Personally I have found downvoting to be one of the biggest problems with LW, and one reason I don’t go to the effort of writing full posts here.
People will downvote something that you spent a lot of time putting together, and which may have a lot of merit, but which perhaps isn’t perfect. I have found this is particularly true if you present a theory about something without enough “rubber stamp” hedging about how what you’re saying might not be true.
Some things posted here are genuinely without any merit, or so riddled with sloppy thinking that they deserve to be on negative karma, but that doesn’t apply to most things.
As a fix for this, I would make downvoting something a user has a limited supply of, like 1 per week, increasing gradually with the karma that user accrues. Perhaps the starting supply of downvotes should be 0/week until the user has submitted some content.
And of course we need to fight botting, but that seems obvious.
And of course we need to fight botting, but that seems obvious.
Would be a big problem with your suggestion. Possibly only solved by gated entry to the forum. I.e. must email requesting to join the forum. Although I hate putting up barriers to entry to lw.
Other fora have developed ways of combatting bots; captchas, browser cookies, ips, etc.
Make it relatively easy for humans to enter but harder to make a mess, have algorithms that look for accounts whose voting patterns correlate but who never post anything, etc. Have a report spam button. Use blacklisting of emails and ips.
Personally I have found downvoting to be one of the biggest problems with LW, and one reason I don’t go to the effort of writing full posts here.
People will downvote something that you spent a lot of time putting together, and which may have a lot of merit, but which perhaps isn’t perfect. I have found this is particularly true if you present a theory about something without enough “rubber stamp” hedging about how what you’re saying might not be true.
Some things posted here are genuinely without any merit, or so riddled with sloppy thinking that they deserve to be on negative karma, but that doesn’t apply to most things.
As a fix for this, I would make downvoting something a user has a limited supply of, like 1 per week, increasing gradually with the karma that user accrues. Perhaps the starting supply of downvotes should be 0/week until the user has submitted some content.
And of course we need to fight botting, but that seems obvious.
agreed.
want to point out that this:
Would be a big problem with your suggestion. Possibly only solved by gated entry to the forum. I.e. must email requesting to join the forum. Although I hate putting up barriers to entry to lw.
Why gated entry?
Other fora have developed ways of combatting bots; captchas, browser cookies, ips, etc.
Make it relatively easy for humans to enter but harder to make a mess, have algorithms that look for accounts whose voting patterns correlate but who never post anything, etc. Have a report spam button. Use blacklisting of emails and ips.
We have about one bot a month, I deal with that pretty easily. We have one troll every day, causing damage, causing special focus.
God that guy STILL ….