People on this site already give too much upvotes, and too little downvotes. By which I mean that if anyone writes a lot of comments, their total karma is most likely to be positive, even if the comments are mostly useless (as long as they are not offensive, or don’t break some local taboo). People can build a high total karma just by posting a lot, because one thousand comments with average karma of 1 provide more total karma than e.g. twenty comments with 20 karma each. But which of those two would you prefer as a reader, assuming that your goal is not to procrastinate on LW for hours a day?
Every comment written has a cost—the time people spend reading that comment. So a neutral comment (not helpful, not harmful) has a slightly negative value, if we could measure that precisely. One such comment does not make big harm. Hundred such comments, daily, from different users… that’s a different thing. Each comment should pay the price of time it takes to read it, or be downvoted.
People already hesitate to downvote, because expressing a negative opinion about something connected with other person feels like starting an unnecessary conflict. This is an instinct we should try to overcome. Asking for an explanation for a single downvote escalates the conflict. I think it is OK to ask if a seemingly innocent comment gets downvoted to −10, because then there is something to explain. But a single downvote or two, that does not need an explanation. Someone probably just did not think the comment was improving the quality of a discussion.
People can build a high total karma just by posting a lot,
So what?
because one thousand comments with average karma of 1 provide more total karma than e.g. twenty comments with 20 karma each. But which of those two would you prefer as a reader, assuming that your goal is not to procrastinate on LW for hours a day?
When I prefer the latter, I use stuff like Top Comments Today/This Week/whatever, setting my preferences to “Display 10 comments by default” and sorting comments by “Top”, etc. The presence of lots of comments at +1 doesn’t bother me that much. (Also, just because a comment is at +20 doesn’t always mean it’s something terribly interesting to read—it could be someone stating that they’ve donated to SIAI, a “rationality quote”, etc.)
Every comment written has a cost—the time people spend reading that comment. So a neutral comment (not helpful, not harmful) has a slightly negative value, if we could measure that precisely. One such comment does not make big harm. Hundred such comments, daily, from different users… that’s a different thing. Each comment should pay the price of time it takes to read it, or be downvoted.
That applies more to several-paragraph comments than to one-sentence ones.
6 instances of too much [*nn2*] (where [*nn2*] is any plural noun);
576 instances of too many [*nn2*];
0 instances of too little [*nn2*]; and
123 instances of too few [*nn2*] (and 83 of not enough [*nn2*], for that matter);
on the Corpus of Contemporary American English the figures are 75, 3217, 11, 323 and 364 respectively. (And many of the minoritarian uses are for things that you’d measure by some means other than counting them, e.g. “too much drugs”.) So apparently the common use of “less” as an informal equivalent of “fewer” only applies to the comparatives. (Edited to remove the “now-” before “common”—in the Corpus of Historical American English less [*nn2*] appears to be actually slightly less common today than it was in the late 19th century.)
Please don’t do that.
People on this site already give too much upvotes, and too little downvotes. By which I mean that if anyone writes a lot of comments, their total karma is most likely to be positive, even if the comments are mostly useless (as long as they are not offensive, or don’t break some local taboo). People can build a high total karma just by posting a lot, because one thousand comments with average karma of 1 provide more total karma than e.g. twenty comments with 20 karma each. But which of those two would you prefer as a reader, assuming that your goal is not to procrastinate on LW for hours a day?
Every comment written has a cost—the time people spend reading that comment. So a neutral comment (not helpful, not harmful) has a slightly negative value, if we could measure that precisely. One such comment does not make big harm. Hundred such comments, daily, from different users… that’s a different thing. Each comment should pay the price of time it takes to read it, or be downvoted.
People already hesitate to downvote, because expressing a negative opinion about something connected with other person feels like starting an unnecessary conflict. This is an instinct we should try to overcome. Asking for an explanation for a single downvote escalates the conflict. I think it is OK to ask if a seemingly innocent comment gets downvoted to −10, because then there is something to explain. But a single downvote or two, that does not need an explanation. Someone probably just did not think the comment was improving the quality of a discussion.
So what?
When I prefer the latter, I use stuff like Top Comments Today/This Week/whatever, setting my preferences to “Display 10 comments by default” and sorting comments by “Top”, etc. The presence of lots of comments at +1 doesn’t bother me that much. (Also, just because a comment is at +20 doesn’t always mean it’s something terribly interesting to read—it could be someone stating that they’ve donated to SIAI, a “rationality quote”, etc.)
That applies more to several-paragraph comments than to one-sentence ones.
Isn’t it ‘too many upvotes’ and ‘too few downvotes’?
Yep. On the British National Corpus there are:
6 instances of
too much [*nn2*](where[*nn2*]is any plural noun);576 instances of
too many [*nn2*];0 instances of
too little [*nn2*]; and123 instances of
too few [*nn2*](and 83 ofnot enough [*nn2*], for that matter);on the Corpus of Contemporary American English the figures are 75, 3217, 11, 323 and 364 respectively. (And many of the minoritarian uses are for things that you’d measure by some means other than counting them, e.g. “too much drugs”.) So apparently the common use of “less” as an informal equivalent of “fewer” only applies to the comparatives. (Edited to remove the “now-” before “common”—in the Corpus of Historical American English
less [*nn2*]appears to be actually slightly less common today than it was in the late 19th century.)