Amusingly, I’m not sure whether to upvote or downvote. I’m happy to have (some) discussion of LW signaling and it’s impact on groupthink or limits on contrarian exploration on uncomfortable dimensions. But this doesn’t seem to be that.
Upvotes are not agreement (and I am with you that I’d like to see the agree/disagree option on posts). They’re “I like seeing this kind of thing on LW”. And downvotes are closer to “I wish I hadn’t spent time reading this”. There’s a ton of noise, of course—people don’t have to say WHY they voted, and there’s no oversight or cabal who overrides votes based on some secret meetings. Sometimes votes just mean “I don’t get it”, or “right on!”. They’re a weak signal, but the easiest one to get.
It’s good advice from the admins, if you’re not getting the reception you want, to look for examples of things that DO get the reception you want. Points and votes aren’t the end-goal, but they somewhat correlate with engagement and approval. Unfortunately, there’s no way except trial and error (and posting smaller things, for more targeted trials) and engagement with comments (IMO a much better signal than votes) to find out what really works here.
And just to acknowledge—yes, it’s an imperfect group of people, and there are some topics and styles which just aren’t going to work here. That’s not ideal, perhaps, but it is what it is. You’re free to use LW for the things it works well for, and other sites/groups/activities for the things THEY work well for. I don’t know anyone who exclusively posts on LW.
Thanks. Agreed, different places works better for different topics and styles.
I have checked and can acknowledge that a lot of downvotes are quite uncomfortable psychologically even if you are fully prepared to them and even without explicit harassment.
That could be bad:
1) to people who would like to write about some controversial topics which could be uncomfortable but finally helpful to the community (I’m not talking about myself here, but about more sensitive persons);
2) to the community as a whole and to members of the community finally, as their views less likely to be challenged in current setup;
Interesting that this downvote problem probably will matter less for the prominent members of the community who already have a lot of karma and respect. This could lead to the situation when controversial topics become discussed only at the behest of the community leaders.
I could also point that recent changes at YouTube where you cannot see dislikes now, just their percentage, work really well. They encourage more involvement and do not hinder the incentive to write.
P.S. This comment I cannot write because of the rate limit, so it will be posted later.
P.P.S. I decided to consider this not a bug, but a feature and I will answer max 1 comment per day in the following couple of months in any of my places. It should help in different ways: to choose only most valuable comments to engage with, to not spend too much time in useless discussions etc. Personal lengthy discussions could be done through DM if anyone needs them.
Just a clarification: I didn’t mean that I think the voting was particularly broken or needs fixing, I meant the PEOPLE are imperfect and some topics, themes, and styles won’t work here, regardless of voting or feedback/filtering mechanism. It’s not a “downvote problem”, it’s a “community preference expressed through voting”, which may or may not be a problem. The voting is an indicator, not a cause.
Controversial topics on some dimensions are welcomed, but on other topics are indistinguishable (by the members of the community) from garbage or attacks. The joy and pain of a voting system is that there’s no oversight or leadership who declare whether the masses are “correct” in their judgement of what they want more or less of on the site.
If the people are broken, the system could compensate with better rules. If you tell someone to upvote or downvote on the basis of like/dislike, most of what you are going to see is bias...because people like their opinions confirmed.
I didn’t say “broken”, I said “imperfect”. The system can compensate a little bit, if most of the people want it to. But if it compensates/interferes too much with users’ preferences, the people leave (and different people may or may not join).
There’s no way to make a purely voluntary social chat group to be more accepting of dimensions of disagreement they don’t accept as valid. And I, for one, don’t want that anyway.
If you hold “membership of the group” and “voting according to agreement instead of truth” as fixed, sure. But under these assumptions a rationality promoting group is doomed to failure .
I also didn’t say “voting according to agreement instead of truth”. More “voting according to what we want to read and write about”. I did presume that we don’t have the option (nor, in my part, the desire) to radically change the membership. Though, now that I think about it, that’s isomorphic to someone finding a different group (instead of or in addition to this one) that’s more receptive, and I do support that.
I’m OK with being doomed to failure, if the only definition of success is “every idea, regardless of priors and preferences, gets an equal voice”.
Amusingly, I’m not sure whether to upvote or downvote. I’m happy to have (some) discussion of LW signaling and it’s impact on groupthink or limits on contrarian exploration on uncomfortable dimensions. But this doesn’t seem to be that.
Upvotes are not agreement (and I am with you that I’d like to see the agree/disagree option on posts). They’re “I like seeing this kind of thing on LW”. And downvotes are closer to “I wish I hadn’t spent time reading this”. There’s a ton of noise, of course—people don’t have to say WHY they voted, and there’s no oversight or cabal who overrides votes based on some secret meetings. Sometimes votes just mean “I don’t get it”, or “right on!”. They’re a weak signal, but the easiest one to get.
It’s good advice from the admins, if you’re not getting the reception you want, to look for examples of things that DO get the reception you want. Points and votes aren’t the end-goal, but they somewhat correlate with engagement and approval. Unfortunately, there’s no way except trial and error (and posting smaller things, for more targeted trials) and engagement with comments (IMO a much better signal than votes) to find out what really works here.
And just to acknowledge—yes, it’s an imperfect group of people, and there are some topics and styles which just aren’t going to work here. That’s not ideal, perhaps, but it is what it is. You’re free to use LW for the things it works well for, and other sites/groups/activities for the things THEY work well for. I don’t know anyone who exclusively posts on LW.
Thanks. Agreed, different places works better for different topics and styles.
I have checked and can acknowledge that a lot of downvotes are quite uncomfortable psychologically even if you are fully prepared to them and even without explicit harassment.
That could be bad:
1) to people who would like to write about some controversial topics which could be uncomfortable but finally helpful to the community (I’m not talking about myself here, but about more sensitive persons);
2) to the community as a whole and to members of the community finally, as their views less likely to be challenged in current setup;
Interesting that this downvote problem probably will matter less for the prominent members of the community who already have a lot of karma and respect. This could lead to the situation when controversial topics become discussed only at the behest of the community leaders.
I could also point that recent changes at YouTube where you cannot see dislikes now, just their percentage, work really well. They encourage more involvement and do not hinder the incentive to write.
P.S. This comment I cannot write because of the rate limit, so it will be posted later.
P.P.S. I decided to consider this not a bug, but a feature and I will answer max 1 comment per day in the following couple of months in any of my places. It should help in different ways: to choose only most valuable comments to engage with, to not spend too much time in useless discussions etc. Personal lengthy discussions could be done through DM if anyone needs them.
Just a clarification: I didn’t mean that I think the voting was particularly broken or needs fixing, I meant the PEOPLE are imperfect and some topics, themes, and styles won’t work here, regardless of voting or feedback/filtering mechanism. It’s not a “downvote problem”, it’s a “community preference expressed through voting”, which may or may not be a problem. The voting is an indicator, not a cause.
Controversial topics on some dimensions are welcomed, but on other topics are indistinguishable (by the members of the community) from garbage or attacks. The joy and pain of a voting system is that there’s no oversight or leadership who declare whether the masses are “correct” in their judgement of what they want more or less of on the site.
If the people are broken, the system could compensate with better rules. If you tell someone to upvote or downvote on the basis of like/dislike, most of what you are going to see is bias...because people like their opinions confirmed.
I didn’t say “broken”, I said “imperfect”. The system can compensate a little bit, if most of the people want it to. But if it compensates/interferes too much with users’ preferences, the people leave (and different people may or may not join).
There’s no way to make a purely voluntary social chat group to be more accepting of dimensions of disagreement they don’t accept as valid. And I, for one, don’t want that anyway.
If you hold “membership of the group” and “voting according to agreement instead of truth” as fixed, sure. But under these assumptions a rationality promoting group is doomed to failure .
I also didn’t say “voting according to agreement instead of truth”. More “voting according to what we want to read and write about”. I did presume that we don’t have the option (nor, in my part, the desire) to radically change the membership. Though, now that I think about it, that’s isomorphic to someone finding a different group (instead of or in addition to this one) that’s more receptive, and I do support that.
I’m OK with being doomed to failure, if the only definition of success is “every idea, regardless of priors and preferences, gets an equal voice”.
If voting was only about topics , the situation would be much better. But the explicit instruction is like /dislike, not ir/relevant.
Disagree—voting is and should be about what we want on the site, inclusive of relevance, style, respect for prior work, and general tone.
And with that, I’m going to bow out. I’ll read any responses, but probably won’t reply further.
But it will inevitably include “against my biases” ,because that’s disagreement, too.