I agree that downvoting new people is a bad idea—and every comment in the Welcome Thread should get a load of karma.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote—at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don’t downvote, comments on average get positive karma—which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there’s a high chance of positive karma.
However, we don’t want these posts. They clutter LW, increasing noise. The reason we read forums rather than random letter sequences is because forums filter for strings that have useful semantic content; downvoting inane or uninsightful comments increases this filtering effect. I’d much rather spent a short period of time reading only high quality comments than spend longer reading worse comments.
Worse, it can often be hard to distinguish between a good comment on a topic you don’t understand and a bad one. Yet I get much more value spending time reading the good one, which might educate me, than the bad one, which might confuse me—especially if I have trouble distinguishing experts.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote—at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don’t downvote, comments on average get positive karma—which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there’s a high chance of positive karma.
We should expect comments on average to get positive karma, as long as the average member is making contributions which are on the whole more wanted than unwanted. Attempting to institute a minimum quota of downvoted comments strikes me as simply ridiculous. If the least worthwhile comment out of twenty is still not an actual detraction from the conversation, there’s no reason to downvote it.
If we’re just concerned with the average quality of discourse, it would be simpler to just cut off the whole community and go back to dialogues between Eliezer and Robin,.
If we’re just concerned with the average quality of discourse, it would be simpler to just cut off the whole community and go back to dialogues between Eliezer and Robin,.
The most significant dialog between Eliezer and Robin (Foom debate) was of abysmally low quality—relative to the output of either of those individuals when not dialoging with each other. I have been similarly unimpressed with other dialogs that I have seen them have in blog comments. Being good writers does not necessarily make people good at having high quality dialogs. Especially when their ego may be more centered around being powerful presenters of their own ideas than in being patient and reliable when comprehending of the communication of others.
If we want high quality dialog have Eliezer write blog posts and Yvain engage with them.
Especially when their ego may be more centered around being powerful presenters of their own ideas than in being patient and reliable when comprehending of the communication of others.
Yep. I did write this article hoping that LWers would benefit from it, and EY was one of those LWers. (Assuming his arguing style hasn’t changed since the last few times I saw him argue.)
“Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement.”
“My [...friend...] was highly turned off by Less Wrong when the first comment he made was voted down.”
It seems to me that we want to cull people who repeatedly make poor comments, and who register an account just to make a single trolling remark (i.e. evading the first criteria via multiple accounts). We do not want to cull new users who have not yet adapted to the cultural standards of LessWrong, or who happen to have simply hit on one of the culture’s sore spots.
If nothing else, the idea that this community doesn’t have blind spots and biases from being a relatively closed culture is absurd. Of course we have biases, and we want new members because they’re more likely to question those biases. We don’t want a mindless rehashing of the same old arguments again and again, but that initial down vote can be a large disincentive to wield so casually.
Of course, solving this is trickier than identifying it! A few random ideas:
Mark anyone who registered less than a week ago, or with less than 5 comments, with a small “NEWBIE” icon (ideally something less offensive than actually saying “NEWBIE”). Also helps distinguish a fresh troll account from a regular poster who happens to have said something controversial.
Someone’s first few posts are “protected” and only show positive karma, unless the user goes beneath a certain threshold (say, −10 total karma across all their posts). This allows “troll accounts” to quickly be shut down, and only shields someone’s initial foray (and they’ll still be met with rebuttal comments)
There’s probably other options, but it seems that it would be beneficial to protect a user’s initial foray, while still leaving the community to defend itself from longer-term threats.
How about redirecting users to the latest Welcome thread when they register, and encouraging them to post there? Such posts are usually quickly uploaded to half-a-dozen or thereabouts.
I definitely think the “Welcome” threads could do with more prominence. That said, I’m loathe to do introductions myself; I’d far rather just jump in to discussing things and let people learn about me from my ideas. I’d expect plenty of other people here have a similar urge to respond to a specific point, before investing themselves in introductions and community-building / social activities.
For some reason I would feel much better imposing a standard cost on commenting (e.g. −2 karma) that can be easily balanced by being marginally useful. This would better disincentivise both spamming and comments that people didn’t expect to be worth very much insight, and still allow people to upvote good-but-not-promotion-worthy comments without artificially inflating that user’s karma. This however would skew commenters towards fewer, longer, more premeditated replies. I don’t know if we want this.
If we don’t downvote, comments on average get positive karma—which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there’s a high chance of positive karma.
Anyone who posts in order to get karma either overvalues karma or undervalues their time. If their time really is worth so little, they probably can’t produce karma-worthy comments anyway.
“If their time really is worth so little, they probably can’t produce karma-worthy comments anyway.”
I can throw out a quick comment in 2 minutes. I enjoy writing quick comments, because I like talking about myself. I expect a lot of people like talking about themselves, given various social conventions and media presentations.
I almost never see a comment of mine voted down unless it’s actively disagreeable (BTW, cryonics is a scam!), attempting to appeal to humour (you lot seriously cannot take a joke), or actively insulting (I like my karma enough not to give an example :P)
I’d idly estimate that I average about +1 karma per post. Basically, they’re a waste of time.
I have over 1,000 karma.
So, the community consensus is that I’m a worthwhile contributor, despite the vast majority of my comments being more or less a waste of time. Specifically, I’m worthwhile because I’m prolific.
(Of course, if I cared about milking karma, I’d put this time in to writing a couple well-researched main posts and earn 100+ karma from an hour of work, instead of ~30/hour contributing a two-line comment here and there.)
It occurred to me that Eliezer’s intuitions for moderation may not be calibrated to the modern Internet, where there really is a forum for people at every level of intelligence: Yahoo Answers, Digg, Facebook, 4chan, Tagged (which is basically the smaller but profitable successor to MySpace that no one intelligent has heard of), etc. I saw the Reddit community denigrate, but Reddit was a case of the smart people having legitimately better software (and therefore better entertainment through better chosen links). Nowadays, things are more equalized and you don’t pay much of a price in user experience terms for hanging out on a forum where the average intelligence is similar to yours.
Robin Hanson recently did the first ever permanent banning on Overcoming Bias, and that was for someone who was unpleasant and made too many comments, not someone who was stupid. (Not sure how often Robin deletes comments though, it does seem to happen at least a little.)
If we don’t downvote, comments on average get positive karma—which makes people post them more and more.
I don’t think this effect is very significant. I find it implausible that people post more comments on Hacker News, where comments are hardly ever voted down below zero, because it gets them karma. But even if they do, Hacker News is a great, thriving community. I would love it if we adopted a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.
I like the idea of promote/agree/disagree buttons somewhat.
It definitely changes my feeling about getting voted down to know there are people like Larks. I guess I just assumed that everyone was like me in reserving downvotes for the absolute worst stuff. Maybe there’s some way of getting new users to expect that their first few comments will be voted down and not to worry about it?
It would be interesting to see statistics on up vs down vote frequency per user. Even just a graph of how many users are in the 0-10% down vote bracket, 10-20%, etc. would be neat. I doubt the data is currently available, otherwise it would be trivial to put together a simple graph and a quick post detailing trends in that data.
I agree that downvoting new people is a bad idea—and every comment in the Welcome Thread should get a load of karma.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote—at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don’t downvote, comments on average get positive karma—which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there’s a high chance of positive karma.
However, we don’t want these posts. They clutter LW, increasing noise. The reason we read forums rather than random letter sequences is because forums filter for strings that have useful semantic content; downvoting inane or uninsightful comments increases this filtering effect. I’d much rather spent a short period of time reading only high quality comments than spend longer reading worse comments.
Worse, it can often be hard to distinguish between a good comment on a topic you don’t understand and a bad one. Yet I get much more value spending time reading the good one, which might educate me, than the bad one, which might confuse me—especially if I have trouble distinguishing experts.
Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement. In the long run, well kept gardens die by pacificism.
We should expect comments on average to get positive karma, as long as the average member is making contributions which are on the whole more wanted than unwanted. Attempting to institute a minimum quota of downvoted comments strikes me as simply ridiculous. If the least worthwhile comment out of twenty is still not an actual detraction from the conversation, there’s no reason to downvote it.
If we’re just concerned with the average quality of discourse, it would be simpler to just cut off the whole community and go back to dialogues between Eliezer and Robin,.
The most significant dialog between Eliezer and Robin (Foom debate) was of abysmally low quality—relative to the output of either of those individuals when not dialoging with each other. I have been similarly unimpressed with other dialogs that I have seen them have in blog comments. Being good writers does not necessarily make people good at having high quality dialogs. Especially when their ego may be more centered around being powerful presenters of their own ideas than in being patient and reliable when comprehending of the communication of others.
If we want high quality dialog have Eliezer write blog posts and Yvain engage with them.
Yep. I did write this article hoping that LWers would benefit from it, and EY was one of those LWers. (Assuming his arguing style hasn’t changed since the last few times I saw him argue.)
“Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement.”
“My [...friend...] was highly turned off by Less Wrong when the first comment he made was voted down.”
It seems to me that we want to cull people who repeatedly make poor comments, and who register an account just to make a single trolling remark (i.e. evading the first criteria via multiple accounts). We do not want to cull new users who have not yet adapted to the cultural standards of LessWrong, or who happen to have simply hit on one of the culture’s sore spots.
If nothing else, the idea that this community doesn’t have blind spots and biases from being a relatively closed culture is absurd. Of course we have biases, and we want new members because they’re more likely to question those biases. We don’t want a mindless rehashing of the same old arguments again and again, but that initial down vote can be a large disincentive to wield so casually.
Of course, solving this is trickier than identifying it! A few random ideas:
Mark anyone who registered less than a week ago, or with less than 5 comments, with a small “NEWBIE” icon (ideally something less offensive than actually saying “NEWBIE”). Also helps distinguish a fresh troll account from a regular poster who happens to have said something controversial.
Someone’s first few posts are “protected” and only show positive karma, unless the user goes beneath a certain threshold (say, −10 total karma across all their posts). This allows “troll accounts” to quickly be shut down, and only shields someone’s initial foray (and they’ll still be met with rebuttal comments)
There’s probably other options, but it seems that it would be beneficial to protect a user’s initial foray, while still leaving the community to defend itself from longer-term threats.
How about redirecting users to the latest Welcome thread when they register, and encouraging them to post there? Such posts are usually quickly uploaded to half-a-dozen or thereabouts.
I definitely think the “Welcome” threads could do with more prominence. That said, I’m loathe to do introductions myself; I’d far rather just jump in to discussing things and let people learn about me from my ideas. I’d expect plenty of other people here have a similar urge to respond to a specific point, before investing themselves in introductions and community-building / social activities.
For some reason I would feel much better imposing a standard cost on commenting (e.g. −2 karma) that can be easily balanced by being marginally useful. This would better disincentivise both spamming and comments that people didn’t expect to be worth very much insight, and still allow people to upvote good-but-not-promotion-worthy comments without artificially inflating that user’s karma. This however would skew commenters towards fewer, longer, more premeditated replies. I don’t know if we want this.
I find short, pithy replies tend to get better responses karma-wise.
Anyone who posts in order to get karma either overvalues karma or undervalues their time. If their time really is worth so little, they probably can’t produce karma-worthy comments anyway.
“If their time really is worth so little, they probably can’t produce karma-worthy comments anyway.”
I can throw out a quick comment in 2 minutes. I enjoy writing quick comments, because I like talking about myself. I expect a lot of people like talking about themselves, given various social conventions and media presentations.
I almost never see a comment of mine voted down unless it’s actively disagreeable (BTW, cryonics is a scam!), attempting to appeal to humour (you lot seriously cannot take a joke), or actively insulting (I like my karma enough not to give an example :P)
I’d idly estimate that I average about +1 karma per post. Basically, they’re a waste of time.
I have over 1,000 karma.
So, the community consensus is that I’m a worthwhile contributor, despite the vast majority of my comments being more or less a waste of time. Specifically, I’m worthwhile because I’m prolific.
(Of course, if I cared about milking karma, I’d put this time in to writing a couple well-researched main posts and earn 100+ karma from an hour of work, instead of ~30/hour contributing a two-line comment here and there.)
Thanks for that link.
It occurred to me that Eliezer’s intuitions for moderation may not be calibrated to the modern Internet, where there really is a forum for people at every level of intelligence: Yahoo Answers, Digg, Facebook, 4chan, Tagged (which is basically the smaller but profitable successor to MySpace that no one intelligent has heard of), etc. I saw the Reddit community denigrate, but Reddit was a case of the smart people having legitimately better software (and therefore better entertainment through better chosen links). Nowadays, things are more equalized and you don’t pay much of a price in user experience terms for hanging out on a forum where the average intelligence is similar to yours.
Robin Hanson recently did the first ever permanent banning on Overcoming Bias, and that was for someone who was unpleasant and made too many comments, not someone who was stupid. (Not sure how often Robin deletes comments though, it does seem to happen at least a little.)
I don’t think this effect is very significant. I find it implausible that people post more comments on Hacker News, where comments are hardly ever voted down below zero, because it gets them karma. But even if they do, Hacker News is a great, thriving community. I would love it if we adopted a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.
I like the idea of promote/agree/disagree buttons somewhat.
We already have a system where you can only downvote a number of comments up to four times your karma.
I idly wonder if any noticeable fraction of downvotes does come from people who don’t have enough karma to post toplevel articles.
I’d guess that “high karma” would refer to the threshhold needed for posting articles, which is a pretty low bar.
I like the sound of that for some reason.
I too like this idea that would grant me more power without any more responsibility.
Larks strikes again.
(Comment was at −1 when I found it.)
It definitely changes my feeling about getting voted down to know there are people like Larks. I guess I just assumed that everyone was like me in reserving downvotes for the absolute worst stuff. Maybe there’s some way of getting new users to expect that their first few comments will be voted down and not to worry about it?
It would be interesting to see statistics on up vs down vote frequency per user. Even just a graph of how many users are in the 0-10% down vote bracket, 10-20%, etc. would be neat. I doubt the data is currently available, otherwise it would be trivial to put together a simple graph and a quick post detailing trends in that data.
To adjust your calibration a bit more: I worry that I might run out of my 4*Karma downvoting limit.
I guess that was a joke, but the downvote wasn’t me ;)
If nothing else downvoting replies to your own comments seems a bit dubeous