Well… you can’t actually stop people from activating custom CSS that hides karma values. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it—you can’t affect it! It’s therefore probably best to create some mechanism that gives people what they want to get out of hiding karma, while still giving you what you want out of showing people karma (e.g., a “hide karma but give me a notification if one of my comments is quite strongly downvoted” option—not suggesting this exact thing, just brainstorming…).
Hmm, I agree that I can’t prevent it in that sense, but I think defaults matter a lot here, as does just normal social feedback and whatever the social norms are.
It’s not at all clear to me that the current equilibrium isn’t pretty decent, where people can do it, but it’s reasonably inconvenient to do it, and so allows the people who are disproportionately negatively affected by karma notification to go that route. I would be curious in whether there are any others who do the same as Jan does, and if there are many, then we can figure out what the common motivations are and see whether it makes sense to elevate it to some site-level feature.
It’s not at all clear to me that the current equilibrium isn’t pretty decent, where people can do it, but it’s reasonably inconvenient to do it, and so allows the people who are disproportionately negatively affected by karma notification to go that route.
But this is an extremely fragile equilibrium. It can be broken by, say, someone posting a set of simple instructions on how to do this. For instance:
Anyone running the uBlock Origin browser extension can append several lines to their “My Filters” tab in the uBlock extension preferences, and thus totally hide all karma-related UI elements on Less Wrong. (PM me if you want the specific lines to append.)
Or someone makes a browser extension to do this. Or a user style. Or…
FWIW I also think it’s quite possible the current equilibrium is decent (which is part of reasons why I did not posted something like “How did I turned karma off” with simple instruction about how to do it on the forum, which I did consider). On the other hand I’d be curious about more people trying it and reporting their experiences.
I suspect many people kind of don’t have this action in the space of things they usually consider—I’d expect what most people would do is 1) just stop posting 2) write about their negative experience 3) complain privately.
Well… you can’t actually stop people from activating custom CSS that hides karma values. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it—you can’t affect it! It’s therefore probably best to create some mechanism that gives people what they want to get out of hiding karma, while still giving you what you want out of showing people karma (e.g., a “hide karma but give me a notification if one of my comments is quite strongly downvoted” option—not suggesting this exact thing, just brainstorming…).
Hmm, I agree that I can’t prevent it in that sense, but I think defaults matter a lot here, as does just normal social feedback and whatever the social norms are.
It’s not at all clear to me that the current equilibrium isn’t pretty decent, where people can do it, but it’s reasonably inconvenient to do it, and so allows the people who are disproportionately negatively affected by karma notification to go that route. I would be curious in whether there are any others who do the same as Jan does, and if there are many, then we can figure out what the common motivations are and see whether it makes sense to elevate it to some site-level feature.
But this is an extremely fragile equilibrium. It can be broken by, say, someone posting a set of simple instructions on how to do this. For instance:
Anyone running the uBlock Origin browser extension can append several lines to their “My Filters” tab in the uBlock extension preferences, and thus totally hide all karma-related UI elements on Less Wrong. (PM me if you want the specific lines to append.)
Or someone makes a browser extension to do this. Or a user style. Or…
FWIW I also think it’s quite possible the current equilibrium is decent (which is part of reasons why I did not posted something like “How did I turned karma off” with simple instruction about how to do it on the forum, which I did consider). On the other hand I’d be curious about more people trying it and reporting their experiences.
I suspect many people kind of don’t have this action in the space of things they usually consider—I’d expect what most people would do is 1) just stop posting 2) write about their negative experience 3) complain privately.