I’m a female-type person. I can’t speak to anyone else, but I did make a post a while ago, and it was met largely with indifference and I wound up taking a (small) karma hit. This did a variety of things, some useful and some not, but one thing it hasn’t done is encourage me to take the time to write another top-level post.
If I’m wandering around a large in-person gathering and I drift over to an interesting conversation and say something and get shot down—even if it’s because I said something stupid—I’m more likely to drift away or at least shut up rather than continue to hang out with and seek approval from Those People Who Were Mean To Me™. “Drifting away” is much easier on the Internet, and if more women are giving up after making one or two poorly-received comments, that could easily explain the gender bias.
Possible solutions if I have the right idea (no idea how palatable they are to others):
1) Be more parsimonious with downvotes and generous with upvotes in general.
2) Attempt to draw out individual women Less Wrong ers on particular topics (solicited input puts one out on less of a social limb).
3) Identify who makes each vote on a comment or post, so people can identify Those People Who Were Mean To Me™ and not have to consider the entire Less Wrong community as a whole to be united against them.
I wonder if there is a gender difference in tone of the way people introduce themselves to a group. Per my experience, the girl way seems to be personal sharing (signal: “I’m approachable”), the guy way seems to be chiming in on topic (signal: “I’m capable”). Since your article was weighted more to personal sharing than to providing something topically useful, I think you might have gotten a confused reaction from the regulars (“how is this supposed to help me be a rationalist?”).
I wonder if allowing explicitly flagged “hello / about me posts” would help? Normal contextual politeness would kick in and the response to such a post would be much less aggressive.
I really like the newcomer welcome page. I also really like what ciphergoth and others are doing with their self-introductions; explaining when and how they came to LW, and a little about their perspective and what their goals are in LW . While this is a big step in the right direction, I think it could go further to be a lot better.
When a newcomer comes to LW, a warm welcome consists of two parts. First, they introduce themselves to you; this is the welcome page. Second, an introduction from you should be available to them, at the click of a button. When you first arrive at LW, it feels like a huge dark opera hall of masked voices. It would be great if whenever you read an interesting comment, you can click on that person’s name and read their self-introduction. The problem with the welcome page as it is currently built is that it would difficult for a newcomer to retrieve introductions over the weeks or months that they are getting to know us.
I don’t know how Reddit works, but it just occurred to me that one simple solution would be to make comments written on the welcome page special so that they’re always listed first in the list of comments, regardless of when it was written.
You might consider changing the phrase “please feel free to leave a comment”—it might be more welcoming to just ask people to “please leave a comment”, giving the impression that we want to hear from them. (Though I’m not confident this would be better.)
It would be nice to invite questions, not only on LW jargon (which you do), but on the etiquette of posting and voting, why those mean people may have downvoted one of your comments (and why you shouldn’t take that to mean we won’t appreciate you), etc. I’m not sure how to gracefully incorporate this into your text.
Eliezer should add a link from LW’s “About” page. (Except, the link should move somehow with the month’s welcome thread, if we have new ones every month. What’s your plan here?)
hmm, here’s a spiel on voting and karma, I’m a little worried that it sounds too forbidding—what do you think?
You may have noticed that all the posts and all the comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have “karma” scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you’ve just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don’t be discouraged by this. If you’ve any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.
My non-confident impression is that it’s good. One slightly friendlier suggestion would be to replace “Don’t be discouraged by this.” with “Don’t be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us.”
giving the impression that we want to hear from them.
Is “We’d love to know who you are, what you’re doing, and how you found us.” too strong do you think?
2 Good idea—let’s see what I can come up with....
What’s your plan here?
Yeah, I’m not sure how well this works with the one-a-month structure. Ideally I’d like this thread to be stickied to the front page, but I know that requires some admin-help.
hmm, here’s a spiel on voting and karma, I’m a little worried that it sounds too forbidding—what do you think?
You may have noticed that all the posts and all the comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have “karma” scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you’ve just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don’t be discouraged by this. If you’ve any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.
Good idea. With the threads for introductory posts linked to from the (to be built) welcome page, and with newcomers encouraged to introduce themselves and ask questions.
I’m not sure I like your solutions but I think your sort of experience might not be atypical. My female friends and family have often reacted to criticism of their ideas with what I (a man) found to be an overly defensive posture. My reply was always to tell them not to take things so personally. My guess is that boys are tend to receive more encouragement and confidences boosting from parents and teachers and so are more confident putting their ideas out there and don’t take poor reception as hard- but I don’t really know.
I’ve definitely made comments (here and elsewhere) that were taken poorly and lead me to back off commenting for a while. I know where your coming from but I think identifying votes can easily lead retaliatory voting which is all kinds of irrational and is a disincentive for honest voting. I’d also be wary of devaluing karma by being more generous with it.
I’m curious what you have in mind for (2). I guess if topics were specifically about gender-related biases there would be room for it. I think some of few women here might be annoyed by this.
My suggestions are two fold.
It would be nice if there was some information on individual comments regarding either the poster’s join date, post count, or karma. I’d prefer one of the first two to avoid people favoring comments by people with higher karma counts. I suggest this specifically so that we can easily identify newcomers and not treat them too harshly. There are pretty high barriers of entry here (the OB back catalog is almost required reading and if you’re not familiar with Ev psych, cog sci or programming you’re gonna get lost at times). We could be a lot more welcoming if we knew who we were welcoming.
Down votes should be followed by comments that explain them whenever possible. The whole point of rating comments and posts, in addition to sorting them, is to provide feedback. But frankly people don’t get more rational just because one of their comments has a negative number attached. People need to know what the community didn’t like about their comment and what facts they should consider that might lead them to change their mind. And in critical replies education should take priority over scoring rationalist points for mocking cleverness.
I think these ideas might help with the gender thing, but frankly they’d just make for a more sustainable community.
I’m trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either “I have been an active member for <X weeks” or “I have posted <X comments”. My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn’t give us many pixels to play with.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they’re considered new, a little message appears that says ” is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?”
Lots of sites have this kind of thing—and the commonest implementation I see is “five whatevers” (eg five stars or five coffee beans or in our case five paperclips?) where they start out grey and progressively get coloured-in to indicate… not time-since joined but a combination of that and of active participation in the community (usually numbers of posts and replies).
We could easily compare time-joined to karma points. EY et al would get five paperclips, a newbie with no karma would start with none. The paperclips could work on a logarithmic scale.
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we’re trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there’s no need for kid gloves.
I’ve seen a few forums where a user’s name is accompanied by a ‘rank’, often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I’m not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I’m sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough
By ‘rare enough’ do you mean “only about 1 in 3 comments” or is my standard of “blatant mistake” stricter than yours? (I was under the impression that you were actually more fussy than I since you mentioned being wary of hitting your downvote cap despite being in the same karma ballpark as I.)
It’s not the senior members that I’d be worried about… but, say, myself. I have already made one mis-application so far—where I thought somebody was making a rookie mistake, but they actually had been around for a while and he was very upset at my correction.
I think we don’t have too much problem at either end of the scale, this sort of solution would help the mob in the middle.
3) Identify who makes each vote on a comment or post, so people can identify Those People Who Were Mean To Me™ and not have to consider the entire Less Wrong community as a whole to be united against them.
If you click on “Preferences” under your name in the upper-right corner, you can check the box “Make my votes public”.
For 2) It reeks too much of the navel-gazing “women in X” boredom occuring in education that AnnaSalamon pointed out in her comment.
I certainly don’t want my ideas and imput valued because of my chromosomes; I want them to be valued if and when they have merit.
For 3), anyone who thinks the entire community is against them based on one negative reply has insufficiently thick skin to deal with the internet in general. The burden of effort not to think this way is on you, not on the community.
If it helps, assume the mean person was just that, a Mean Person.
Also, be Awesome so that anyone who is Mean to you will look stupid in comparison.
Overall, I just think that encouraging niceness is just going to be more trouble than its worth, and a turnoff to participating in the community for the already-interested nerdy set that doesn’t much care for such things.
There’s no reason male Less Wrong ers couldn’t be drawn out individually in the same way; I only phrased it that way to keep it germane to the topic. If we had individual profiles on which we could sum up our relevant interests/activities, for instance, I could put in a little non-intrusive box “I am writing a paper on why the Reflection Principle is stupid for school” and somebody interested in the Reflection Principle could say “hey, Alicorn, do you feel like crossposting the précis of your paper here on Less Wrong? I’d like to read it.” I’d be more comfortable sharing something like that at someone’s request than I would just posting it on my own initiative, but there would be nothing stopping someone else of any gender from being solicited to make another post on another subject.
There is such a thing as efficient niceness. This isn’t kindergarden, and you don’t get a big gold star for ‘participating’. Still, it shouldn’t be a crime to post a few words acknowledging a good point, encouraging someone, or wishing someone well. Even among us guys, who are conditioned to pretend we don’t need them, such practices can help keep people motivated, and keep people coming back.
tl;dr: rationality/honesty should not be compromised for niceness’ sake. Niceness is still possible, and indeed desirable within these constraints.
Identify who makes each vote on a comment or post, so people can identify Those People Who Were Mean To Me™ and not have to consider the entire Less Wrong community as a whole to be united against them.
Strongly seconded. This would be particularly helpful in discounting systematic downvoters.
Much more than finding out who voted what way, I’d like to see the total upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It would be very useful to know if I got 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes or if the comment just sat there getting nothing. I’d much rather know how many people found it interesting or useful than who didn’t like it. The original comment also wasn’t thought through—if the “community as a whole to be united against them” occurred they’d get trashed, not a few down votes.
Off-thread: I recently up voted a comment with −7 votes, because I thought it was worth reading even though probably wrong.
Much more than finding out who voted what way, I’d like to see the total upvotes and downvotes on a comment
Oh, I’d love that too, I just want to know who the person is who logs on once or twice a week and systematically downvotes everything I posted since the last time they were on.
Something like a “5 points (10+/5-)” display, linked to a page that displayed the votes would be nice. I’d contribute it if I could afford the time to really dive into the codebase and learn how it works.
Something like reddit commentroversy would be nice as a feature of the site. Sadly it doesn’t work on LW, maybe I’ll try to look at it and figure out if there is a possible hack to getting working until (if) the feature is implemented here.
A random comment I selected to show what it looks like [Username Changed]:
username 70 points(+184/-116) 7 hours ago[-]
If anyone uses reddit and doesn’t have this get the greasemonkey add-on then go back to the commentroversy and click install.
Something like reddit commentroversy would be nice as a feature of the site. Sadly it doesn’t work on LW, maybe I’ll try to look at it and figure out if there is a possible hack to getting working until (if) the feature is implemented here.
A very quick bit of troubleshooting shows that the json load doesn’t appear to be occurring, i.e. the $.getJSON apparently doesn’t work.
Edit: to be precise, the script bombs out when trying to do anything with ‘$.getJSON’, which perhaps is not available in LW’s version of jQuery?
Edit 2: Ah, LW doesn’t use jQuery. It uses Prototype. The script would have to be converted. But it does indeed appear that LW exports the needed data in JSON form.
Off-thread: I recently up voted a comment with −7 votes, because I thought it was worth reading even though probably wrong.
I think another advantage a +x/-y display would be that sympathy votes or outcome skewing would be harder. If I see a post that is rated −7 and disagree with its status, should I vote the comment up? What if the post was −1? Would that change my vote? I think +5/-12 is harder to sympathize with than −7.
I have a strong opinion that votes should be independent of each other.
I’m a female-type person. I can’t speak to anyone else, but I did make a post a while ago, and it was met largely with indifference and I wound up taking a (small) karma hit. This did a variety of things, some useful and some not, but one thing it hasn’t done is encourage me to take the time to write another top-level post.
If I’m wandering around a large in-person gathering and I drift over to an interesting conversation and say something and get shot down—even if it’s because I said something stupid—I’m more likely to drift away or at least shut up rather than continue to hang out with and seek approval from Those People Who Were Mean To Me™. “Drifting away” is much easier on the Internet, and if more women are giving up after making one or two poorly-received comments, that could easily explain the gender bias.
Possible solutions if I have the right idea (no idea how palatable they are to others):
1) Be more parsimonious with downvotes and generous with upvotes in general.
2) Attempt to draw out individual women Less Wrong ers on particular topics (solicited input puts one out on less of a social limb).
3) Identify who makes each vote on a comment or post, so people can identify Those People Who Were Mean To Me™ and not have to consider the entire Less Wrong community as a whole to be united against them.
I wonder if there is a gender difference in tone of the way people introduce themselves to a group. Per my experience, the girl way seems to be personal sharing (signal: “I’m approachable”), the guy way seems to be chiming in on topic (signal: “I’m capable”). Since your article was weighted more to personal sharing than to providing something topically useful, I think you might have gotten a confused reaction from the regulars (“how is this supposed to help me be a rationalist?”).
I wonder if allowing explicitly flagged “hello / about me posts” would help? Normal contextual politeness would kick in and the response to such a post would be much less aggressive.
Regular open threads for introductory posts?
how’s this?
I really like the newcomer welcome page. I also really like what ciphergoth and others are doing with their self-introductions; explaining when and how they came to LW, and a little about their perspective and what their goals are in LW . While this is a big step in the right direction, I think it could go further to be a lot better.
When a newcomer comes to LW, a warm welcome consists of two parts. First, they introduce themselves to you; this is the welcome page. Second, an introduction from you should be available to them, at the click of a button. When you first arrive at LW, it feels like a huge dark opera hall of masked voices. It would be great if whenever you read an interesting comment, you can click on that person’s name and read their self-introduction. The problem with the welcome page as it is currently built is that it would difficult for a newcomer to retrieve introductions over the weeks or months that they are getting to know us.
I don’t know how Reddit works, but it just occurred to me that one simple solution would be to make comments written on the welcome page special so that they’re always listed first in the list of comments, regardless of when it was written.
I like it :). Two small suggestions:
You might consider changing the phrase “please feel free to leave a comment”—it might be more welcoming to just ask people to “please leave a comment”, giving the impression that we want to hear from them. (Though I’m not confident this would be better.)
It would be nice to invite questions, not only on LW jargon (which you do), but on the etiquette of posting and voting, why those mean people may have downvoted one of your comments (and why you shouldn’t take that to mean we won’t appreciate you), etc. I’m not sure how to gracefully incorporate this into your text.
Eliezer should add a link from LW’s “About” page. (Except, the link should move somehow with the month’s welcome thread, if we have new ones every month. What’s your plan here?)
hmm, here’s a spiel on voting and karma, I’m a little worried that it sounds too forbidding—what do you think?
My non-confident impression is that it’s good. One slightly friendlier suggestion would be to replace “Don’t be discouraged by this.” with “Don’t be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us.”
Thanks for building us the welcome thread.
I like that
No problem =)
1 Done =)
Is “We’d love to know who you are, what you’re doing, and how you found us.” too strong do you think?
2 Good idea—let’s see what I can come up with....
Yeah, I’m not sure how well this works with the one-a-month structure. Ideally I’d like this thread to be stickied to the front page, but I know that requires some admin-help.
hmm, here’s a spiel on voting and karma, I’m a little worried that it sounds too forbidding—what do you think?
Good idea. With the threads for introductory posts linked to from the (to be built) welcome page, and with newcomers encouraged to introduce themselves and ask questions.
I just had a go at an introductory/welcome page. Any suggestions?
welcome
The monthly Open Thread may be repurposed to also act as a more fleshed-out introductory & welcome thread.
I’m not sure I like your solutions but I think your sort of experience might not be atypical. My female friends and family have often reacted to criticism of their ideas with what I (a man) found to be an overly defensive posture. My reply was always to tell them not to take things so personally. My guess is that boys are tend to receive more encouragement and confidences boosting from parents and teachers and so are more confident putting their ideas out there and don’t take poor reception as hard- but I don’t really know.
I’ve definitely made comments (here and elsewhere) that were taken poorly and lead me to back off commenting for a while. I know where your coming from but I think identifying votes can easily lead retaliatory voting which is all kinds of irrational and is a disincentive for honest voting. I’d also be wary of devaluing karma by being more generous with it.
I’m curious what you have in mind for (2). I guess if topics were specifically about gender-related biases there would be room for it. I think some of few women here might be annoyed by this.
My suggestions are two fold.
It would be nice if there was some information on individual comments regarding either the poster’s join date, post count, or karma. I’d prefer one of the first two to avoid people favoring comments by people with higher karma counts. I suggest this specifically so that we can easily identify newcomers and not treat them too harshly. There are pretty high barriers of entry here (the OB back catalog is almost required reading and if you’re not familiar with Ev psych, cog sci or programming you’re gonna get lost at times). We could be a lot more welcoming if we knew who we were welcoming.
Down votes should be followed by comments that explain them whenever possible. The whole point of rating comments and posts, in addition to sorting them, is to provide feedback. But frankly people don’t get more rational just because one of their comments has a negative number attached. People need to know what the community didn’t like about their comment and what facts they should consider that might lead them to change their mind. And in critical replies education should take priority over scoring rationalist points for mocking cleverness.
I think these ideas might help with the gender thing, but frankly they’d just make for a more sustainable community.
While acknowledging that we’re talking about a small sample size here, this matches my experiences—especially in the area of religion.
Agreed.
This can be time-consuming—it’s a good ideal, but we should not have a norm of down-votes requiring an explanation.
Cannot agree enough.
I wonder if you are subconsciously more aggressive in the area of religion.
Another explanation would be that religious women are inherently more defensive.
Explaining downvotes for newcomers (as shown by join date) would economize on effort where the marginal payoff is high.
I’m trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either “I have been an active member for <X weeks” or “I have posted <X comments”. My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn’t give us many pixels to play with.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they’re considered new, a little message appears that says ” is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?”
I like this
Lots of sites have this kind of thing—and the commonest implementation I see is “five whatevers” (eg five stars or five coffee beans or in our case five paperclips?) where they start out grey and progressively get coloured-in to indicate… not time-since joined but a combination of that and of active participation in the community (usually numbers of posts and replies).
We could easily compare time-joined to karma points. EY et al would get five paperclips, a newbie with no karma would start with none. The paperclips could work on a logarithmic scale.
At which point the natural desire to earn status within communities would drive many of us to maximize paperclips. Which would be funny.
Why not use what we’ve already got and use their karma score? Maybe show it when you mouse over the name or something?
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we’re trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there’s no need for kid gloves.
I’ve seen a few forums where a user’s name is accompanied by a ‘rank’, often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I’m not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I’m sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
Or in keeping with the martial arts theme, a series of belt colors? I know this varies from art to art and dojo to dojo, though.
It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
But if the tribe expands?
We worry about any problems that brings when they happen. (Premature optimization is usually a bad idea.)
By ‘rare enough’ do you mean “only about 1 in 3 comments” or is my standard of “blatant mistake” stricter than yours? (I was under the impression that you were actually more fussy than I since you mentioned being wary of hitting your downvote cap despite being in the same karma ballpark as I.)
The problem with Nesov_2009 is that I’m prohibited from downvoting him by the site rules.
Hey! How did I end up here? Must have been a bump somewhere in the recent comments.
It’s not the senior members that I’d be worried about… but, say, myself. I have already made one mis-application so far—where I thought somebody was making a rookie mistake, but they actually had been around for a while and he was very upset at my correction.
I think we don’t have too much problem at either end of the scale, this sort of solution would help the mob in the middle.
Getting upset at being corrected sounds like a rookie mistake to me.
If you click on “Preferences” under your name in the upper-right corner, you can check the box “Make my votes public”.
Where can we see the votes of people who have ticked this box?
After experimenting with it, I don’t think you can. Looks like it’s unimplemented.
Does that preference affect which posts you have up/down voted?
Thanks, I didn’t realize about preferences, you solved several problems for me.
Please don’t do 2 and 3.
Why in particular don’t you like those ideas?
For 2) It reeks too much of the navel-gazing “women in X” boredom occuring in education that AnnaSalamon pointed out in her comment. I certainly don’t want my ideas and imput valued because of my chromosomes; I want them to be valued if and when they have merit.
For 3), anyone who thinks the entire community is against them based on one negative reply has insufficiently thick skin to deal with the internet in general. The burden of effort not to think this way is on you, not on the community. If it helps, assume the mean person was just that, a Mean Person. Also, be Awesome so that anyone who is Mean to you will look stupid in comparison.
Overall, I just think that encouraging niceness is just going to be more trouble than its worth, and a turnoff to participating in the community for the already-interested nerdy set that doesn’t much care for such things.
There’s no reason male Less Wrong ers couldn’t be drawn out individually in the same way; I only phrased it that way to keep it germane to the topic. If we had individual profiles on which we could sum up our relevant interests/activities, for instance, I could put in a little non-intrusive box “I am writing a paper on why the Reflection Principle is stupid for school” and somebody interested in the Reflection Principle could say “hey, Alicorn, do you feel like crossposting the précis of your paper here on Less Wrong? I’d like to read it.” I’d be more comfortable sharing something like that at someone’s request than I would just posting it on my own initiative, but there would be nothing stopping someone else of any gender from being solicited to make another post on another subject.
strongly agree with 2, only partly agree with 3.
There is such a thing as efficient niceness. This isn’t kindergarden, and you don’t get a big gold star for ‘participating’. Still, it shouldn’t be a crime to post a few words acknowledging a good point, encouraging someone, or wishing someone well. Even among us guys, who are conditioned to pretend we don’t need them, such practices can help keep people motivated, and keep people coming back.
tl;dr: rationality/honesty should not be compromised for niceness’ sake. Niceness is still possible, and indeed desirable within these constraints.
I overreacted a bit. Sorry.
(Edited)
That sounded somewhat harsh.
Yeah, my page hadn’t loaded the rest of the thread. I didn’t see someone ask why and answer. Had I I would have held off. Still.
Strongly seconded. This would be particularly helpful in discounting systematic downvoters.
Much more than finding out who voted what way, I’d like to see the total upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It would be very useful to know if I got 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes or if the comment just sat there getting nothing. I’d much rather know how many people found it interesting or useful than who didn’t like it. The original comment also wasn’t thought through—if the “community as a whole to be united against them” occurred they’d get trashed, not a few down votes.
Off-thread: I recently up voted a comment with −7 votes, because I thought it was worth reading even though probably wrong.
Oh, I’d love that too, I just want to know who the person is who logs on once or twice a week and systematically downvotes everything I posted since the last time they were on.
Something like a “5 points (10+/5-)” display, linked to a page that displayed the votes would be nice. I’d contribute it if I could afford the time to really dive into the codebase and learn how it works.
Something like reddit commentroversy would be nice as a feature of the site. Sadly it doesn’t work on LW, maybe I’ll try to look at it and figure out if there is a possible hack to getting working until (if) the feature is implemented here.
A random comment I selected to show what it looks like [Username Changed]:
username 70 points(+184/-116) 7 hours ago[-]
If anyone uses reddit and doesn’t have this get the greasemonkey add-on then go back to the commentroversy and click install.
A very quick bit of troubleshooting shows that the json load doesn’t appear to be occurring, i.e. the $.getJSON apparently doesn’t work.
Edit: to be precise, the script bombs out when trying to do anything with ‘$.getJSON’, which perhaps is not available in LW’s version of jQuery?
Edit 2: Ah, LW doesn’t use jQuery. It uses Prototype. The script would have to be converted. But it does indeed appear that LW exports the needed data in JSON form.
I think another advantage a +x/-y display would be that sympathy votes or outcome skewing would be harder. If I see a post that is rated −7 and disagree with its status, should I vote the comment up? What if the post was −1? Would that change my vote? I think +5/-12 is harder to sympathize with than −7.
I have a strong opinion that votes should be independent of each other.