I agree that links to comics should better go in the open thread, but this explanation for the downvotes seems incorrect—a search for “xkcd” and SMBC” shows many posts consisting of links to comics, most of them upvoted. This one was downvoted because the suggestion that the comic references LW was deemed wrong.
And I think the community’s reaction was rather too harsh—it was a honest mistake by the poster, and while I can understand someone downvoting it when it had zero or few downvotes, I cannot understand someone piling on after it had been already heavily downvoted and taking it to its present value of −15, a karma score I associate with trolls, spam, personal abuse or political rants, not a honest mistake.
I cannot understand someone piling on after it had been already heavily downvoted
I vote down when the post is of a kind I don’t want to see here, without regard of the post’s current score. This seems to me as a more sensible voting pattern than the obvious alternative and I hope I am not applying it alone.
I agree, on reflection, that it is a sensible voting policy.
It is certainly simpler than mine, which under introspection, seems to be something like “upvote something that is quite below its proper score, downvote something that is quite above it, and don’t bother when there is not much difference, with the deontological constraints of not upvoting when the deserved net score is negative, not downvoting when it is positive, upvoting ceteris paribus responses to myself, and probably further qualifications”.
The main problem I have with voting to reach the proper score is that to do it well means either that
I’d have to constantly check all the posts I have voted on to see whether the score hasn’t overshot and my vote isn’t already moving the karma away from my desired value, or
I’d have to guess the future quasi-stable rating of the post and vote according to the difference of this guess from my desired score (assuming such a rating exists, i.e. that karma of posts or comments stops wildly fluctuating some time after they are published).
(1) is obviously waste of time and (2) is too complex and error-prone. The default position of many LWers, i.e. voting according to the present standing and not checking afterwards, I dislike because the resulting score depends on the order in which the readers vote. Consider e.g. 10 readers finding the post unremarkable and deserving 0 and another 10 readers finding it worth +5. Then if the former group votes first and the latter votes last, the post ends up at +5, while in the reversed order it would stand at 0.
(I have observed that many bad posts sink rapidly soon after being posted and then slowly climb back to around zero level. I hypothesise that may be because the regular readers who may be more demanding in quality are more likely to read a post soon while the more forgiving occasional readers who check new content less often read posts later; even if there were many more regular readers than occasional readers, since most of the former group would forgo voting because the post had already got what it deserved, the latter group would dominate in the long-term voting results.)
I should note this is well-travelled ground; we have this conversation about twice a year.
You are, of course, correct about the failure mode of the adjust-towards-preferred-score strategy.
The vote-without-reference-to-preferred-score strategy has the problem where, if comment C1 has a score 5x higher than C2, someone reading them can’t tell whether that reflects 5x as many people reading C1 as C2 and endorsing it about as much, or a 5x higher proportion of readers endorsed it. Which is kind of a big deal, if we want karma scores to serve as feedback about comment quality/desirability rather than thread popularity, which some of us do.
People vary in terms of which problem they’re more motivated to avoid, so you end up with both behaviors in the community. When the subject comes up, proponents of adjust-toward-preferred-score typically dismiss the concern you describe by positing that there’s no systematic difference between early voters and late voters, and proponents of ignore-preferred-score dismiss the above concern by positing that there’s not that much variation in how many people read any given pair of comments. (Personally, I suspect both of those statements are false.)
I’m not sure that’s actually more sensible, given that upvotes and downvotes aren’t shown separately (does +3 means three people want to see more comments like that and everyone else is indifferent, or does it mean seven people want to see more of them and four want to see fewer?). If they were I would do that too, but right now I mentally assign each post/comment a “deserved” score and upvote/downvoted if the current score is below/above it.
I agree that links to comics should better go in the open thread, but this explanation for the downvotes seems incorrect—a search for “xkcd” and SMBC” shows many posts consisting of links to comics, most of them upvoted. This one was downvoted because the suggestion that the comic references LW was deemed wrong.
And I think the community’s reaction was rather too harsh—it was a honest mistake by the poster, and while I can understand someone downvoting it when it had zero or few downvotes, I cannot understand someone piling on after it had been already heavily downvoted and taking it to its present value of −15, a karma score I associate with trolls, spam, personal abuse or political rants, not a honest mistake.
I vote down when the post is of a kind I don’t want to see here, without regard of the post’s current score. This seems to me as a more sensible voting pattern than the obvious alternative and I hope I am not applying it alone.
(Disclaimer: I haven’t downvoted this post.)
I agree, on reflection, that it is a sensible voting policy.
It is certainly simpler than mine, which under introspection, seems to be something like “upvote something that is quite below its proper score, downvote something that is quite above it, and don’t bother when there is not much difference, with the deontological constraints of not upvoting when the deserved net score is negative, not downvoting when it is positive, upvoting ceteris paribus responses to myself, and probably further qualifications”.
The main problem I have with voting to reach the proper score is that to do it well means either that
I’d have to constantly check all the posts I have voted on to see whether the score hasn’t overshot and my vote isn’t already moving the karma away from my desired value, or
I’d have to guess the future quasi-stable rating of the post and vote according to the difference of this guess from my desired score (assuming such a rating exists, i.e. that karma of posts or comments stops wildly fluctuating some time after they are published).
(1) is obviously waste of time and (2) is too complex and error-prone. The default position of many LWers, i.e. voting according to the present standing and not checking afterwards, I dislike because the resulting score depends on the order in which the readers vote. Consider e.g. 10 readers finding the post unremarkable and deserving 0 and another 10 readers finding it worth +5. Then if the former group votes first and the latter votes last, the post ends up at +5, while in the reversed order it would stand at 0.
(I have observed that many bad posts sink rapidly soon after being posted and then slowly climb back to around zero level. I hypothesise that may be because the regular readers who may be more demanding in quality are more likely to read a post soon while the more forgiving occasional readers who check new content less often read posts later; even if there were many more regular readers than occasional readers, since most of the former group would forgo voting because the post had already got what it deserved, the latter group would dominate in the long-term voting results.)
I should note this is well-travelled ground; we have this conversation about twice a year.
You are, of course, correct about the failure mode of the adjust-towards-preferred-score strategy.
The vote-without-reference-to-preferred-score strategy has the problem where, if comment C1 has a score 5x higher than C2, someone reading them can’t tell whether that reflects 5x as many people reading C1 as C2 and endorsing it about as much, or a 5x higher proportion of readers endorsed it. Which is kind of a big deal, if we want karma scores to serve as feedback about comment quality/desirability rather than thread popularity, which some of us do.
People vary in terms of which problem they’re more motivated to avoid, so you end up with both behaviors in the community. When the subject comes up, proponents of adjust-toward-preferred-score typically dismiss the concern you describe by positing that there’s no systematic difference between early voters and late voters, and proponents of ignore-preferred-score dismiss the above concern by positing that there’s not that much variation in how many people read any given pair of comments. (Personally, I suspect both of those statements are false.)
I’m not sure that’s actually more sensible, given that upvotes and downvotes aren’t shown separately (does +3 means three people want to see more comments like that and everyone else is indifferent, or does it mean seven people want to see more of them and four want to see fewer?). If they were I would do that too, but right now I mentally assign each post/comment a “deserved” score and upvote/downvoted if the current score is below/above it.
One can edit to add “Retracted” or a similar disclaimer in the post to stop the downvoting.