If I’m having lunch with a friend, then my usual expectation is that I’ll get strong compliments if they adore my clothing style, but I won’t get strong criticisms if they strongly dislike it, unless I explicitly opt in to receiving the latter feedback. Most people seem to treat high-salience personal compliments as opt-out, while treating high-salience personal criticisms as opt-in. This can be outweighed if the criticism is important enough, but otherwise, criticism tends to be relatively mild and cloaked in humor or indirection.
Thinking about it in those terms, it makes sense to me to treat upvotes as similar to “person says they love my haircut” and downvotes as similar to “person says they hate my haircut.” I probably want to be able to view both kinds of feedback in a time and place of my choosing, but I don’t want to have the latter feedback tossed my way literally every time I open Chrome or check my email.
It might be that those norms are fine for personal style, but that we want to promote better, more pro-criticism norms in areas that matter more. We might want to push in the direction of making critical feedback opt-out, so people can (a) update faster on things that do matter a lot, and (b) perhaps get some useful exposure therapy that will make us better at receiving tips, pushback, and contrary views in the future. Mostly I’m just making this comment so folks feel comfortable talking about their preferences openly, without feeling like they’re Bad Rationalists if they’re not already convinced that it’s useful for them personally to receive a regular stream of downvote notifications (in the world where they get a lot of downvotes).
I think I might have posted significantly less on the original Less Wrong if it had made downvotes this salient at a time when I wasn’t yet confident in the quality of my contributions, and if it didn’t offer a “don’t show downvotes” option.
If I’m having lunch with a friend, then my usual expectation is that I’ll get strong compliments if they adore my clothing style, but I won’t get strong criticisms if they strongly dislike it, unless I explicitly opt in to receiving the latter feedback. Most people seem to treat high-salience personal compliments as opt-out, while treating high-salience personal criticisms as opt-in. This can be outweighed if the criticism is important enough, but otherwise, criticism tends to be relatively mild and cloaked in humor or indirection.
Thinking about it in those terms, it makes sense to me to treat upvotes as similar to “person says they love my haircut” and downvotes as similar to “person says they hate my haircut.” I probably want to be able to view both kinds of feedback in a time and place of my choosing, but I don’t want to have the latter feedback tossed my way literally every time I open Chrome or check my email.
It might be that those norms are fine for personal style, but that we want to promote better, more pro-criticism norms in areas that matter more. We might want to push in the direction of making critical feedback opt-out, so people can (a) update faster on things that do matter a lot, and (b) perhaps get some useful exposure therapy that will make us better at receiving tips, pushback, and contrary views in the future. Mostly I’m just making this comment so folks feel comfortable talking about their preferences openly, without feeling like they’re Bad Rationalists if they’re not already convinced that it’s useful for them personally to receive a regular stream of downvote notifications (in the world where they get a lot of downvotes).
I think I might have posted significantly less on the original Less Wrong if it had made downvotes this salient at a time when I wasn’t yet confident in the quality of my contributions, and if it didn’t offer a “don’t show downvotes” option.