I share your frustration with voting at times. I know and endorse the stated voting norms. I’m also reasonably confident that plenty of people engage in yay/boo voting at times, especially around particularly touchy subjects. In the same way I’d expect to get heavily downvoted on the fictional Blessed Wrong (Less Wrong for Christians) if I posted about how there’s no God unless I was extremely careful about how I did it, I expect to get downvoted on Less Wrong if I say something that goes against commonly held beliefs of readers unless I’m really careful about how I do it.
As a result, I have a hard time knowing what feedback to take from upvotes and downvotes. Sometimes I get upvoted because I pressed an applause button. Sometimes I get upvoted because I wrote an actually good post. Sometimes I get downvoted because I pressed a boo button. And sometimes I get downvoted because my post wasn’t very good for some specific reasons I should fix. There’s generally not enough bandwidth in the voting signal to figure out what case I’m in unless someone takes the time to write a comment explaining why they voted how they did.
I share your frustration with voting at times. I know and endorse the stated voting norms. I’m also reasonably confident that plenty of people engage in yay/boo voting at times, especially around particularly touchy subjects. In the same way I’d expect to get heavily downvoted on the fictional Blessed Wrong (Less Wrong for Christians) if I posted about how there’s no God unless I was extremely careful about how I did it, I expect to get downvoted on Less Wrong if I say something that goes against commonly held beliefs of readers unless I’m really careful about how I do it.
As a result, I have a hard time knowing what feedback to take from upvotes and downvotes. Sometimes I get upvoted because I pressed an applause button. Sometimes I get upvoted because I wrote an actually good post. Sometimes I get downvoted because I pressed a boo button. And sometimes I get downvoted because my post wasn’t very good for some specific reasons I should fix. There’s generally not enough bandwidth in the voting signal to figure out what case I’m in unless someone takes the time to write a comment explaining why they voted how they did.