Thank you responding, habryka! It’s great we have alt-account and mass-voting detection.
Because this would cause people to basically not downvote things, drastically reducing the signal to noise ratio of the site.
We can have a list of popular reasons for downvoting, like typos, bad titles, spammy tags, I’m not sure which are the most popular.
The problem as I see it is demotivation of new authors or even experienced ones who has some tentative ideas that sound counterintuitive at first. We live in unreasonable times and possibly the holy grail alignment solutions we are looking for will sound unreasonable at first.
On X they don’t have downvotes at first glance but they have similar functionality: they have quick short responses, flagging of spam and other things, muting, blocking, etc. It allows to quickly see what people think by reading responses.
Readers will adjust: posts that had −1, will now have 3 upvotes. Posts that had 20 upvotes, will now have 30. There is a way to “inflate” the older posts so they’ll be comprable with new ones.
We can prevent people from double downvoting if they opened the post and instantly double downvoted (spend almost zero time on the page). Those are most likely the ones who didn’t read anything except the title.
Maybe it’s better for them to flag it instead if it was some spam or another violation, or ask to change the title. It’s unfair for the writer and other readers to get authors double downvoted just because of the bad title or some typo.
We have the ability to comment and downvote paragraphs. This feature is great. Maybe we can aggregate those and they’ll be more precise.
Especially going below zero is demotivating. So maybe we can ask people to give some feedback (at least as a bubble in a corner after you downvoted. You can ignore this bubble). So you can double downvote someone below zero and then a bubble will appear for 30 seconds and maybe on some “Please, give feedback for some of your downvotes to motivate writers to improve” page.
We maybe want to teach authors why others “don’t like their posts”, so this cycle of downvotes (after initial success, almost each post I was writing was downvoted and I had no idea why, I thought they were too short and so hard to get the context, my ideas I counterintuitive and exploratory) will not become perpetual until the author will abandon the whole thing.
We can have the great website we have now plus a “school of newbies learning to become great thinkers, writers and safety researchers” by getting feedback or we can become more and more like some elitist club where only the established users are welcome and double upvote each other while double downvoting the newbies and those whose ideas are counterintuitive, too new or written not in some perfect journalistic style.
Thank you for considering it! The rational community is great, kind and important. LessWrong is great, kind and important. Great website engines and UIs can become even greater. Thank you for the work you do!
Thank you responding, habryka! It’s great we have alt-account and mass-voting detection.
We can have a list of popular reasons for downvoting, like typos, bad titles, spammy tags, I’m not sure which are the most popular.
The problem as I see it is demotivation of new authors or even experienced ones who has some tentative ideas that sound counterintuitive at first. We live in unreasonable times and possibly the holy grail alignment solutions we are looking for will sound unreasonable at first.
On X they don’t have downvotes at first glance but they have similar functionality: they have quick short responses, flagging of spam and other things, muting, blocking, etc. It allows to quickly see what people think by reading responses.
Readers will adjust: posts that had −1, will now have 3 upvotes. Posts that had 20 upvotes, will now have 30. There is a way to “inflate” the older posts so they’ll be comprable with new ones.
Some more thoughts:
We can prevent people from double downvoting if they opened the post and instantly double downvoted (spend almost zero time on the page). Those are most likely the ones who didn’t read anything except the title.
Maybe it’s better for them to flag it instead if it was some spam or another violation, or ask to change the title. It’s unfair for the writer and other readers to get authors double downvoted just because of the bad title or some typo.
We have the ability to comment and downvote paragraphs. This feature is great. Maybe we can aggregate those and they’ll be more precise.
Especially going below zero is demotivating. So maybe we can ask people to give some feedback (at least as a bubble in a corner after you downvoted. You can ignore this bubble). So you can double downvote someone below zero and then a bubble will appear for 30 seconds and maybe on some “Please, give feedback for some of your downvotes to motivate writers to improve” page.
We maybe want to teach authors why others “don’t like their posts”, so this cycle of downvotes (after initial success, almost each post I was writing was downvoted and I had no idea why, I thought they were too short and so hard to get the context, my ideas I counterintuitive and exploratory) will not become perpetual until the author will abandon the whole thing.
We can have the great website we have now plus a “school of newbies learning to become great thinkers, writers and safety researchers” by getting feedback or we can become more and more like some elitist club where only the established users are welcome and double upvote each other while double downvoting the newbies and those whose ideas are counterintuitive, too new or written not in some perfect journalistic style.
Thank you for considering it! The rational community is great, kind and important. LessWrong is great, kind and important. Great website engines and UIs can become even greater. Thank you for the work you do!