It occurred to me that Eliezer’s intuitions for moderation may not be calibrated to the modern Internet, where there really is a forum for people at every level of intelligence: Yahoo Answers, Digg, Facebook, 4chan, Tagged (which is basically the smaller but profitable successor to MySpace that no one intelligent has heard of), etc. I saw the Reddit community denigrate, but Reddit was a case of the smart people having legitimately better software (and therefore better entertainment through better chosen links). Nowadays, things are more equalized and you don’t pay much of a price in user experience terms for hanging out on a forum where the average intelligence is similar to yours.
Robin Hanson recently did the first ever permanent banning on Overcoming Bias, and that was for someone who was unpleasant and made too many comments, not someone who was stupid. (Not sure how often Robin deletes comments though, it does seem to happen at least a little.)
If we don’t downvote, comments on average get positive karma—which makes people post them more and more.
I don’t think this effect is very significant. I find it implausible that people post more comments on Hacker News, where comments are hardly ever voted down below zero, because it gets them karma. But even if they do, Hacker News is a great, thriving community. I would love it if we adopted a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.
I like the idea of promote/agree/disagree buttons somewhat.
It definitely changes my feeling about getting voted down to know there are people like Larks. I guess I just assumed that everyone was like me in reserving downvotes for the absolute worst stuff. Maybe there’s some way of getting new users to expect that their first few comments will be voted down and not to worry about it?
It would be interesting to see statistics on up vs down vote frequency per user. Even just a graph of how many users are in the 0-10% down vote bracket, 10-20%, etc. would be neat. I doubt the data is currently available, otherwise it would be trivial to put together a simple graph and a quick post detailing trends in that data.
Thanks for that link.
It occurred to me that Eliezer’s intuitions for moderation may not be calibrated to the modern Internet, where there really is a forum for people at every level of intelligence: Yahoo Answers, Digg, Facebook, 4chan, Tagged (which is basically the smaller but profitable successor to MySpace that no one intelligent has heard of), etc. I saw the Reddit community denigrate, but Reddit was a case of the smart people having legitimately better software (and therefore better entertainment through better chosen links). Nowadays, things are more equalized and you don’t pay much of a price in user experience terms for hanging out on a forum where the average intelligence is similar to yours.
Robin Hanson recently did the first ever permanent banning on Overcoming Bias, and that was for someone who was unpleasant and made too many comments, not someone who was stupid. (Not sure how often Robin deletes comments though, it does seem to happen at least a little.)
I don’t think this effect is very significant. I find it implausible that people post more comments on Hacker News, where comments are hardly ever voted down below zero, because it gets them karma. But even if they do, Hacker News is a great, thriving community. I would love it if we adopted a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.
I like the idea of promote/agree/disagree buttons somewhat.
We already have a system where you can only downvote a number of comments up to four times your karma.
I idly wonder if any noticeable fraction of downvotes does come from people who don’t have enough karma to post toplevel articles.
I’d guess that “high karma” would refer to the threshhold needed for posting articles, which is a pretty low bar.
I like the sound of that for some reason.
I too like this idea that would grant me more power without any more responsibility.
Larks strikes again.
(Comment was at −1 when I found it.)
It definitely changes my feeling about getting voted down to know there are people like Larks. I guess I just assumed that everyone was like me in reserving downvotes for the absolute worst stuff. Maybe there’s some way of getting new users to expect that their first few comments will be voted down and not to worry about it?
It would be interesting to see statistics on up vs down vote frequency per user. Even just a graph of how many users are in the 0-10% down vote bracket, 10-20%, etc. would be neat. I doubt the data is currently available, otherwise it would be trivial to put together a simple graph and a quick post detailing trends in that data.
To adjust your calibration a bit more: I worry that I might run out of my 4*Karma downvoting limit.
I guess that was a joke, but the downvote wasn’t me ;)
If nothing else downvoting replies to your own comments seems a bit dubeous