(Admins have the power to look at who’s voted, but it happens very rarely, and typically* only after checking with another team member that the situation is important enough to warrant it [the most common case being ’someone looks like they’re probably a Eugine_Nier sockpuppet])
I think it’s bad form for a person who wrote a post to complain about it getting downvoted. It seems less obviously bad to me for a different person to express confusion about it.
*when I say “typically” I mean “we talked about this being the norm, and everyone agreed to it. Later we onboarded a new person and forgot to initially talk to them about that norm, so they may have looked at some of the votes, but we have since talked about the norm with them. So I can’t promise it happens never but it’s definitely not a thing that casually happens by default.
If Ray’s talking about me as the newly onboarded member, I can say I didn’t examine any individual votes outside of due process. (I recall one such case of due process where multiple users were reporting losing karma on multiple posts and comments—we traced it back to a specific cause.)
I do a lot of the analytics, so when I first joined I was delving into the data, but mostly at the aggregate metrics level. Since I was creating new ways to query the data, Ray correctly initiated a conversation to determine our data handling norms. I believe this was last September.
For further reassurance, I can say that vote data is stored only with inscrutable ID numbers for comments, posts, and users. We have to do multiple lookups/queries if we want to figure who voted on something, which is more than enough friction to ensure we don’t ever accidentally see individual votes.
We do look at aggregate vote data that isn’t about a user voting on a specific thing, e.g. overall number of votes, whether a post is getting a very large proportion of downvotes (anyone can approximately infer this by comparing karma and number of votes via the hover-over).
I’d appreciate this information (about looking at votes) being published in meta.
The difference between “confusion” and “complain” is a grey area. I’ve heard people exclaim, “I’m so confused. This is exciting!” and other times people exclaim, “I’m so confused, this is frustrating”.
I suspect you weren’t sharing your confusion because you had a fun and jolly sentiment behind it. But being text, it’s very hard to tell. (hence the follow up question, “how was that confusion for you?”—which I assume you weren’t taking seriously and weren’t going to answer, particularly because I put you on the defensive about mod culture and powers)
Two separate comments here:
If users knew more about what the mods were or were not doing, there would be less to bring up in my original comment.
Unclear about why you shared your confusion. What are your motives and in having those motives from a mod-power position, how does that shape the culture around here?
My intent was “I’d be interested in knowing what the reasoning was, but also it’s important for downvoters to not feel obligation to share their reasoning if they don’t feel like it.” That’s a bit of a handful to type out every single time I experience it.
I updated the FAQ. But an important note about how I think about all of this is it’s *not* actually possible or tractable for everyone to have read everything there is to know about the LW moderation team, nor is it possible/tractable for the LW team to keep everyone on the site fully informed about all of our philosophical and ethical positions.
We’ve been trying recently to publicly post our most important positions, promises, deliberate-not-promises, etc. But we can’t cover everything.
I can’t see whose voted.
(Admins have the power to look at who’s voted, but it happens very rarely, and typically* only after checking with another team member that the situation is important enough to warrant it [the most common case being ’someone looks like they’re probably a Eugine_Nier sockpuppet])
I think it’s bad form for a person who wrote a post to complain about it getting downvoted. It seems less obviously bad to me for a different person to express confusion about it.
*when I say “typically” I mean “we talked about this being the norm, and everyone agreed to it. Later we onboarded a new person and forgot to initially talk to them about that norm, so they may have looked at some of the votes, but we have since talked about the norm with them. So I can’t promise it happens never but it’s definitely not a thing that casually happens by default.
If Ray’s talking about me as the newly onboarded member, I can say I didn’t examine any individual votes outside of due process. (I recall one such case of due process where multiple users were reporting losing karma on multiple posts and comments—we traced it back to a specific cause.)
I do a lot of the analytics, so when I first joined I was delving into the data, but mostly at the aggregate metrics level. Since I was creating new ways to query the data, Ray correctly initiated a conversation to determine our data handling norms. I believe this was last September.
For further reassurance, I can say that vote data is stored only with inscrutable ID numbers for comments, posts, and users. We have to do multiple lookups/queries if we want to figure who voted on something, which is more than enough friction to ensure we don’t ever accidentally see individual votes.
We do look at aggregate vote data that isn’t about a user voting on a specific thing, e.g. overall number of votes, whether a post is getting a very large proportion of downvotes (anyone can approximately infer this by comparing karma and number of votes via the hover-over).
I’d appreciate this information (about looking at votes) being published in meta.
The difference between “confusion” and “complain” is a grey area. I’ve heard people exclaim, “I’m so confused. This is exciting!” and other times people exclaim, “I’m so confused, this is frustrating”.
I suspect you weren’t sharing your confusion because you had a fun and jolly sentiment behind it. But being text, it’s very hard to tell. (hence the follow up question, “how was that confusion for you?”—which I assume you weren’t taking seriously and weren’t going to answer, particularly because I put you on the defensive about mod culture and powers)
Two separate comments here:
If users knew more about what the mods were or were not doing, there would be less to bring up in my original comment.
Unclear about why you shared your confusion. What are your motives and in having those motives from a mod-power position, how does that shape the culture around here?
My intent was “I’d be interested in knowing what the reasoning was, but also it’s important for downvoters to not feel obligation to share their reasoning if they don’t feel like it.” That’s a bit of a handful to type out every single time I experience it.
I updated the FAQ. But an important note about how I think about all of this is it’s *not* actually possible or tractable for everyone to have read everything there is to know about the LW moderation team, nor is it possible/tractable for the LW team to keep everyone on the site fully informed about all of our philosophical and ethical positions.
We’ve been trying recently to publicly post our most important positions, promises, deliberate-not-promises, etc. But we can’t cover everything.