I suspect in most communities votes are a measure of attention and this makes even downvotes rewarding. Downvotes are easier to get which could explain the disparity in the amount of contributions. This doesn’t apply to LW due to the comment hiding system, I think.
Yes. Clearly bad karma in itself is not enough for trolls and others who frequently get downvoted—there need to be some more tangible effects like comment hiding. This should have been discussed by the authors but I can’t see that they did that (only skim-read the paper, though).
This interesting sentence from the abstract confirms what you say about downvotes being rewarding:
Interestingly, the authors that receive no feedback are most likely to leave a community.
Hence negative feeback is better than being ignored.
I suspect in most communities votes are a measure of attention and this makes even downvotes rewarding. Downvotes are easier to get which could explain the disparity in the amount of contributions. This doesn’t apply to LW due to the comment hiding system, I think.
This has already been posted on the Open Thread by NancyLebovitz.
Thanks. I missed that.
On the other hand, it didn’t get any comments on the open thread, and it’s getting some discussion here.
I think it is worth a Discussion post as it is really applicable. The rational choice would be to change the LW voting semantics: Drop vote down.
Yes. Clearly bad karma in itself is not enough for trolls and others who frequently get downvoted—there need to be some more tangible effects like comment hiding. This should have been discussed by the authors but I can’t see that they did that (only skim-read the paper, though).
This interesting sentence from the abstract confirms what you say about downvotes being rewarding:
Hence negative feeback is better than being ignored.
Or worse, being hellbanned.