Do you agree that some people don’t post here anymore because of the overly critical environment, and that we might have lost important contributors that way?
It’s true that criticism deters new users much more easily than established users, but I think losing established users is orders of magnitude worse than losing new users.
That old familiar post you linked discusses karma, and I think karma has evolved to be something very different from what it was intended to be. Almost nobody has a happy trigger like that. You can’t simply dictate what kinds of signals voting is supposed to send because it will acquire new meanings by usage, and stubbornly going against the grain is going to send unintended signals to people.
I agree. That said, established users generally have high status in the community, which can help mitigate this effect. I think that LW being overly critical is more of a problem for newer users, and even then it’s important to consider that one man’s “overly critical enviroment” might well be another’s “high standards of rigor.”
It’s true that criticism deters new users much more easily than established users, but I think losing established users is orders of magnitude worse than losing new users.
That old familiar post you linked discusses karma, and I think karma has evolved to be something very different from what it was intended to be. Almost nobody has a happy trigger like that. You can’t simply dictate what kinds of signals voting is supposed to send because it will acquire new meanings by usage, and stubbornly going against the grain is going to send unintended signals to people.