It’s not actually obvious to me that downvotes are even especially useful. I understand what purpose they’re supposed to serve, but I’m not sure they actually serve it.
It seems like if we removed them, a major tool available to trolls is just gone.
I think downvoting is also fairly punishing for newcomers—I’ve heard a few people mention they avoided Less Wrong due to worry about downvoting.
Good vs bad posts could be discerned just by looking at total likes, the way it is on facebook. Actual spam could just be reported rather than downvoted, which triggers mod attention but has not visible effect.
Alternative, go with the Hacker News model of only enabling downvotes after you’ve accumulated a large amount of karma (enough to put you in, say, the top .5% of users.) I think this gets most of the advantages of downvotes without the issues.
I agree. In addition to the numerous good ideas suggested in this tree, we could also try the short term solution of turning off all downvoting for the next 3 months. This might well increase population.
(Or similar variants like turning off ‘comment score below threshold’ hiding, etc)
Good vs bad posts could be discerned just by looking at total likes, the way it is on facebook.
Preferably also sorted by the number of total likes. Otherwise the only difference between a comment with 1 upvote and 15 upvotes is a single character on screen that requires some attention to even notice.
Actual spam could just be reported rather than downvoted
There are some kinds of behavior which in my opinion should be actively discouraged, besides spam. Stubborn stupidity, or verbal aggressivity towards other debaters. It would be nice to have a mechanism to do something about them, preferably without getting moderators involved. But maybe those could also be flagged, and maybe moderators should have a way to attach a warning to the comment without removing it completely. (I imagine a red text saying “this comment is unnecessarily rude”, which would also effectively halve the number of likes for the purpose of comment sorting.)
It’s not actually obvious to me that downvotes are even especially useful. I understand what purpose they’re supposed to serve, but I’m not sure they actually serve it.
It seems like if we removed them, a major tool available to trolls is just gone.
I think downvoting is also fairly punishing for newcomers—I’ve heard a few people mention they avoided Less Wrong due to worry about downvoting.
Good vs bad posts could be discerned just by looking at total likes, the way it is on facebook. Actual spam could just be reported rather than downvoted, which triggers mod attention but has not visible effect.
Alternative, go with the Hacker News model of only enabling downvotes after you’ve accumulated a large amount of karma (enough to put you in, say, the top .5% of users.) I think this gets most of the advantages of downvotes without the issues.
I agree. In addition to the numerous good ideas suggested in this tree, we could also try the short term solution of turning off all downvoting for the next 3 months. This might well increase population.
(Or similar variants like turning off ‘comment score below threshold’ hiding, etc)
Preferably also sorted by the number of total likes. Otherwise the only difference between a comment with 1 upvote and 15 upvotes is a single character on screen that requires some attention to even notice.
There are some kinds of behavior which in my opinion should be actively discouraged, besides spam. Stubborn stupidity, or verbal aggressivity towards other debaters. It would be nice to have a mechanism to do something about them, preferably without getting moderators involved. But maybe those could also be flagged, and maybe moderators should have a way to attach a warning to the comment without removing it completely. (I imagine a red text saying “this comment is unnecessarily rude”, which would also effectively halve the number of likes for the purpose of comment sorting.)