What happened is that completely useless comments, e.g. “YES WE KHAN!!!!!! :)”, are voted up and drown all useful comments
As far as I can tell, there are no useful comments in the comments section. In the complete absence of anything of substance (a situation LW is not in danger of being), simple community applause lights floating up is understandable. The situation in the Q&A section, where there is substance, appears better.
Also you picked a page which looks like it’s largely populated by schoolchildren. Youtube is populated by, well, everyone. LW’s audience is strongly selected. I don’t know if I even need to say this, but it seems reasonable to expect the downvote system to be used more usefully on LW than on youtube.
My point is that the negative aspects of such a system are rarely compared to the positive aspects.
People say that the reputation system employed by lesswrong holds the trolls at bay and reduces noise. Yet when I am showing that reputation systems frequently fail at doing so, the same people argue that lesswrong is different and that’s why it works. Does it? Or does it just look like it works because lesswrong is different?
Do the positive effects really outweigh the negative?
As far as I can tell, there are no useful comments in the comments section. In the complete absence of anything of substance (a situation LW is not in danger of being), simple community applause lights floating up is understandable. The situation in the Q&A section, where there is substance, appears better.
Also you picked a page which looks like it’s largely populated by schoolchildren. Youtube is populated by, well, everyone. LW’s audience is strongly selected. I don’t know if I even need to say this, but it seems reasonable to expect the downvote system to be used more usefully on LW than on youtube.
My point is that the negative aspects of such a system are rarely compared to the positive aspects.
People say that the reputation system employed by lesswrong holds the trolls at bay and reduces noise. Yet when I am showing that reputation systems frequently fail at doing so, the same people argue that lesswrong is different and that’s why it works. Does it? Or does it just look like it works because lesswrong is different?
Do the positive effects really outweigh the negative?