On being downvoted
Meta: I don’t think I have anything even moderately good to say here. Still, 1) I observe and endorse the policy of “Posts on practically any topic are welcomed on LessWrong”, and 2) I think it might be helpful to start a conversation about this, in part so that others can say useful things, and in part because it might trigger others to discuss their feelings, which seems like something that plausibly might lead to good outcomes.
I find myself being downvoted periodically. And I find it to be moderately frustrating.
I don’t endorse this feeling. If I could self-modify my limbic system, I’d design it to be negligibly affected by downvotes.
Well, actually, that’s not true. I think I’d design it to be a little self-conscious and driven to reflect on what I could improve on. In proportion to how plausible I find the downvotes to be justified. But often times I am confident that the downvotes aren’t justified, and yet can’t shake the feeling of being moderately frustrated.
From the FAQs:
What should my votes mean?
We encourage people to vote such that upvote means “I want to see more of this” and downvote means “I want to see less of this.”
Suppose that everyone voted according to this and I observe myself being downvoted. What does that mean?
Well, I guess it means that someone with a LessWrong account wants to see less of the type of thing I wrote. Expressing it that way, being more than negligibly affected emotionally seems pretty silly.
Maybe I’m looking at this through the wrong frame though. Maybe I’m being too gears-y and not feelings-y enough.
I’ve never really grokked the idea of frames that aren’t gears-oriented though. Maybe someone else can offer some wisdom here.
One thing that seems to help a fair bit is receiving an explanation. Or, similarly, a negative/constructive reaction. I strongly suspect this to be the case for others as well.
I’m not sure why this is though. How much information does the explanation provide? I could usually guess at the reason pretty accurately, I think, so hearing the explanation doesn’t actually cause me to update my beliefs much.
I don’t recall this actually happening, but as an example, sometimes I write things that I think might be contentious or hostile sounding. If such a thing gets downvoted, I start off being decently confident that the contentiousness was why. Hearing someone tell me “it’s the contentiousness” updates my emotions a good amount even though it updates my beliefs a small amount.
Here’s something that I do suspect happens, both to me and to others: being downvoted for, at least appearing to be, overconfident. For example, three paragraphs ago I wrote “I strongly suspect this to be the case for others as well.” and I noticed myself cringe a little. I thought to myself something along these lines:
Ugh. Certain people probably think sounds arrogant. And they might downvote me because of it.
But I shouldn’t let that stop me. I endorse the way I framed it. Stating that you are confident in something is not the same thing as being arrogant, and doesn’t automatically deserve a status slap-down. It’s just clear communication.
Also, if you find that you’re underconfident way more than you’re overconfident, and you seek to be well-calibrated, well, you’re not updating your beliefs quickly enough. You should probably update towards being more confident about things. You might even overshoot and end up too overconfident. If that happens, it’s ok. Like a pendulum, you can just continue to sway.
Similarly, I experience the same cringe after writing the above quoted section. I worry that it sounds hostile and uncharitable. But I also endorse what I wrote and think it is best to lean (not completely!) towards doing the thing I endorse instead of the thing that is easy.
I won’t keep doing this… but even that above paragraph, I cringe a little. Doesn’t it sound like I am humble-bragging? Maybe. But I don’t want to sit here all afternoon trying to think of a better way to frame it.
Maybe it has to do with the lack of nonverbal cues. I think I come across as arrogant at times in my writing, but in real life, I’ve been told the opposite, and I believe that I mostly give off the impression of the opposite of arrogance in real life.[1] Relatedly, I think I remember hearing that people find Robin Hanson to be surprisingly friendly when they meet him in real life.
I wonder what this means. Maybe it’d be helpful to use words such as “like” more frequently in an attempt to mirror how we’d actually speak in real life.
Y’know, I don’t think I recall a conversation about downvoting in general. Especially not one that tries to look through a feelings-oriented frame. Which is a little surprising, and a little disappointing.
I’m not sure what else to say to end this post. I guess I’ll say that I look forward to chatting about it in the comments and am hopeful that the conversation leads to something good.
- ^
A few weeks ago actually, a close friend pulled me aside and advised me to be more confident. Maybe because I use a lot of qualifiers in my speech.
I also remember, early in my career, an engineering manager telling me this. I was a junior web developer and when asked how capable I feel at doing a particular task, or how quickly I think I could get it done, I’d just be honest. The manager told me it makes me look bad and, even if I don’t believe it, for political reasons, I should appear confident.
I’m not above doing things for political reasons, but here I avoid doing so. I find it to be extremely distasteful, and the political advantages don’t really come close to outweighing this distastefulness.
When I get a negative reaction from people (in general, not just downvotes on posts), I start thinking of every possible thing that could have caused it. Knowing which thing caused the bad reaction out of the infinite space of things I could have done is helpful for me because it shuts down the “generate more reasons I might be bad” loop.
Ah yes! That’s really helpful. I just realized that that’s a big part of what’s happening with me as well. Thanks!
I share your frustration with voting at times. I know and endorse the stated voting norms. I’m also reasonably confident that plenty of people engage in yay/boo voting at times, especially around particularly touchy subjects. In the same way I’d expect to get heavily downvoted on the fictional Blessed Wrong (Less Wrong for Christians) if I posted about how there’s no God unless I was extremely careful about how I did it, I expect to get downvoted on Less Wrong if I say something that goes against commonly held beliefs of readers unless I’m really careful about how I do it.
As a result, I have a hard time knowing what feedback to take from upvotes and downvotes. Sometimes I get upvoted because I pressed an applause button. Sometimes I get upvoted because I wrote an actually good post. Sometimes I get downvoted because I pressed a boo button. And sometimes I get downvoted because my post wasn’t very good for some specific reasons I should fix. There’s generally not enough bandwidth in the voting signal to figure out what case I’m in unless someone takes the time to write a comment explaining why they voted how they did.
Have you assessed how accurate your unconfidence is? That is, when you feel unconfident about a project but go ahead anyway, how does it generally turn out?
I’ve never done so explicitly. Well, one time I did for a few weeks. I was doing great with most of my predictions being pretty accurate, and then a handful of them turned out to wildly undershoot (ie. the task took way longer than I expected), I lost motivation, and stopped.
Overall though, if I think back to my assessments over the years and how accurate they turned out to be, I think I lean slightly towards being too overconfident.
I wonder, what percentage of users vote based on post quality, and what percentage vote based on the viewpoint of the post?
Maybe I shouldn’t vote this way, but whether I agree plays a role in whether I upvote a post. I don’t downvote things I disagree with, though.
Would you downvote a new post that’s thoughtful and interesting, but it’s one that you strongly disagree with? If so, and if that user is new, basically no one else will see that post. Maybe you don’t do this, but others do. I don’t think this is a fair response, to essentially negate all of someone’s work in writing a good essay. If downvotes didn’t affect viewing priority, this would be much less of an issue.
Just thought about this post again, and wanted to add. I disabled karma notifications after being downvoted a few times. Maybe it would help you too.
I’ve had it disabled for a while now. Thanks for thinking of me though :)
FWIW, most of my downvotes on LW are for poorly reasoned jumping to conclusions posts and/or where the poster does not seem to fully know what they are talking about and should have done more homework first. Would never downvote a well written post even if I 100% disagree.
To me it seems appropriate to post about things that you don’t know too much about, as long as you make a reasonable effort to communicate where your confidence is. Ie. if you say “here are some thoughts about X; I am just spitballing and don’t know too much about X”, that seems fine.
What do you think? I suspect you also think it’s fine and are moreso trying to point at confident assertions about things the author doesn’t actually know much about.
Spitballing is fine, but I feel like in most of those cases, the user should make it a New Question, not a New Post.
Yes, of course, what I meant is more of a case of somebody confidently presenting as an self-evident truth something with a ton of well-known counterarguments. Or more generally, somebody that is not only clueless, but showing no awareness of how clueless they are, and no evidence that they at least tried to look for relevant information. [IMHO] Somebody who demonstrates willingness to learn deserves a comment pointing them to relevant information (and may still warrant a downvote, depending on how off the post it). Somebody who does not deserves to be downvoted, and usually would not deserve the time I would need to spend to explain my downvote in a comment. [/IMHO]
Hello Adam Zerner,
I believe it is very useful to look at voting through both frameworks, and agree that this is an important aspect to look at. Thanks for deciding to write your concerns in this post.
Downvoting through the lens of stictly ‘wanting to see more/less of something’, to me, makes it hard to differentiate a response between the functional aspect of writing, and the emotional. Many a post would be much more fulfilling for the posters with differing levels of emotional concerns, if they were accurately and feeling-y addressed—preferably maybe even before posting.
I have tried to write things earlier, that got heavily down-voted, and I left LW for a good while. Mostly because what I wrote was on the Feeling-channel. As such, I primarily wanted an emotional understanding response, and in my naivety I believed that it was obvious. There were vulnerable emotions there, which were never addressed. Of course, I could have been more explicit about my values/needs—but the natural prerequisite for that would be ‘trust’. And from my limited experience, asking for feelingy-things is more risky here, because it, weirdly enough, seems to indicate that what you have written is less than what it could be if you would simply answer ‘neutrally’. Which is true, in a way. If someone were to give me the sought after feeling-y channel feedback, I would be less reactive about the votes.
Your frustration could point to many things, but since the feelings are important—responses to the content alone might totally miss the high value to you when getting a fulfilling response there. And maybe it would allow to to write some things in your posts that is not clear.
I imagine that the format on the recent dialogue-post by habryka and kave, serves to me as a much better example as to how useful it can be to get feedback on the more value-based, personal side of things. In my experience it greatly increase any odds of me being more creative, engaged, content and collected about something.
I mean, I would feel more content and happy about a site that encouraged and help facillitate interactions like those. A simple—I need ‘emotional feedback’ button you could press, to see if maybe there was something very important you were missing. Still, emotional feedback is also a bit more personal—and so you would have to have trust that your respondent was adequately skilled and trustworthy, to be able to handle it.
If you could improve a post, or maybe find the courage and willingness to write something through the support and help of peers—wouldn’t it be kind of nice? Especially if it was easy to do. I have some ideas here, but not sure if I should elaborate here.
Kindly, Caerulea-Lawrence