimating the how much some users take a psychological hit if they put effort into something and get slapped down without comment, having those be somewhat reliably not misfiring seems important.
(this is probably fairly minor on your list of things, no worries if you disengage)
I think it’s a hard tradeoff. I do think lots of people take psychological hits, but it is also genuinely important that people who are not a good fit for the site learn quickly and get the hint that they either have to shape up or get out. Otherwise we are at risk of quickly deteroriating in discussion quality. I do think this still makes it valuable to reduce variance, but I think we’ve already largely done that with the strong-vote and vote-weighting system.
Upvotes by senior users matter a lot more, and any senior user can you dig you out of multiple junior users downvoting you, which helps.
I think making downvotes completely unavailable beneath a certain karma level wouldn’t be good.
But also I think the outsized effects of downvotes is strongest when it’s one of the first votes, (as it was) rather than when it’s one among many votes, because it also makes the post disappear from the front page and takes away from it the chance to get more votes. upvotes don’t do that, because they make the post stay longer on the frontpage, so it can always later gain more downvotes by new people getting exposed to it.
So if we do limit the power of downvotes or who can cast them, perhaps it should be focused on early votes, and not votes in general?
I would need more data to make an opinion on this.
At first sight, it seems to me like having a rule “if your total karma is less than 100, you are not allowed to downvote an article or a comment if doing so would push it under zero” would be good.
But I have no idea how often that happens in real life. Do we actually have many readers with karma below 100 who bother to vote?
By the way, I didn’t vote on your article, but… you announced that you were writing a book i.e. it is not even finished, you didn’t provide a free chapter or something… so what exactly was there to upvote you for?
(Sorry, this is too blunt, and I understand that people need some positive reinforcement along the way. But this is not a general website to make people feel good; unfortunately, aspiring rationalists are a tiny fraction of the general population, so making this website more welcoming to the general population would get us hopelessly diluted. Also, there is a soft taboo on politics, which your post was kinda about, without providing something substantial to justify that.)
Sorry to hear about that experience. I think that “downvote” should be a power you unlock when you’re well-established on LW (maybe at 1k karma or so) rather than being universally available. The sting of a downvote on something you think is important is easily 50x the reward of an upvote, and giving that power to people who have little context on the community seems very bad EV.
Especially with LW becoming more in the public eye, letting random internetgoers who register give any LWer negative feedback (which is often painful/discouraging) seems pretty likely to be detrimental. I’d be interested in takes from the LW team on this.
Edit: Man, I love the disagree vote separation. It’s nice people being able to disagree with me without downvoting.
I think this would train the wrong habits in LessWrong users, and also skew the incentive landscape that is already tilted somewhat too much in the direction of “you get karma if you post content” away from “you get karma if your content on average makes the site better”.
hmm, I both see the incentive issue and also that the current widespread downvote marginally mitigates this. Not sure if it helps a lot to have lurker downvotes, and expect there are notable costs. Do you think there is a karma bar below which the EV of a downvote from those users is negative? My guess is at least totally new users add painful noise in a net negative way often enough that their contribution to keeping things bad things low is not worthwhile, and pushes away some good contributors lowering average quality.
I suspect you might be underestimating the how much some users take a psychological hit if they put effort into something and get slapped down without comment, having those be somewhat reliably not misfiring seems important.
(this is probably fairly minor on your list of things, no worries if you disengage)
I think it’s a hard tradeoff. I do think lots of people take psychological hits, but it is also genuinely important that people who are not a good fit for the site learn quickly and get the hint that they either have to shape up or get out. Otherwise we are at risk of quickly deteroriating in discussion quality. I do think this still makes it valuable to reduce variance, but I think we’ve already largely done that with the strong-vote and vote-weighting system.
Upvotes by senior users matter a lot more, and any senior user can you dig you out of multiple junior users downvoting you, which helps.
I think making downvotes completely unavailable beneath a certain karma level wouldn’t be good.
But also I think the outsized effects of downvotes is strongest when it’s one of the first votes, (as it was) rather than when it’s one among many votes, because it also makes the post disappear from the front page and takes away from it the chance to get more votes. upvotes don’t do that, because they make the post stay longer on the frontpage, so it can always later gain more downvotes by new people getting exposed to it.
So if we do limit the power of downvotes or who can cast them, perhaps it should be focused on early votes, and not votes in general?
I would need more data to make an opinion on this.
At first sight, it seems to me like having a rule “if your total karma is less than 100, you are not allowed to downvote an article or a comment if doing so would push it under zero” would be good.
But I have no idea how often that happens in real life. Do we actually have many readers with karma below 100 who bother to vote?
By the way, I didn’t vote on your article, but… you announced that you were writing a book i.e. it is not even finished, you didn’t provide a free chapter or something… so what exactly was there to upvote you for?
(Sorry, this is too blunt, and I understand that people need some positive reinforcement along the way. But this is not a general website to make people feel good; unfortunately, aspiring rationalists are a tiny fraction of the general population, so making this website more welcoming to the general population would get us hopelessly diluted. Also, there is a soft taboo on politics, which your post was kinda about, without providing something substantial to justify that.)