I didn’t mean to say you were suggesting particular rules.
If a thing is unfair, then it is not following therules. It does sound like you believe or believed that there were some rules that should have been followed, but were not.
Your hypothetical rules might have been reasonable. If my vague speculation about roughly what those rule might have been is close, then there isn’t a means in place on this board to enforce rules like that.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action. I thought you guys were being silly by insisting that I had spoiled something everyone already knew. I thought you were all too quick to judge, and I felt that you became biased against my comments, even ones unrelated to the spoiler. I was not aware that I had broken any rules until I had nothing left to lose. An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty. If this were not the case then the accusing party would wield far too much power to be trustworthy. I think I have made it very clear why I thought this was unfair.
i don’t take it personally. He questioned my understanding of fairness. I answered him. I wasn’t complaining, because I have not really been harmed. And downvotes did not solve the problem, as the “damage” remains. Do try to follow the conversation.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action.
Of course—each person’s reaction was to downvote your post once (ignoring for the moment the issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere of additional penalties for defending yourself—it’s not really relevant in this case since that’s theoretically a second ‘initial action’). So, what you really mean is the collective response should be proportionate to the initial action. The way the voting system works creates a strange set of incentives—downvoting a post that already has a low score—or a person who already has low karma—does not cost any more (in terms of the cost to the downvote cap) than downvoting a post which is just on the visibility threshold.
Yet it’s hard to see how this could be otherwise, particularly if both the downvote cap and karma scores need to be statically calculated.
I’ve been thinking about that, but didn’t want to say anything because its really not my site and I probably couldn’t design a better one if I tried. But, yeah, I think the downvote system does warrant some reform, and I have no idea how that would work because it would vary from case to case. Maybe there could be some guidelines advising the community on which general infractions deserve a certain number of downvotes. It could be an interesting project, actually...
It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause “bad” comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for “soft” downvotes that don’t subtract from the karma of the author of the post until the post gets upvoted past a certain threshold. Another would be to limit, reduce, or eliminate the contribution to karma of negative-scored posts (if it is limited to −2, this is equivalent to making all downvotes “soft” under the first proposal)
If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn’t make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they’ll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or not a person should be trusted. There should probably be limits on how much of these a person can have.
The likes and dislikes should be used when someone says something either clever or amusing, or something like my comment which people might consider unhelpful, but does not reflect on my rationality. This would be displayed above the comments, but the total amount of likes a commenter has stored up will be private.
This way the emotional element will still be present, but will not interfere with a person’s ability to add to our understanding of rationality.
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Yes, this sort of thing was proposed at the site’s inception (I was a major proponent), but it failed to get off the ground. Mostly, the objection was that the UI would necessarily be confusing.
An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty
Sorry, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. If you do not possess the means to defend a right, you don’t actually have it. In this case, no authority greater than your own had declared this right, and you have no expectation for any power to intercede on your behalf.
I didn’t mean to say you were suggesting particular rules.
If a thing is unfair, then it is not following the rules. It does sound like you believe or believed that there were some rules that should have been followed, but were not.
Your hypothetical rules might have been reasonable. If my vague speculation about roughly what those rule might have been is close, then there isn’t a means in place on this board to enforce rules like that.
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action. I thought you guys were being silly by insisting that I had spoiled something everyone already knew. I thought you were all too quick to judge, and I felt that you became biased against my comments, even ones unrelated to the spoiler. I was not aware that I had broken any rules until I had nothing left to lose. An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty. If this were not the case then the accusing party would wield far too much power to be trustworthy. I think I have made it very clear why I thought this was unfair.
Irrelevant. Damage was done, and downvotes were used to route around the damage. Try not to take it personally.
i don’t take it personally. He questioned my understanding of fairness. I answered him. I wasn’t complaining, because I have not really been harmed. And downvotes did not solve the problem, as the “damage” remains. Do try to follow the conversation.
Of course—each person’s reaction was to downvote your post once (ignoring for the moment the issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere of additional penalties for defending yourself—it’s not really relevant in this case since that’s theoretically a second ‘initial action’). So, what you really mean is the collective response should be proportionate to the initial action. The way the voting system works creates a strange set of incentives—downvoting a post that already has a low score—or a person who already has low karma—does not cost any more (in terms of the cost to the downvote cap) than downvoting a post which is just on the visibility threshold.
Yet it’s hard to see how this could be otherwise, particularly if both the downvote cap and karma scores need to be statically calculated.
I’ve been thinking about that, but didn’t want to say anything because its really not my site and I probably couldn’t design a better one if I tried. But, yeah, I think the downvote system does warrant some reform, and I have no idea how that would work because it would vary from case to case. Maybe there could be some guidelines advising the community on which general infractions deserve a certain number of downvotes. It could be an interesting project, actually...
It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause “bad” comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for “soft” downvotes that don’t subtract from the karma of the author of the post until the post gets upvoted past a certain threshold. Another would be to limit, reduce, or eliminate the contribution to karma of negative-scored posts (if it is limited to −2, this is equivalent to making all downvotes “soft” under the first proposal)
If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn’t make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they’ll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or not a person should be trusted. There should probably be limits on how much of these a person can have.
The likes and dislikes should be used when someone says something either clever or amusing, or something like my comment which people might consider unhelpful, but does not reflect on my rationality. This would be displayed above the comments, but the total amount of likes a commenter has stored up will be private.
This way the emotional element will still be present, but will not interfere with a person’s ability to add to our understanding of rationality.
Downvotes you can make are limited to some multiple of your karma.
I didn’t know that..… How does that make sense?
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Yes, this sort of thing was proposed at the site’s inception (I was a major proponent), but it failed to get off the ground. Mostly, the objection was that the UI would necessarily be confusing.
The people who frequent this site are expected to read a sequence of posts explaining quantum physics, but a dual “like” system is too complicated?
inorite?!
Sorry, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. If you do not possess the means to defend a right, you don’t actually have it. In this case, no authority greater than your own had declared this right, and you have no expectation for any power to intercede on your behalf.
It’s like Nerf Mob Justice in here.