I’d also really like to see a return of the old LW cultural thing of, if you downvote then you explain why. There are some downvotes on my comments that I’m left scratching my head about and going “Okay, whatever.” It’s hard for downvotes to improve culture if the feedback amounts to “Bad.”
For instance, my review has been pretty heavily downvoted. Why? I can think of several reasons. But the net effect is to convey that LW would rather not have seen such a review.
Now why would that be?
I notice that there’s also a −16 on the agree/disagree voting, with just three votes. So I’m guessing that what I said seriously irked a few people who probably heavy-downvoted the karma too.
But if it’s really a distributed will, it’s curious. Do you really want me not to have shared more context? Not to have reflected on where I’m at with the post? Or is it that you want me to feel differently about the post than I do?
I guess I don’t get to know!
It’s worth remembering that karma downvoting has a technical function. Serious negative karma makes a comment invisible by default. A user who gets a lot of negative karma in a short period of time can’t post comments for a while (I think?). A user who has low karma overall can’t post articles (unless that’s changed?).
So a karma downvote amounts to saying “Shut up.”
And a strong-downvote amounts to saying “Shut the fuck up.”
If that’s really the only communication the whole culture encourages for downvotes… that doesn’t really foster clarity.
It seems dead obvious to me that this aspect of conversation culture here is quite bad.
For instance, my review has been pretty heavily downvoted. Why? I can think of several reasons. But the net effect is to convey that LW would rather not have seen such a review.
Now why would that be?
I notice that there’s also a −16 on the agree/disagree voting, with just three votes. So I’m guessing that what I said seriously irked a few people who probably heavy-downvoted the karma too.
But if it’s really a distributed will, it’s curious. Do you really want me not to have shared more context? Not to have reflected on where I’m at with the post? Or is it that you want me to feel differently about the post than I do?
I guess I don’t get to know!
It’s worth remembering that karma downvoting has a technical function. Serious negative karma makes a comment invisible by default. A user who gets a lot of negative karma in a short period of time can’t post comments for a while (I think?). A user who has low karma overall can’t post articles (unless that’s changed?).
So a karma downvote amounts to saying “Shut up.”
And a strong-downvote amounts to saying “Shut the fuck up.”
If that’s really the only communication the whole culture encourages for downvotes… that doesn’t really foster clarity.
It seems dead obvious to me that this aspect of conversation culture here is quite bad.
But this isn’t a hill I intend to die on.