The question was posted a few hours ago on a weekend, and is currently sitting at 10 karma with 5 votes. I suspect you have to give it some time to see if anyone with the requisite expertise takes the time to actually comment (or send a DM).
Basic advice for this site: don’t worry too much about votes—it’s a useful feedback for a VERY coarse-grained “please do more like this” or “please do less like this”, but there’s almost no information content about exactly what part of the message is generating the reaction.
It’s not a very strong relationship between post karma (vote total) and number of people who are shown the title, even less so the number who click on it, let alone really engage with it. Certainly there is some causality, especially the difference between negative, slightly postive (<10), medium (11-30), and quite popular (31+). But it’s not particularly linear, and it’s probably overwhelmed by how accessible it is, how useful and interesting people find the topic, and whether the mods frontpage it.
Note that I said “don’t worry too much about”, not “it’s completely meaningless”. It IS an important feedback channel, especially if taken as fairly coarse indicators of how a few readers react (most posts get fewer than 20 votes during their first week). Learn a bit from it, but unless it’s literally negative, don’t worry too much about it.
For topics where you’re seeking feedback and interaction, pay a lot more attention to the comments than to the votes. These tend to be sparse as well, for most topics, but they’re much more direct, as they’re the reason you’re posting in the first place (feedback to make your beliefs and models less wrong).
I agree with you about the roughness and changeability of karma. My main issue with it—particularly with downvotes and on this specific topic—is that it is too effective at silencing, while being too frustration, for too little informational gain. Even that wouldn’t be too big a deal because it does offer benefits and is an attractively simple solution for drawing on crowd wisdom.
Where the difficulty lies, I think, is when requesting advice about infohazards is met with negative vibes—frowns and sternness in real life, or downvotes online—without useful explicit feedback about the question at hand. That does a disservice to both the person asking for advice and to the people who think infohazards are worth taking seriously. I think that advocating for a change of vibes is better than putting up with inappropriate vibes, which is partly why I chose not to just put up with a few random downvotes and instead spoke up about it.
I don’t think I downvoted the advice post, but I do recall that I skimmed it and decided I don’t have much to say about it. I’m probably guilty of making that face when someone brings up the word “infohazard” in real life—I don’t think it’s a very useful generalization for most things. I don’t know how representative I am, and it seemed a good-faith discussion, so I left it alone.
IMO, “infohazard” is the kind of term that aggregates a number of distinct things in such a way as to make the speaker sound erudite, rather than to illuminate any aspect of the topic. It’s also almost always about fear of others’ freedom or abilities, not about the information itself.
The question was posted a few hours ago on a weekend, and is currently sitting at 10 karma with 5 votes. I suspect you have to give it some time to see if anyone with the requisite expertise takes the time to actually comment (or send a DM).
Basic advice for this site: don’t worry too much about votes—it’s a useful feedback for a VERY coarse-grained “please do more like this” or “please do less like this”, but there’s almost no information content about exactly what part of the message is generating the reaction.
It’s not really an option not to worry about votes, as they determine how many people see the post.
It’s not a very strong relationship between post karma (vote total) and number of people who are shown the title, even less so the number who click on it, let alone really engage with it. Certainly there is some causality, especially the difference between negative, slightly postive (<10), medium (11-30), and quite popular (31+). But it’s not particularly linear, and it’s probably overwhelmed by how accessible it is, how useful and interesting people find the topic, and whether the mods frontpage it.
Note that I said “don’t worry too much about”, not “it’s completely meaningless”. It IS an important feedback channel, especially if taken as fairly coarse indicators of how a few readers react (most posts get fewer than 20 votes during their first week). Learn a bit from it, but unless it’s literally negative, don’t worry too much about it.
For topics where you’re seeking feedback and interaction, pay a lot more attention to the comments than to the votes. These tend to be sparse as well, for most topics, but they’re much more direct, as they’re the reason you’re posting in the first place (feedback to make your beliefs and models less wrong).
I agree with you about the roughness and changeability of karma. My main issue with it—particularly with downvotes and on this specific topic—is that it is too effective at silencing, while being too frustration, for too little informational gain. Even that wouldn’t be too big a deal because it does offer benefits and is an attractively simple solution for drawing on crowd wisdom.
Where the difficulty lies, I think, is when requesting advice about infohazards is met with negative vibes—frowns and sternness in real life, or downvotes online—without useful explicit feedback about the question at hand. That does a disservice to both the person asking for advice and to the people who think infohazards are worth taking seriously. I think that advocating for a change of vibes is better than putting up with inappropriate vibes, which is partly why I chose not to just put up with a few random downvotes and instead spoke up about it.
I don’t think I downvoted the advice post, but I do recall that I skimmed it and decided I don’t have much to say about it. I’m probably guilty of making that face when someone brings up the word “infohazard” in real life—I don’t think it’s a very useful generalization for most things. I don’t know how representative I am, and it seemed a good-faith discussion, so I left it alone.
IMO, “infohazard” is the kind of term that aggregates a number of distinct things in such a way as to make the speaker sound erudite, rather than to illuminate any aspect of the topic. It’s also almost always about fear of others’ freedom or abilities, not about the information itself.