I agree with the comments (like John Maxwell’s) that suggest that Less Wrong effectively discourages comments and posts. My karma score for the past 30 days is currently +29, 100% positive. This isn’t because I don’t have anything controversial to say. It is because I mostly stopped posting the controversial things here. I am much more likely to post them on Scott’s blog instead, since there is no voting on that blog. I think this is also the reason for the massive numbers of comments on Scott’s posts—there is no negative incentive to prevent that there.
I’m not sure of the best way to fix this. Getting rid of karma or only allowing upvotes is probably a bad idea. But I think the community needs to fix its norms relating to downvoting in some way. For example, officially downvoting purely for disagreement has been discouraged, but in practice I see a very large amount of such downvoting. Comments referring to religion in particular are often downvoted simply for mentioning the topic without saying something negative, even if nothing positive is said about it.
I also agree with those who have said that the division between Main and Discussion is not working. I would personally prefer simply to remove that distinction, even if nothing else is put in to replace it.
Leave Main for articles introducing concepts needed to discuss things (like ‘bias’) and Discussion for specific examples of using these concepts, and divide the Open thread into Quantitative models, Developing models and Anecdata.
I agree with the comments (like John Maxwell’s) that suggest that Less Wrong effectively discourages comments and posts. My karma score for the past 30 days is currently +29, 100% positive. This isn’t because I don’t have anything controversial to say. It is because I mostly stopped posting the controversial things here. I am much more likely to post them on Scott’s blog instead, since there is no voting on that blog. I think this is also the reason for the massive numbers of comments on Scott’s posts—there is no negative incentive to prevent that there.
I’m not sure of the best way to fix this. Getting rid of karma or only allowing upvotes is probably a bad idea. But I think the community needs to fix its norms relating to downvoting in some way. For example, officially downvoting purely for disagreement has been discouraged, but in practice I see a very large amount of such downvoting. Comments referring to religion in particular are often downvoted simply for mentioning the topic without saying something negative, even if nothing positive is said about it.
I also agree with those who have said that the division between Main and Discussion is not working. I would personally prefer simply to remove that distinction, even if nothing else is put in to replace it.
Leave Main for articles introducing concepts needed to discuss things (like ‘bias’) and Discussion for specific examples of using these concepts, and divide the Open thread into Quantitative models, Developing models and Anecdata.