Huh, just to check, this seems like the comment of yours that you are probably referring to, and I didn’t see any strong downvotes. Before I voted on it it was at −1 with 2 total votes, which very likely means someone with a weak-upvote strength of 2 small-downvoted it. My guess is that’s just relatively random voting noise and people small-upvote and small-downvote lots of stuff without having strong feelings about it.
It does produce harsher experiences when the first vote is a downvote, and I’ve considered over the years to do a Reddit-like thing where you hide the total karma of a new comment for a few hours to reduce those effects, but I overall decided against it.
Oh, that’d be nice—hide it for maybe 6 hours or until there are 4 voters, whichever comes first. That lets solid signals come through quickly, and weak ones settle a bit before hitting.
Shoot, I forgot that high-karma users have a “small-strength” of 2, so I can’t tell if it was strong-downvoted or not. I mistakenly assumed it was a newish user. Edit: P.S. I might feel better if karma was hidden on my own new comments, whether or not they are hidden on others, though it would then be harder to guess at the vote distribution, making the information even more useless than usual if it survives the hiding-period. Still seems like a net win for the emotional benefits.
Huh, just to check, this seems like the comment of yours that you are probably referring to, and I didn’t see any strong downvotes. Before I voted on it it was at −1 with 2 total votes, which very likely means someone with a weak-upvote strength of 2 small-downvoted it. My guess is that’s just relatively random voting noise and people small-upvote and small-downvote lots of stuff without having strong feelings about it.
It does produce harsher experiences when the first vote is a downvote, and I’ve considered over the years to do a Reddit-like thing where you hide the total karma of a new comment for a few hours to reduce those effects, but I overall decided against it.
Oh, that’d be nice—hide it for maybe 6 hours or until there are 4 voters, whichever comes first. That lets solid signals come through quickly, and weak ones settle a bit before hitting.
Shoot, I forgot that high-karma users have a “small-strength” of 2, so I can’t tell if it was strong-downvoted or not. I mistakenly assumed it was a newish user. Edit: P.S. I might feel better if karma was hidden on my own new comments, whether or not they are hidden on others, though it would then be harder to guess at the vote distribution, making the information even more useless than usual if it survives the hiding-period. Still seems like a net win for the emotional benefits.