I am voting on this post in such a manner as to keep the karma as close as possible to 0.
Oh, please do not do this! If you think something is good, upvote. If you think something is bad, downvote. That’s what the votes are for. If you have no preference either way, abstain from voting.
The way you described it, your vote is equivalent to “my opinion is the opposite of other people’s opinion, whatever that is”. That’s just throwing sand into the gears. Other people express their preferences, and you are just trying to cancel that. Imagine if many people started doing the same thing.
Also, this kind of voting is time-sensitive. Imagine that there are 5 people who want to upvote an article and 3 people who want to downvote it. Regardless of the order, the final karma will be +2. Now add three more people who want to make the result close to zero. Now, depending on the order of the votes, the result can be anything between −1 and +5.
If there is an article on an important topic written in a bad way, I think a good approach would be to write a summary (written in a good way) and a link to the article.
Posts like “this is an article that does not belong to LW, and I do not even bother to write a summary” should be downvoted without a second thought. Anyone who thinks otherwise is free to post the article again, with the summary.
relative voting—disagree; if I want to state preferences in terms of what a posts karma should be, not in terms of what direction it should move, that seems to me like a reasonable thing to say.
re: don’t belong on lw—sure, but commenting to say it needed a summary is honorable. in general I think it’s slightly dishonorable to downvote without explanation if you push a post further below zero, and I make sure to comment on posts I heavy downvote with an explanation of what would have changed my vote. being reviewer #2 is bad enough, I don’t want to be reviewer #3!
Oh, please do not do this! If you think something is good, upvote. If you think something is bad, downvote. That’s what the votes are for. If you have no preference either way, abstain from voting.
The way you described it, your vote is equivalent to “my opinion is the opposite of other people’s opinion, whatever that is”. That’s just throwing sand into the gears. Other people express their preferences, and you are just trying to cancel that. Imagine if many people started doing the same thing.
Also, this kind of voting is time-sensitive. Imagine that there are 5 people who want to upvote an article and 3 people who want to downvote it. Regardless of the order, the final karma will be +2. Now add three more people who want to make the result close to zero. Now, depending on the order of the votes, the result can be anything between −1 and +5.
If there is an article on an important topic written in a bad way, I think a good approach would be to write a summary (written in a good way) and a link to the article.
Posts like “this is an article that does not belong to LW, and I do not even bother to write a summary” should be downvoted without a second thought. Anyone who thinks otherwise is free to post the article again, with the summary.
relative voting—disagree; if I want to state preferences in terms of what a posts karma should be, not in terms of what direction it should move, that seems to me like a reasonable thing to say.
re: don’t belong on lw—sure, but commenting to say it needed a summary is honorable. in general I think it’s slightly dishonorable to downvote without explanation if you push a post further below zero, and I make sure to comment on posts I heavy downvote with an explanation of what would have changed my vote.
being reviewer #2 is bad enough, I don’t want to be reviewer #3!