Its Eliezer’s site and all, but doesn’t it kinda go against seeking the truth to pretend someone never said something when they did? I mean, if J.K. Rowling makes a statement about Harry Potter and retracts it, does that make the statement a spoiler? Eliezer chose to give information to people in his notes. He can’t really take that knowledge away. If anything, retracting a statement indicates that the statement is no longer valid, not that it is now a secret (this by the way would’ve been enough to answer my question, after which I would have gladly deleted my “spoiler” with no more than 3, rather than 30, downvotes). Rules are rules, but it just seems to me that it sorta goes against rationalism to hold to a rule just because someone says so, when it doesn’t entirely make sense.
(This better not get downvoted like all my other comments here. I said nothing irrational or detrimental to any reader. I was making an honest case, and if anyone wants to provide a civilized response, I welcome them. We’re trying to be rational here, that implies treating arguments with a degree of fairness)
Look. It’s very simple. The only response necessary is a gesture toward the main post:
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that you weren’t aware your statement fell under that category. It’s just impolite that your response was something other than “oops, fixed.” If you think the policy is misguided somehow, make a top-level comment about it.
It’s your right to ignore the clearly-stated rules of these threads, just as it’s our right to downvote you for it.
I hadn’t realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules. Someone said it should be coded, but nobody actually explained why I had broken the rules until after I went to sleep. When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it. At this point I don’t feel that I did anything wrong enough to warrant more than 5 downvotes on what was otherwise a reasonable query and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it. [...]
and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
Too bad, agreeing to follow the rules of the thread, even if that means editing/rot13ing past comments, would have been the easiest way to get your karma back.
Edited to add: Some Quirrel-type lesson about learning when to lose, and the costs of needless escalation, seems appropriate.
The initial shock of having lost so much karma was the only time I felt I really “lost” here. I notice that karma loss does more to infuriate than actually punish, and that it has the potential to hurt the site more than me, by nullifying my ability to reach a larger audience when I have something important to say. When I see a rule I don’t like, I tend to ignore it, not that doing so was my intention here. My problem wasn’t that I lost karma, it was that I was accused of wrongdoing which I did not believe myself to have committed.
(That said, you are probably right about learning to lose. One of my biggest problems has been that I find escalation of conflict fun after it reaches a point where I cannot possibly win. I’m very popular with authority, as you could probably guess.)
As far as he knew it was gone. I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes, and I’m not sure if you’re not being too optimistic to expect it of the others who downvoted.
When I started here I went back and changed posts, hoping that downvotes would be replaced with upvotes. There was little reaction and I think it really wasn’t worth the time.
I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes,
We were still in the discussion thread. I don’t promise to stick around indefinitely, but he would have obviously chosen to mention he has now fixed it, same way that he chose to complain instead.
I hadn’t realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules.
In general, when someone says something is a spoiler and should be put in ROT13, the polite thing to do is to comply. You can then argue that it shouldn’t be necessary, after the damage control is done.
If you’re failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view. I will generally check back in a day to see if the spoiler has been ROT13′d, and reverse my downvote if it has.
The policy is listed in the post header, and the “more specifically” link says exactly what it is that should only be mentioned in ROT13.
And if you’d just bothered to go down to the local planning office, you’d see the policy was available for anyone to look at for the last nine months.
I have never posted a spoiler before, nor had I intended to. I was not aware that confidence was to be given to the accusing party. I will keep this in mind in the future.
It’s not about who’s the “accusing party”, it’s about limiting potential damage. It would have cost you only a few seconds to edit in order to rot13 or remove something you were told was spoiler—an action which would have been of positive utility to us, of hardly any cost to you—instead you preferred to spend a hundredfold times that amount of time in a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.
Why don’t we instead trade utilities, you by editing to remove/rot13 the spoiler, and I by removing my own downvotes of you? As could have been done from the very first post?
a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.
Not everyone is losing. For example, I’ve been enjoying this. I doubt I’m the only one.
For example, I’ve been enjoying this. I doubt I’m the only one.
First time it can be amusing, but if such situation would repeat often, the amusement would fade and the costs would stay. So I cooperate with my future selves by resisting to act on my amusement.
First time it can be amusing, but if such situation would repeat often, the amusement would fade and the costs would stay.
I can’t tell if you’re telling me I don’t actually enjoy this or if you’re threatening me with promises that time will deliver retribution.
I cooperate with my future selves
Things like this are why I can’t convince my friends that you guys aren’t a “system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” I don’t know what you’re saying but I’ll bet p>0.75 there’s a way to say it without sounding like a fucking time traveler.
EDIT: I mean to say that you use phrases that reference something common to some group you belong to, but uncommon to the public majority. I could say you sound like you come from fairy land or a phyg or outer space, but saying that you sound like you come from another time seemed the most apt until I noticed the phrase I criticized said something about your future selves. Maybe that’s why I thought of time travel. I wasn’t taking you literally.
I’m threatening you that time may deliver more discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t rot-13 the spoilers, how exactly the spoiler is defined, etc… and that can become rather boring.
And by the way, I am a time traveller, I just always move in the same direction with a constant speed.
Actually, I would say that this whole affair was a net positive. It brought to light an issue that I’m sure some of us believe should be reformed. At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall. Rationalists cannot agree to disagree, so when we argue correctly, we become stronger. I suppose I was briefly frustrated by this and its possible that some animosity sprung up here and there, but in the end we’re all really friends here trying to talk about a story we enjoy, and this was undeniably amusing.
At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An exaggerated example: if someone writes something bad and gets −10 karma, and two people react with “stop doing this!” and get +5 karma each, the total balance is 0, but the total utility is negative.) Also chronical procrastinators like me probably have a bias against recognizing the opportunity cost of time spent reading comments, which makes us ignore comments that—judged strictly by the utility they give us—should be downvoted.
This is just a speculation about the nature of karma on LW. I don’t think that you did something horrible here, and I consider the downvoting of the offending comment a sufficient fix. But next time be more careful, because on this site torturing a person for 50 years is considered appropriate to avoid 3^^^3 readers getting spoilers in their eyes. :D
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
(see my comment below for why this was actually positive-sum)
We’re kinda wasting time in the first place. I mean, we’re debating a Harry Potter fanfiction. That’s hardly the most productive use of our time. Your trade would be very reasonable if I valued my karma as much as I value leaving my comment. i apologize to anyone who might have the story ruined for them by the revelation at the end of the first book, from more than 15 years ago. I’m not going to use the rot13 because it would be putting symbolism over substance. I would be censoring myself to avoid what is only technically defined as a spoiler because spoilers are “bad” regardless of whether their presence does any real harm.
Honestly, does anyone here actually say, “Rot13! I better not read this question because this guy is going to tell me the entire third act”? If anything, Rot13 just makes me more curious, as does a simple “Spoiler Alert”. I realized that this is only evidence for my mind, but even if someone on here as a deadly allergy to information they’re probably going to know anyway by next week, my comment would barely hurt them, if at all. Harry traded a 100,000 galleons because the value he assigned to Hermione was exponentially greater. I would trade twice my current amount of karma because the value I assign to resisting absurd technicalities is exponentially greater.
If you’re failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view.
A post only needs a score of −1 to be hidden.
The post currently stands at −12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).
By default, posts with −2 or less are hidden. (I just created a new account to check). I’m pretty sure the default used to be −4.
The post currently stands at −12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).
That is not relevant to anything I said. People can downvote for whatever reason they want, and should generally do so to mean “I want to see fewer comments like this one”.
By default, comments with a score of −2 are visible and with a score of −3 are hidden. The preferences page is confusing because it uses “below” as a strict inequality. I believe this was the original default, though there may have been something else in the middle.
Are you suggesting there’s some rule about what a post ‘deserves’ in terms of votes?
The actual mechanic is that scores or hundreds of individuals read each post. If they like it, they hit upvote. If they don’t like it, they hit downvote. Some voters may think “this has enough upvotes already” and not upvote even though they like a post. Some voters may think “this has enough downvotes to collapse and I only get a limited number of downvotes myself so I’ll save them for things other people aren’t downvoting.” But in the end it is mostly a reflect of the number of people that noticed your post and felt something about it.
You don’t deserve 12 downvotes for this, that’s just what happened.
Also, you can prevent accumulation of negative karma, if you’re concerned about that, by retracting.
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.
V guvax ur jebgr vg va gur grkg rdhvinyrag bs fubhgvat va fbzr rneyvre Nhgube’f Abgrf, npghnyyl.
Yes. And then he retracted that statement.
Its Eliezer’s site and all, but doesn’t it kinda go against seeking the truth to pretend someone never said something when they did? I mean, if J.K. Rowling makes a statement about Harry Potter and retracts it, does that make the statement a spoiler? Eliezer chose to give information to people in his notes. He can’t really take that knowledge away. If anything, retracting a statement indicates that the statement is no longer valid, not that it is now a secret (this by the way would’ve been enough to answer my question, after which I would have gladly deleted my “spoiler” with no more than 3, rather than 30, downvotes). Rules are rules, but it just seems to me that it sorta goes against rationalism to hold to a rule just because someone says so, when it doesn’t entirely make sense.
(This better not get downvoted like all my other comments here. I said nothing irrational or detrimental to any reader. I was making an honest case, and if anyone wants to provide a civilized response, I welcome them. We’re trying to be rational here, that implies treating arguments with a degree of fairness)
Look. It’s very simple. The only response necessary is a gesture toward the main post:
I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that you weren’t aware your statement fell under that category. It’s just impolite that your response was something other than “oops, fixed.” If you think the policy is misguided somehow, make a top-level comment about it.
It’s your right to ignore the clearly-stated rules of these threads, just as it’s our right to downvote you for it.
I hadn’t realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules. Someone said it should be coded, but nobody actually explained why I had broken the rules until after I went to sleep. When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it. At this point I don’t feel that I did anything wrong enough to warrant more than 5 downvotes on what was otherwise a reasonable query and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
Too bad, agreeing to follow the rules of the thread, even if that means editing/rot13ing past comments, would have been the easiest way to get your karma back.
Edited to add: Some Quirrel-type lesson about learning when to lose, and the costs of needless escalation, seems appropriate.
The initial shock of having lost so much karma was the only time I felt I really “lost” here. I notice that karma loss does more to infuriate than actually punish, and that it has the potential to hurt the site more than me, by nullifying my ability to reach a larger audience when I have something important to say. When I see a rule I don’t like, I tend to ignore it, not that doing so was my intention here. My problem wasn’t that I lost karma, it was that I was accused of wrongdoing which I did not believe myself to have committed.
(That said, you are probably right about learning to lose. One of my biggest problems has been that I find escalation of conflict fun after it reaches a point where I cannot possibly win. I’m very popular with authority, as you could probably guess.)
I would also guess that many of your peers don’t much care for the escalation of conflict for its own sake, either.
no, just authority.
(The people who downvoted you here are your peers, not authority.)
Okay, I’m honestly curious: why the downvotes? I thought I was being helpful.
I consider a peer to be anyone I can beat in an argument when my logic is sound, regardless of other circumstances.
As far as he knew it was gone. I wouldn’t have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes, and I’m not sure if you’re not being too optimistic to expect it of the others who downvoted.
When I started here I went back and changed posts, hoping that downvotes would be replaced with upvotes. There was little reaction and I think it really wasn’t worth the time.
Near as I can tell, the easiest way to get your karma back is to make a top level post repeating what other people are already saying in storytelling way. That may fall out of fashion at some point, though, so don’t over invest your time in developing your storytelling and other people repeating skills, or whatever.
We were still in the discussion thread. I don’t promise to stick around indefinitely, but he would have obviously chosen to mention he has now fixed it, same way that he chose to complain instead.
In general, when someone says something is a spoiler and should be put in ROT13, the polite thing to do is to comply. You can then argue that it shouldn’t be necessary, after the damage control is done.
If you’re failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view. I will generally check back in a day to see if the spoiler has been ROT13′d, and reverse my downvote if it has.
The policy is listed in the post header, and the “more specifically” link says exactly what it is that should only be mentioned in ROT13.
And if you’d just bothered to go down to the local planning office, you’d see the policy was available for anyone to look at for the last nine months.
I have never posted a spoiler before, nor had I intended to. I was not aware that confidence was to be given to the accusing party. I will keep this in mind in the future.
It’s not about who’s the “accusing party”, it’s about limiting potential damage. It would have cost you only a few seconds to edit in order to rot13 or remove something you were told was spoiler—an action which would have been of positive utility to us, of hardly any cost to you—instead you preferred to spend a hundredfold times that amount of time in a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.
Why don’t we instead trade utilities, you by editing to remove/rot13 the spoiler, and I by removing my own downvotes of you? As could have been done from the very first post?
Not everyone is losing. For example, I’ve been enjoying this. I doubt I’m the only one.
First time it can be amusing, but if such situation would repeat often, the amusement would fade and the costs would stay. So I cooperate with my future selves by resisting to act on my amusement.
I can’t tell if you’re telling me I don’t actually enjoy this or if you’re threatening me with promises that time will deliver retribution.
Things like this are why I can’t convince my friends that you guys aren’t a “system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” I don’t know what you’re saying but I’ll bet p>0.75 there’s a way to say it without sounding like a fucking time traveler.
EDIT: I mean to say that you use phrases that reference something common to some group you belong to, but uncommon to the public majority. I could say you sound like you come from fairy land or a phyg or outer space, but saying that you sound like you come from another time seemed the most apt until I noticed the phrase I criticized said something about your future selves. Maybe that’s why I thought of time travel. I wasn’t taking you literally.
EDIT II: Son of Edit: Phyg
I’m threatening you that time may deliver more discussions about whether we should or shouldn’t rot-13 the spoilers, how exactly the spoiler is defined, etc… and that can become rather boring.
And by the way, I am a time traveller, I just always move in the same direction with a constant speed.
Point taken, though.
Actually, I would say that this whole affair was a net positive. It brought to light an issue that I’m sure some of us believe should be reformed. At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall. Rationalists cannot agree to disagree, so when we argue correctly, we become stronger. I suppose I was briefly frustrated by this and its possible that some animosity sprung up here and there, but in the end we’re all really friends here trying to talk about a story we enjoy, and this was undeniably amusing.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An exaggerated example: if someone writes something bad and gets −10 karma, and two people react with “stop doing this!” and get +5 karma each, the total balance is 0, but the total utility is negative.) Also chronical procrastinators like me probably have a bias against recognizing the opportunity cost of time spent reading comments, which makes us ignore comments that—judged strictly by the utility they give us—should be downvoted.
This is just a speculation about the nature of karma on LW. I don’t think that you did something horrible here, and I consider the downvoting of the offending comment a sufficient fix. But next time be more careful, because on this site torturing a person for 50 years is considered appropriate to avoid 3^^^3 readers getting spoilers in their eyes. :D
I would never have guessed that we had that many readers.
It depends on a few assumptions:
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
(Also, I am joking.)
Wouldn’t transhumans with sufficiently modified minds probably have the cognitive ability necessary to guess the spoiler?
I actually agree, Although it is rather exasperating to argue against a larger group of people.
(see my comment below for why this was actually positive-sum) We’re kinda wasting time in the first place. I mean, we’re debating a Harry Potter fanfiction. That’s hardly the most productive use of our time. Your trade would be very reasonable if I valued my karma as much as I value leaving my comment. i apologize to anyone who might have the story ruined for them by the revelation at the end of the first book, from more than 15 years ago. I’m not going to use the rot13 because it would be putting symbolism over substance. I would be censoring myself to avoid what is only technically defined as a spoiler because spoilers are “bad” regardless of whether their presence does any real harm.
Honestly, does anyone here actually say, “Rot13! I better not read this question because this guy is going to tell me the entire third act”? If anything, Rot13 just makes me more curious, as does a simple “Spoiler Alert”. I realized that this is only evidence for my mind, but even if someone on here as a deadly allergy to information they’re probably going to know anyway by next week, my comment would barely hurt them, if at all. Harry traded a 100,000 galleons because the value he assigned to Hermione was exponentially greater. I would trade twice my current amount of karma because the value I assign to resisting absurd technicalities is exponentially greater.
A post only needs a score of −1 to be hidden.
The post currently stands at −12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).
By default, posts with −2 or less are hidden. (I just created a new account to check). I’m pretty sure the default used to be −4.
That is not relevant to anything I said. People can downvote for whatever reason they want, and should generally do so to mean “I want to see fewer comments like this one”.
By default, comments with a score of −2 are visible and with a score of −3 are hidden. The preferences page is confusing because it uses “below” as a strict inequality. I believe this was the original default, though there may have been something else in the middle.
Are you suggesting there’s some rule about what a post ‘deserves’ in terms of votes?
The actual mechanic is that scores or hundreds of individuals read each post. If they like it, they hit upvote. If they don’t like it, they hit downvote. Some voters may think “this has enough upvotes already” and not upvote even though they like a post. Some voters may think “this has enough downvotes to collapse and I only get a limited number of downvotes myself so I’ll save them for things other people aren’t downvoting.” But in the end it is mostly a reflect of the number of people that noticed your post and felt something about it.
You don’t deserve 12 downvotes for this, that’s just what happened.
Also, you can prevent accumulation of negative karma, if you’re concerned about that, by retracting.
I wasn’t suggesting any rules, I was pointing out that this case seemed less than fair to me. In any case I suppose you’re right.
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.