Proposals for making LW upvote-only emerge every few months, most recently during the retributive downvoting fiasco. I said then, and I continue to believe now, that it’s a terrible idea.
JMIV is right to say in the ancestor that subtle features of moderation mechanics have outsized effects on community culture; I even agree with him that Eliezer voiced an unrealistically rosy view of the downvote in “Well-Kept Gardens”. But upvote-only systems have their own pitfalls, and quite severe ones. The reasons behind them are somewhat complex, but boil down to bad incentives.
Imagine posting as a game scored in utility. Upvotes gain you utility; downvotes lose you it; and for most people being downvoted costs you more than being upvoted gains you, though the exact ratio varies from person to person. You want to maximize your utility, and you have a finite amount of time to spend on it. If you spend that time researching new content to post, your output is low but it’s very rarely downvoted. Debate takes a moderate amount of time; votes on debate are less reliable, especially if you’re arguing for something like neoreaction or radical feminism or your own crackpot views on time and dimension, but you’re all but guaranteed upvotes from people that agree with you. Plus telling people they’re wrong is fun, so you get some bonus utility. Finally, you can post cat pictures, which takes almost no time, will score a few upvotes from people that like looking at their little jellybean toes, but violates content norms.
Which one of these is optimal changes, depending on how tolerant you are of downvoting and how good you are at dodging it. But while removing the downvote option incentivizes all three (which is why social media likes it), it should be clear that it incentivizes the last two much more. You can see the fruits of this on Facebook groups, that site’s closest analogy to what’s being proposed here. (Tumblr, and Facebook user pages, are also upvote-only in practice, but their sharing and friending mechanisms make them harder to analyze in these terms.)
He isn’t suggesting making LW upvote only. Just a creating a new section of it that is upvote only. And why not? If you’re right the evidence will bear out that it is a terrible system. But we won’t know until we test the idea.
An earlier version of my comment read “LW or parts of it”. Edited it out for stylistic reasons and because I assumed the application to smaller domains would be clear enough in context. Guess I was wrong.
Granted, not everything I said would apply to the first proposal, the one where top-level posts are upvote-only but comments aren’t. That’s a little more interesting; I’m still leery of it but I haven’t fully worked out the incentives.
As to empirics, one thing we’re not short on is empirical data from other forums. We’re not so exceptional that the lessons learned from them can’t be expected to apply.
Apologies if that seemed like nitpick (which I try to avoid). I thought it was relevant because even if you are right, trying out the new system wouldn’t mean making LessWrong terrible, it would just mean making a small part of LessWrong terrible (which we could then get rid of). The cost is so small so that I don’t see why its shouldn’t be tried.
I think the cost is higher than you’re giving it credit for. Securing dev time to implement changes around here is incredibly hard, at least if you aren’t named Eliezer, and changes anywhere are usually harder to back out than they are to put in; we can safely assume that any change we manage to push through will last for months, and forever is probably more likely.
Hacker News has a downvote, but you need to have 500 karma to use it. This keeps it from being used too often, and only by people very familiar with the community culture. Stackoverflow allows anyone to downvote, but you have to spend your own karma, to discourage it.
HN also hides the votes that comments have. And reddit has been moving to this policy as well.
Imagine posting as a game scored in utility. Upvotes gain you utility; downvotes lose you it
That’s exactly my problem with reddit-style voting in general. Human communication, even in an impoverished medium such as forum posting, is highly, highly complex and pluridimensional. Plus one and minus one don’t even begin to cover it. Even when the purpose is a quick and informal moderation system. Good post on a wholly uninteresting topic? Good ideas once you get past the horrendous spelling? One-line answers? Interesting but highly uncertain info? Excessive posting volume? The complete lack of an answer where one would have been warranted? Strong (dis)approval looking just like mild (dis)approval? Sometimes it’s difficult to vote.
Besides, the way it is set up, the system implicitly tells people that everyone’s opinion is valid, and equally valid at that. Good for those who desire democracy in everything, but socially and psychologically not accurate. Some lurker’s downvote can very well cancel out EY’s upvote, for instance, and you’ll never know. Maybe some sort of weighted karma system would work better, wherein votes would count more according to a combination of the voter’s absolute karma and positive karma percentage.
To address your specific concerns about upvote-only systems, positive feedback expressed verbally may be boring to read and to write, hence reducing it to a number, but negative feedback expressed silently through downvotes leaves you wondering what the hell is wrong with your post and according to who. As long as people can still reply to each other, posters of cat pictures can still be disapproved of, even without downvotes. And perhaps the criticism may stick more if there are words to “haunt” you rather than an abstract minus one.
However, this one strongly depends on community norms. If the default is approval, then the upvote is the cheap signal and a downvote-only system can in fact work better. If the default is disapproval, then the downvote is a cheap signal. An upvote-only policy works best in a significantly more hostile environment.
Proposals for making LW upvote-only emerge every few months, most recently during the retributive downvoting fiasco. I said then, and I continue to believe now, that it’s a terrible idea.
JMIV is right to say in the ancestor that subtle features of moderation mechanics have outsized effects on community culture; I even agree with him that Eliezer voiced an unrealistically rosy view of the downvote in “Well-Kept Gardens”. But upvote-only systems have their own pitfalls, and quite severe ones. The reasons behind them are somewhat complex, but boil down to bad incentives.
Imagine posting as a game scored in utility. Upvotes gain you utility; downvotes lose you it; and for most people being downvoted costs you more than being upvoted gains you, though the exact ratio varies from person to person. You want to maximize your utility, and you have a finite amount of time to spend on it. If you spend that time researching new content to post, your output is low but it’s very rarely downvoted. Debate takes a moderate amount of time; votes on debate are less reliable, especially if you’re arguing for something like neoreaction or radical feminism or your own crackpot views on time and dimension, but you’re all but guaranteed upvotes from people that agree with you. Plus telling people they’re wrong is fun, so you get some bonus utility. Finally, you can post cat pictures, which takes almost no time, will score a few upvotes from people that like looking at their little jellybean toes, but violates content norms.
Which one of these is optimal changes, depending on how tolerant you are of downvoting and how good you are at dodging it. But while removing the downvote option incentivizes all three (which is why social media likes it), it should be clear that it incentivizes the last two much more. You can see the fruits of this on Facebook groups, that site’s closest analogy to what’s being proposed here. (Tumblr, and Facebook user pages, are also upvote-only in practice, but their sharing and friending mechanisms make them harder to analyze in these terms.)
He isn’t suggesting making LW upvote only. Just a creating a new section of it that is upvote only. And why not? If you’re right the evidence will bear out that it is a terrible system. But we won’t know until we test the idea.
An earlier version of my comment read “LW or parts of it”. Edited it out for stylistic reasons and because I assumed the application to smaller domains would be clear enough in context. Guess I was wrong.
Granted, not everything I said would apply to the first proposal, the one where top-level posts are upvote-only but comments aren’t. That’s a little more interesting; I’m still leery of it but I haven’t fully worked out the incentives.
As to empirics, one thing we’re not short on is empirical data from other forums. We’re not so exceptional that the lessons learned from them can’t be expected to apply.
Apologies if that seemed like nitpick (which I try to avoid). I thought it was relevant because even if you are right, trying out the new system wouldn’t mean making LessWrong terrible, it would just mean making a small part of LessWrong terrible (which we could then get rid of). The cost is so small so that I don’t see why its shouldn’t be tried.
I think the cost is higher than you’re giving it credit for. Securing dev time to implement changes around here is incredibly hard, at least if you aren’t named Eliezer, and changes anywhere are usually harder to back out than they are to put in; we can safely assume that any change we manage to push through will last for months, and forever is probably more likely.
Hacker News has a downvote, but you need to have 500 karma to use it. This keeps it from being used too often, and only by people very familiar with the community culture. Stackoverflow allows anyone to downvote, but you have to spend your own karma, to discourage it.
HN also hides the votes that comments have. And reddit has been moving to this policy as well.
That’s exactly my problem with reddit-style voting in general. Human communication, even in an impoverished medium such as forum posting, is highly, highly complex and pluridimensional. Plus one and minus one don’t even begin to cover it. Even when the purpose is a quick and informal moderation system. Good post on a wholly uninteresting topic? Good ideas once you get past the horrendous spelling? One-line answers? Interesting but highly uncertain info? Excessive posting volume? The complete lack of an answer where one would have been warranted? Strong (dis)approval looking just like mild (dis)approval? Sometimes it’s difficult to vote.
Besides, the way it is set up, the system implicitly tells people that everyone’s opinion is valid, and equally valid at that. Good for those who desire democracy in everything, but socially and psychologically not accurate. Some lurker’s downvote can very well cancel out EY’s upvote, for instance, and you’ll never know. Maybe some sort of weighted karma system would work better, wherein votes would count more according to a combination of the voter’s absolute karma and positive karma percentage.
To address your specific concerns about upvote-only systems, positive feedback expressed verbally may be boring to read and to write, hence reducing it to a number, but negative feedback expressed silently through downvotes leaves you wondering what the hell is wrong with your post and according to who. As long as people can still reply to each other, posters of cat pictures can still be disapproved of, even without downvotes. And perhaps the criticism may stick more if there are words to “haunt” you rather than an abstract minus one.
However, this one strongly depends on community norms. If the default is approval, then the upvote is the cheap signal and a downvote-only system can in fact work better. If the default is disapproval, then the downvote is a cheap signal. An upvote-only policy works best in a significantly more hostile environment.