An Invitation to Refrain from Downvoting Posts into Net-Negative Karma
I originally wrote this as a comment on a post which had negative net karma when I first saw it. I figure what I wrote is worth also posting to the top level, so that it can have more chance to be seen and thought about
When I came upon this post, it had a negative karma score. I don’t think it’s good form to have posts receiving negative net karma (except in extreme cases), so I upvoted to provide this with a positive net karma.
It is unpleasant for an author when they receive a negative karma score on a post which they spent time and effort to make (even when that effort was relatively small), much more so than receiving no karma beyond the starting score. This makes the author less likely to post again in the future, which prevents communication of ideas, and keeps the author from getting better at writing. In particular this creates a risk of LessWrong becoming more like a bubble chamber (which I don’t think is desirable), and makes the community less likely to hear valuable ideas that go against the grain of the local culture.
A writer who is encouraged to write more will become more clear in their communication, as well as in their thoughts. And they will also get more used to the particular expectations of the culture of LessWrong- norms that have good reason to exist, but which also go against some people’s intuitions or what has worked well for them in other, more “normie” contexts.
Karma serves as a valuable signal to authors about the extent to which they are doing a good job of writing clearly about interesting topics in a way that provides value to members of the community, but the range of positive integers provides enough signal. There isn’t much lost in excluding the negative range (except in extreme cases).
Let’s be nice to people who are still figuring writing out, I encourage you to refrain from downvoting them into negative karma.
Eh, I hate strategic voting. “Yes means yes, no means no” has a certain elegance that “I mean no, but I am saying yes because other people are saying no, except now there are suddenly more yes’s than no’s and no one knows whether that actually means that most people agree or that too many people are voting strategically” misses.
A bad article should get negative feedback. The problem is that the resulting karma penalty may be too harsh for a new author. Perhaps there could be a way to disentangle this? For example, to limit the karma damage (to new authors only?); for example no matter how negative score you get for the article, the resulting negative karma is limited to, let’s say, “3 + the number of strong downvotes”. But for the purposes of hiding the article from the front page the original negative score would apply.
(Or maybe, in addition to upvote and downvote, there could be a third kind of vote, a “no-vote” that gives 0 karma, and only appears on the articles of new users? Meaning “I don’t like it, but I don’t want to discourage the author”. But the author could see e.g. total karma +1, 100 votes, so clearly the article was unpopular rather than unnoticed.)
Well, at this moment the article has a +4 karma, and what exactly that means? The article was actually popular, it just had bad luck because the first readers didn’t like it. Or the article was unpopular, but many people who didn’t like it upvoted it anyway because… reasons? No one knows. And that is a problem, IMHO. The tool made to provide a signal now generates noise.
I don’t think this would do anything to mitigate the emotional damage. And also, like, the difficulty of getting karma at all is much lower than getting it through posts (and much much lower than getting it through posts on the topic that you happen to care about). If someone can’t get karma through comments, or isn’t willing to try, man we probably don’t want them to be on the site.
Ah yes, we should somehow encourage new members to try their ideas in comments rather than articles. More Open Threads perhaps?
The policy you propose seems that every substack writer should be encouraged to crosspost all their posts to LessWrong if they start crossposting any. When it comes to posts like the one you linked to that are not primarily written for the LessWrong audience, downvoting them when they aren’t fitting is useful.
Personally I try to leave a comment explaining my vote in such cases, as many voters don’t. If someone worked to post something and it’s not the kind of thing I want to see on LessWrong, the only way the author is likely to know what I and others here would like to see is to explain it, as the vote on the post is low bandwidth and only kind of useful as a feedback signal if a person posts a lot.
I’m still likely to downvote if I think a post is really bad, even if it has gone negative, although sometimes I refrain and just leave my comment about how I think the post could be better.
Sadly I don’t have time to do this for all such posts and I end up ignoring most of them.
How many users you can point to who started out making posts that regularly got downvoted to negative karma and later became good contributors? Or, alternatively, specific ideas that were initially only presented by users who got regularly downvoted that were later recognized as correct and valuable? My starting assumption is that it’s basically wishful thinking that this would happen much under any community circumstances, people who write badly will mostly keep writing badly and people who end up writing outstanding stuff mostly start out writing better than average stuff.
Low positive and actively negative scores seen to me to send different signals. A low score can be confused for general apathy, imagining that few people having taken notice of the post enough to vote on it. A negative score communicates clearly that something about the post was objectionable or mistaken.
If the purpose of the scoring system is to aggregate opinions, then negative opinions are a necessary input for an accurate score.
Strikes me as inelegant for the final score to depend on the order in which readers happened to encounter the post. Which would happen under this rule, unless people who refrained from voting were checking back later to deliver their vote against a post they thought was bad, once its score has gone up enough to so so without driving it negative (which seems unlikely).
Avoiding negativity would also negate the part of the system where accumulating very negative karma can restrict a user from posting so often.
I see your point regarding different results depending on order of how people see the post but that’s also true the other way around. Given the assumption that less people are likely to view a post that has negative Karma, people who may actually turn out to like the post and upvote it never do so because of preexisting negative votes.
In fact, I think that’s the whole point of this scheme, isn’t it?
So, either way you never capture an „accurate“ picture because the signal itself is distorting the outcome. The key question is then what outcome one prefers, neither is objectively „right“ or in all respects „better“.
I personally think that downvoting into negative karma is an unproductive practice, in particular with new posts because it stifles debate about potentially interesting topics. If you are bothered enough to downvote there should often be something to the post that is controversial.
Take this post as an example. When I found it a couple of hours after posting, it was already downvoted into negative karma but there is no obvious reason why this should be so. It’s well written and makes a clear point that‘s worth discussing as exemplified by our engagement. Because it’s negative karma, however fewer people are likely to weight in to the debate because the signal is telling them to not bother engaging with this.
In general my suggestion would be to only downvote into negative karma if you can be bothered to explain and defend your downvote in a comment and are willing to take it back if the author if the author of the post gives a reasonable reply.
But as I said, this is just one way of looking at this. I value discourse and critical debate as essential pieces to sense and meaning making and believe that I made a reasonable argument for how this is stifled by current practice.
Thanks to the author of the post for his thoughtful invite for critical reflection!
It’s curious that LWers are polite when they comment, but pretty brutal with the anonymous downvotes.
I think people are just setting too low a threshold for downvotes. That does tempt me to save posts from negative scores just to encourage the authors not to give up. I think people are giving downvotes whenever they didn’t personally benefit from a post, and they should often be giving no vote instead.
I think the official guidance for upvoted and downvotes. is “I want more like this” and “I want less like this”. I reserve downvotes for posts that are so bad that they risk making us less correct and effective. Bad writing with no ideas, evidence, or virwpoints that are new to me specifically just gets no vote either way.
I don’t buy this argument because I think the threshold of 0 is largely arbitrary. Many years ago when LW2.0 was still young, I posted something about anthropic probabilities that I spent months (I think, I don’t completely remember) of time on, and it got like +1 or −1 net karma (from where my vote put it), and I took this extremely hard. I think I avoided the site for like a year. Would I have taken it any harder if it were negative karma? I honestly don’t think so. I could even imagine that it would have been less painful because I’d have preferred rejection over “this isn’t worth engaging with”.
So I don’t see a reason why expectations should turn on +/- 0[1] (why would I be an exception?), so I don’t think that works as a rule—and in general, I don’t see how you can solve this problem with a rule at all. Consequently I think “authors will get hurt by people not appreciating their work” is something we just have to accept, even if it’s very harsh. In individual cases, the best thing you can probably do is write a comment explaining why the rejection happened (if in fact you know the reason), but I don’t think anything can be done with norms or rules.
Relatedly, consider students who cry after seeing test results. There is no threshold below which this happens. One person may be happy with a D-, another may consider a B+ to be a crushing disappointment. And neither of those is wrong! If the first person didn’t do anything (and perhaps could have gotten an A if they wanted) but the second person tried extremely hard to get an A, then the second person has much more reason to be disappointed. It simply doesn’t depend on the grade itself.
I don’t really agree with this. Sure, some people are going to write stuff that’s not very good, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go overboard on negative feedback, or be stingy with positive feedback.
Humans are animals which learn by reinforcement learning, and the lesson they learn when punished is often “stay away from the thing / person / group that gave the punishment”, much more strongly than “don’t do the thing that made that person / thing / group punish me”.
Wheras when they are rewarded, the lesson is “seek out the circumstances / context that let me be rewarded (and also do the thing that will make it reward me)”. Nobody is born writing amazingly, they have to learn it over time, and it comes more naturally to some, less to others.
I don’t want bad writers (who are otherwise intelligent and intellectually engaged, which describes almost everybody who posts on LW) to learn the lesson “stay away from LW”. I want them to receive encouragement (mostly in forms other than karma, e.g. encouraging comments, or inclusion in the community, etc.), leading them to be more motivated to figure out the norms of LW and the art of writing, and try again, with new learning and experience behind them.
It’s not all that arbitrary. Besides the fact that it’s one of the simplest numbers, which makes for an easy to remember / communicate heuristic (a great reason that isn’t arbitrary), I actually think it’s quite defensible as a threshold. If I write a post that has a +6 starting karma, and I see it drop down to 1 or 2 (or, yeah, −1), my thought is “that kinda sucked, but whatever, I’ll learn from my mistake and do better next time”.
But if I see it drop down to, say, −5 or −6, my thought starts to become “why am I even posting on this stupid website that’s so full of anti-social jerks?”. And then I have to talk myself down from deleting my account and removing LW and the associated community from my life.
(Not that I think LW is actually so full of jerks. There’s a lot of lovable people here who talk about interesting things, and I believe in LW’s raison d’etre, which is why I keep forcing myself to come back)
I mean, you’re not addressing my example and the larger point I made. You may be right about your own example, but I’d guess it’s because you’re not thinking of a high effort post. I honestly estimate that I’m in the highest percentile on how much I’ve been hurt by reception to my posts on this site, and in no case was the net karma negative. Similarly, I’d also guess that if you spent a month on a post that ended up at +9, this would feel a lot more hurt than if this post or a similarly short one ended up at −1, or even −20.