Get good at finding holes in your ideas. Become appropriately uncertain. Distill your points to increase signal to noise ratio in your communication. Ask for feedback early and often.
Less wrong is not very welcoming for those who are trying to improve their ideas but are currently saying nonsense because the voting system automatically mutes those who say unpopular things very quickly. I’ve unfortunately encountered this quite a bit myself. Try putting warnings at the beginning that you know things are bad, request that you be downvoted to but not below zero so you can still post, etc. explicitly invite harsh negative feedback frequently. Put everything in one post and keep it short. Avoid aesthetic trappings of academia and just say what you mean concisely. If you’re going to be clever with language to make a point, explain the point without being clever with language too or many won’t get it.
From the little I’ve understood it seems like you’re gesturing in the direction of the boundaries sequence but your SNR is terrible right now and I’m not sure what you’re getting at at all.
request that you be downvoted to but not below zero so you can still post
This would get an automatic downvote from me.
If you get downvoted, write differently, not more of the same plus a disclaimer that you know that this is not what people want but you are going to write more of it regardless. From my perspective, the disclaimer just makes it worse, because you can no longer claim ignorance.
it’s a workaround for a broken downvote system. “don’t like my post, legit. please be aware the downvote system will ban me if I get heavily downvoted”.
Can you clarify what part of the downvote system is broken? If someone posts multiple things that get voted below zero, that indicates to me that most voters don’t want to see more of that on LW. Are you saying it means something else?
I do wish there were agreement indicators on top-level posts, so it could be much clearer to remind people “voting is about whether you think this is good to see on LW, agreement is about the specific arguments”. But even absent that, I don’t see very much below-zero post scores that surprise me or I think are strongly incorrect. If I did, I somewhat expect the mods would override a throttle.
I once got quite upset when someone posted something anti-trans. because I wrote an angry reply, I got heavily downvoted. as a result, I was only able to post once a day for several months, heavily limiting my ability to contribute. perhaps this is the intended outcome of the system; but I think there ought to be a better curve than that. perhaps directly related to time, rather than number of posts—I had to make an effort to make a trivial post regularly so I’d be able to make a spurt of specific posts when I had something I wanted to comment on.
Yeah, I can see how a single highly-downvoted bad comment can outweigh a lot of low-positive good comments. I do wish there were a way to reset the limit in the cases where a poster acknowledges the problem and agrees they won’t do it again (in at least the near-term). Or perhaps a more complex algorithm that counts posts/comments rather than just votes.
And I’ve long been of the opinion that strong votes are harmful, in many ways.
Get good at finding holes in your ideas. Become appropriately uncertain. Distill your points to increase signal to noise ratio in your communication. Ask for feedback early and often.
Less wrong is not very welcoming for those who are trying to improve their ideas but are currently saying nonsense because the voting system automatically mutes those who say unpopular things very quickly. I’ve unfortunately encountered this quite a bit myself. Try putting warnings at the beginning that you know things are bad, request that you be downvoted to but not below zero so you can still post, etc. explicitly invite harsh negative feedback frequently. Put everything in one post and keep it short. Avoid aesthetic trappings of academia and just say what you mean concisely. If you’re going to be clever with language to make a point, explain the point without being clever with language too or many won’t get it.
From the little I’ve understood it seems like you’re gesturing in the direction of the boundaries sequence but your SNR is terrible right now and I’m not sure what you’re getting at at all.
This would get an automatic downvote from me.
If you get downvoted, write differently, not more of the same plus a disclaimer that you know that this is not what people want but you are going to write more of it regardless. From my perspective, the disclaimer just makes it worse, because you can no longer claim ignorance.
it’s a workaround for a broken downvote system. “don’t like my post, legit. please be aware the downvote system will ban me if I get heavily downvoted”.
What you see as a broken system, I see as a system working exactly as intended.
Should we keep any nonsense on LW front page just because the author asked us nicely?
Can you clarify what part of the downvote system is broken? If someone posts multiple things that get voted below zero, that indicates to me that most voters don’t want to see more of that on LW. Are you saying it means something else?
I do wish there were agreement indicators on top-level posts, so it could be much clearer to remind people “voting is about whether you think this is good to see on LW, agreement is about the specific arguments”. But even absent that, I don’t see very much below-zero post scores that surprise me or I think are strongly incorrect. If I did, I somewhat expect the mods would override a throttle.
I once got quite upset when someone posted something anti-trans. because I wrote an angry reply, I got heavily downvoted. as a result, I was only able to post once a day for several months, heavily limiting my ability to contribute. perhaps this is the intended outcome of the system; but I think there ought to be a better curve than that. perhaps directly related to time, rather than number of posts—I had to make an effort to make a trivial post regularly so I’d be able to make a spurt of specific posts when I had something I wanted to comment on.
Yeah, I can see how a single highly-downvoted bad comment can outweigh a lot of low-positive good comments. I do wish there were a way to reset the limit in the cases where a poster acknowledges the problem and agrees they won’t do it again (in at least the near-term). Or perhaps a more complex algorithm that counts posts/comments rather than just votes.
And I’ve long been of the opinion that strong votes are harmful, in many ways.
Agree that it should be time-based rather than karma-based.
I’m currently on a very heavy rate limit that I think is being manually adjusted by the LessWrong team.