Wait a minute, comments are upvoted based on quality rather than agreement?
Until now, I thought that if a comment had, say, nine points, it meant that there existed at least nine LessWrongers who agreed with everything the comment author said. That is not so?
It’s both. There are no “official” guidelines on how you should up/downvote, but a commonly expressed heuristic is “upvote what you want to see more of, and downvote what you would like to see less of”. In practice, people vote to signify all kinds of things: agree/disagree, true/false, cool/uncool, interesting/boring, oooh/eeew, etc.
Wait a minute, comments are upvoted based on quality rather than agreement? Until now, I thought that if a comment had, say, nine points, it meant that there existed at least nine LessWrongers who agreed with everything the comment author said. That is not so?
It’s both. There are no “official” guidelines on how you should up/downvote, but a commonly expressed heuristic is “upvote what you want to see more of, and downvote what you would like to see less of”. In practice, people vote to signify all kinds of things: agree/disagree, true/false, cool/uncool, interesting/boring, oooh/eeew, etc.