Less Wrong is, compared to the rest of the internet, extremely troll-free. But they still show up, you see, and when they do, the only acceptable response is to vote down. Not to reply, just to vote down.
Not every comment is worth seeing. Those that aren’t worth seeing definitely need to be downvoted. But that’s not the only reason to downvote a comment.
I downvote when:
a comment is just a joke and is not a gutbuster (inappropriate for Less Wrong)
someone on the losing side of an argument isn’t even trying to update his beliefs
a comment not an attempt at new insight (can be either useless praise or useless contradiction)
a user is posting for the sake of karma
a comment is employing false premises (as yours is just now)
a comment is annoying (you again)
I hope I helped, and I hope you, when downvoted in the future, think about why first before asking for an explanation. It happens to everyone, and there’s a good reason it happens to everyone: nobody makes good comments every single time he says something. Nobody!
I think on Less Wrong there is a very strong tendency to give away karma much too freely, which encourages the act of posting with the partial motivation of gaining karma. Even if it’s not often the entire motivation, for that reason I wish that personal karma totals were not readily available information.
One must also be wary of too much pacifism. In that post, Eliezer describes beliefs I’ve grokked long before ever discovering Less Wrong.
Edit: On second thought, I’m retracting that downvote, because you tried to provide new insight.
I hope I helped, and I hope you, when downvoted in the future, think about why first before asking for an explanation. It happens to everyone, and there’s a good reason it happens to everyone: nobody makes good comments every single time he says something. Nobody!
I downvote more than most commenters, but I’m worried about demotivating people and impeding the growth of the community. Do you think the good/bad feelings people get from an upvote/downvote are more relative to other people’s karma (in which case there should be no net demotivating effect), or do you think they’re more independent of other people’s karma?
I agree with you that LW hands out too much free karma on average, but my main gripe is that it’s bad at valuing different subjects. In particular, Harry Potter comments are overvalued relative to meaty comments about subjects like singularity strategy.
Another overvalued category of comments is those that many people agree with, but that aren’t worth incentivizing because they would have been made anyway.
Two points where I disagree with you on what to downvote are very short comments (I would like to see more of them; they tend to be dense in content) and what you call “signals of pseudo-modesty” (which I think often are genuine and useful expressions of incomplete confidence that improve the tone of the discussion).
Do you think the good/bad feelings people get from an upvote/downvote are more relative to other people’s karma [...], or do you think they’re more independent of other people’s karma?
I have no one’s experience to go on but my own, but here was mine: when I first started commenting on LW, I was nervous and afraid of downvotes and I didn’t care at all about other people’s karma; I just wanted to not look terribly stupid. Now that I have been here for a long time and made probably many more comments than I should have (for my health), the main things that bother me are when a downvote is unexpected or when I make a comment and a reply is contradicting me and that reply has more karma than the comment I made. And other times when my comments seem to me to be just as good as other comments in the thread, but get nowhere near as much karma. And also, I’m not entirely sure if we want to encourage the type of person who is hypersensitive to downvotes to come here. My gut says we do, but it also says we relax our desire to not have bad comments too much relative to this type of person’s actual value. Complex question.
In particular, Harry Potter comments
I know! If total karma were hidden, though, it wouldn’t as much of a problem. People could just weight against the inflation in ‘fun’ threads like that. (Ever notice how fun-typethreadsinflate karma?) I also agree with you that posts in Main should have 3x karma instead of 10x. (I was pretty shocked when I found out it was 10x after writing this; if it had gotten the same score (though it wouldn’t have)...)
Two points where I disagree with you on what to downvote are very short comments
This is one place where you and I just seem to have different preferences. Maybe it’s because you have an easier time understanding dense material, but I seem to require more words. As an unfair analogy, compare reading the Twelve Virtues of Rationality to the entire Sequences. Many lessons from the latter are in the former, but it’s really hard to get them out of the former without the latter. I made a modest effort at this and actually surprised myself at how much I got right, but most people do not do this.
and what you call “signals of pseudo-modesty”
I have since changed my opinion of this slightly; since underconfidence is a rare enough sin I usually respond to it with a private message with inquiry rather than a downvote (note also that I mentioned this in the context of thinking a comment is looking for karma; I acknowledge how low the base rate is on this[!]).
Edit: Generally, karma has gotten massively inflated lately. Looking at both Top Comments sections, nearly all of the first 600 are from the last five months.
I wonder what would happen if we split the downvote button into “I’m voting you down but please don’t feel bad” and “I’m voting you down and you should feel bad”.
I’m curious, if you don’t mind elaborating, what sort of posts do you have in mind? It’s a little contradictory to me because to get karma, you need to post something people will find worth upvoting...
It goes along a little bit with joke comments, if you follow. I can’t for-sure know what the motivations behind any given post are (surely some motivation is to receive karma even on good comments), but strong warning signs that a comment was posted mostly to receive karma include, roughly in order of strong indicators to weak indicators:
comment is very short
comment includes an emoticon
comment is intended as humor
comment that expresses reasons for having a belief that everyone at Less Wrong already has
comment has little actual content compared to number of words
(related to previous point) comment has no content except agreeing/disagreeing
comment has signals of pseudo-modesty such as, “perhaps”, “maybe”, “I think”, “it seems”, “possibly”, etc.
comment is pure speculation
comment is made after previous ones, where an edit to a previous comment would have been appropriate (users cannot upvote a single comment multiple times, but multiple comments by a single author are fair play)
comment mentions karma
comment speaks in passive voice
Multiple items on this list prime me for down-voting behavior.
Thanks and upvoted. Since reading this subthread (and that post you linked to) I’ve noted a significant increase in my willingness to downvote, and it’s partly because I started noticing more of what you’re talking about.
Although… I’m not in any important disagreement with you, but I’d rather make it clear that I don’t think there’s anything shameful about wanting and enjoying karma. After all, the point of karma is that it’s supposed to motivate people, else why have a karma system? It’s more that, regardless of what motivated a poster to write it, a post with no content (or otherwise not worth seeing) is a bad thing. All the other symptoms you mention just make me pay closer attention to whether a post has meaningful content.
When I put myself in the shoes of someone criticised for making one of those posts, I think it’d feel more fair to be told what was objectively wrong with the post itself, than to just be accused of karma-whoring; what could you possibly say to that, even if the accusation were in error?
comment is made after previous ones, where an edit to a previous comment would have been appropriate (users cannot upvote a single comment multiple times, but multiple comments by a single author are fair play)
Editing an old comment won’t show up in the Recent Comments either, so by posting a new comment more people will read it.
Thanks for giving time to somewhat reveal your thinking.
Would my thinking be correct if I decide you downvoted the Dan Gilbert TED talk post because the comment is annoying?
My thinking is...
It’s not a joke, I wasn’t losing an argument, I was attempting to provide new insight in that Dan Gilbert has something worthwhile to say on the topic, I’m not posting for the sake of karma—but how can you guess my intentions on that anyways? The premise (that synthetic happiness is on topic and Gilbert has something to say on this) is clearly open to interpretation and I reveal my un-sureness of that openly.
Would my thinking be correct if I decide you downvoted the Dan Gilbert TED talk post because the comment is annoying?
No, that wasn’t me.
Also, there was an error in my previous comment, caused by the lack of the “http://” symbols preceding a url. Apparently, this causes hyperlinks to break and delete everything in between them. You should reread the last two paragraphs of it.
I downvoted your comment, and here is why.
Less Wrong is, compared to the rest of the internet, extremely troll-free. But they still show up, you see, and when they do, the only acceptable response is to vote down. Not to reply, just to vote down.
Not every comment is worth seeing. Those that aren’t worth seeing definitely need to be downvoted. But that’s not the only reason to downvote a comment.
I downvote when:
a comment is just a joke and is not a gutbuster (inappropriate for Less Wrong)
someone on the losing side of an argument isn’t even trying to update his beliefs
a comment not an attempt at new insight (can be either useless praise or useless contradiction)
a user is posting for the sake of karma
a comment is employing false premises (as yours is just now)
a comment is annoying (you again)
I hope I helped, and I hope you, when downvoted in the future, think about why first before asking for an explanation. It happens to everyone, and there’s a good reason it happens to everyone: nobody makes good comments every single time he says something. Nobody!
I think on Less Wrong there is a very strong tendency to give away karma much too freely, which encourages the act of posting with the partial motivation of gaining karma. Even if it’s not often the entire motivation, for that reason I wish that personal karma totals were not readily available information.
One must also be wary of too much pacifism. In that post, Eliezer describes beliefs I’ve grokked long before ever discovering Less Wrong.
Edit: On second thought, I’m retracting that downvote, because you tried to provide new insight.
Do you think all downvotes are good downvotes?
No, but I suspect that a higher proportion of downvotes are good ones than upvotes.
I downvote more than most commenters, but I’m worried about demotivating people and impeding the growth of the community. Do you think the good/bad feelings people get from an upvote/downvote are more relative to other people’s karma (in which case there should be no net demotivating effect), or do you think they’re more independent of other people’s karma?
I agree with you that LW hands out too much free karma on average, but my main gripe is that it’s bad at valuing different subjects. In particular, Harry Potter comments are overvalued relative to meaty comments about subjects like singularity strategy.
Another overvalued category of comments is those that many people agree with, but that aren’t worth incentivizing because they would have been made anyway.
Two points where I disagree with you on what to downvote are very short comments (I would like to see more of them; they tend to be dense in content) and what you call “signals of pseudo-modesty” (which I think often are genuine and useful expressions of incomplete confidence that improve the tone of the discussion).
I have no one’s experience to go on but my own, but here was mine: when I first started commenting on LW, I was nervous and afraid of downvotes and I didn’t care at all about other people’s karma; I just wanted to not look terribly stupid. Now that I have been here for a long time and made probably many more comments than I should have (for my health), the main things that bother me are when a downvote is unexpected or when I make a comment and a reply is contradicting me and that reply has more karma than the comment I made. And other times when my comments seem to me to be just as good as other comments in the thread, but get nowhere near as much karma. And also, I’m not entirely sure if we want to encourage the type of person who is hypersensitive to downvotes to come here. My gut says we do, but it also says we relax our desire to not have bad comments too much relative to this type of person’s actual value. Complex question.
I know! If total karma were hidden, though, it wouldn’t as much of a problem. People could just weight against the inflation in ‘fun’ threads like that. (Ever notice how fun-type threads inflate karma?) I also agree with you that posts in Main should have 3x karma instead of 10x. (I was pretty shocked when I found out it was 10x after writing this; if it had gotten the same score (though it wouldn’t have)...)
This is one place where you and I just seem to have different preferences. Maybe it’s because you have an easier time understanding dense material, but I seem to require more words. As an unfair analogy, compare reading the Twelve Virtues of Rationality to the entire Sequences. Many lessons from the latter are in the former, but it’s really hard to get them out of the former without the latter. I made a modest effort at this and actually surprised myself at how much I got right, but most people do not do this.
I have since changed my opinion of this slightly; since underconfidence is a rare enough sin I usually respond to it with a private message with inquiry rather than a downvote (note also that I mentioned this in the context of thinking a comment is looking for karma; I acknowledge how low the base rate is on this[!]).
Edit: Generally, karma has gotten massively inflated lately. Looking at both Top Comments sections, nearly all of the first 600 are from the last five months.
I wonder what would happen if we split the downvote button into “I’m voting you down but please don’t feel bad” and “I’m voting you down and you should feel bad”.
As of right now, 9 out of the top 10 discussion comments for last week are in the Harry Potter threads.
And for all that I enjoy discussing HPMoR, I can’t say I feel that this deserves to be my most upvoted comment ever.
I’m curious, if you don’t mind elaborating, what sort of posts do you have in mind? It’s a little contradictory to me because to get karma, you need to post something people will find worth upvoting...
It goes along a little bit with joke comments, if you follow. I can’t for-sure know what the motivations behind any given post are (surely some motivation is to receive karma even on good comments), but strong warning signs that a comment was posted mostly to receive karma include, roughly in order of strong indicators to weak indicators:
comment is very short
comment includes an emoticon
comment is intended as humor
comment that expresses reasons for having a belief that everyone at Less Wrong already has
comment has little actual content compared to number of words
(related to previous point) comment has no content except agreeing/disagreeing
comment has signals of pseudo-modesty such as, “perhaps”, “maybe”, “I think”, “it seems”, “possibly”, etc.
comment is pure speculation
comment is made after previous ones, where an edit to a previous comment would have been appropriate (users cannot upvote a single comment multiple times, but multiple comments by a single author are fair play)
comment mentions karma
comment speaks in passive voice
Multiple items on this list prime me for down-voting behavior.
Thanks and upvoted. Since reading this subthread (and that post you linked to) I’ve noted a significant increase in my willingness to downvote, and it’s partly because I started noticing more of what you’re talking about.
Although… I’m not in any important disagreement with you, but I’d rather make it clear that I don’t think there’s anything shameful about wanting and enjoying karma. After all, the point of karma is that it’s supposed to motivate people, else why have a karma system? It’s more that, regardless of what motivated a poster to write it, a post with no content (or otherwise not worth seeing) is a bad thing. All the other symptoms you mention just make me pay closer attention to whether a post has meaningful content.
When I put myself in the shoes of someone criticised for making one of those posts, I think it’d feel more fair to be told what was objectively wrong with the post itself, than to just be accused of karma-whoring; what could you possibly say to that, even if the accusation were in error?
Editing an old comment won’t show up in the Recent Comments either, so by posting a new comment more people will read it.
Thanks for giving time to somewhat reveal your thinking.
Would my thinking be correct if I decide you downvoted the Dan Gilbert TED talk post because the comment is annoying?
My thinking is...
It’s not a joke, I wasn’t losing an argument, I was attempting to provide new insight in that Dan Gilbert has something worthwhile to say on the topic, I’m not posting for the sake of karma—but how can you guess my intentions on that anyways? The premise (that synthetic happiness is on topic and Gilbert has something to say on this) is clearly open to interpretation and I reveal my un-sureness of that openly.
That leaves only “it’s annoying”.
No, that wasn’t me.
Also, there was an error in my previous comment, caused by the lack of the “http://” symbols preceding a url. Apparently, this causes hyperlinks to break and delete everything in between them. You should reread the last two paragraphs of it.