The ratio of downvotes tells me how meta-contrarian I’ve been. At least so I thought until recently, now I’m less sure: It could also be someone with a grudge and a few suckpuppets.
Luckily I am 6-7 sigma above normal … in self-aggrandizing (it’s the highest I can go given the number of living humans and while still leaving place for a handful of similarly talented individuals), so I can live with it. I can live with it.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, to the point: What has been surprising to me is how few readers make use of voting in the first place. At first I thought it’s that many comments just don’t get read a whole lot, until I saw surveys with large (in the dozens) numbers of participants, yet whose vote count was barely touched.
Then I thought that it may be that oftentimes it’s just that a large number of positive and negative votes cancel each other out, giving an illusion of sparse voting participation, but that can be ruled out by inferring the number of votes using the percentage (the solutions are mostly unique with no LCD issues), or by ripping those numbers straight from the html source, as Vladimir Nesov pointed out.
Now I’m uncertain as to the relative importance of some technicality in the voting system contributing to said phenomenon, such as lurkers with no karma not being able to vote much, versus readers just not wanting to actively vote. Maybe reading is often more of an outwardly-passive process for some? I do vote a lot. It gives me fuzzies.
However, it should be safe to say that a karma count of e.g. −1 for a comment that’s probably been read a dozen times doesn’t signal anything much different from a comment at 0, i.e. small karma differences get overinterpreted (“Why did I get downvoted, did I break some norm?”).
When someone does vote, there are so many factors at work, it’s very hard indeed to say which exactly caused the downvote. I realize there probably won’t ever be some anonymous-feedback feature built into the commenting system, such as “hover above the vote count, see some anonymous comments explaining the vote”, but it would make sense.
The ratio of downvotes tells me how meta-contrarian I’ve been. At least so I thought until recently, now I’m less sure: It could also be someone with a grudge and a few suckpuppets.
Luckily I am 6-7 sigma above normal … in self-aggrandizing (it’s the highest I can go given the number of living humans and while still leaving place for a handful of similarly talented individuals), so I can live with it. I can live with it.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, to the point: What has been surprising to me is how few readers make use of voting in the first place. At first I thought it’s that many comments just don’t get read a whole lot, until I saw surveys with large (in the dozens) numbers of participants, yet whose vote count was barely touched.
Then I thought that it may be that oftentimes it’s just that a large number of positive and negative votes cancel each other out, giving an illusion of sparse voting participation, but that can be ruled out by inferring the number of votes using the percentage (the solutions are mostly unique with no LCD issues), or by ripping those numbers straight from the html source, as Vladimir Nesov pointed out.
Now I’m uncertain as to the relative importance of some technicality in the voting system contributing to said phenomenon, such as lurkers with no karma not being able to vote much, versus readers just not wanting to actively vote. Maybe reading is often more of an outwardly-passive process for some? I do vote a lot. It gives me fuzzies.
However, it should be safe to say that a karma count of e.g. −1 for a comment that’s probably been read a dozen times doesn’t signal anything much different from a comment at 0, i.e. small karma differences get overinterpreted (“Why did I get downvoted, did I break some norm?”).
When someone does vote, there are so many factors at work, it’s very hard indeed to say which exactly caused the downvote. I realize there probably won’t ever be some anonymous-feedback feature built into the commenting system, such as “hover above the vote count, see some anonymous comments explaining the vote”, but it would make sense.