Possible compromise idea: send everyone their karma upvotes along with downvotes regularly, but send the upvotes in daily batches and the downvotes in monthly batches. Having your downvotes sent to you at known, predictable times rather than in random bursts, and having the updates occur less often, might let users take in the relevant information without having it totally dominate their day-to-day experience of visiting the site. This also makes it easier to spot patterns and to properly discount very small aversive changes in vote totals.
On the whole, I’m not sure how useful this would be as a sitewide default. Some concerns:
It’s not clear to me that karma on its own is all that useful or contentful. Ray recently noted that a comment of his had gotten downvoted somewhat, and that this had been super salient and pointed feedback for him. But I’m pretty sure that the ‘downvote’ Ray was talking about was actually just me turning a strong upvote into a normal upvote for minor / not-worth-independently-tracking reasons. Plenty of people vote for obscure or complicated or just-wrong reasons.
The people who get downvoted the most are likely to have less familiarity with LW norms and context, so they’ll be especially ill-equipped to extract actionable information from downvotes. If all people are learning is ‘<confusing noisy social disapproval>’, I’m not sure that’s going to help them very much in their journey as a rationalist.
Upvotes tend to be a clearer signal in my experience, while needing to meet a lower bar. (Cf.: we have a higher epistemic bar for establishing a norm ‘let’s start insulting/criticizing/calling out our colleagues whenever they make a mistake’ than for establishing a norm ‘let’s start complimenting/praising/thanking our colleagues whenever they do something cool’, and it would be odd to say that the latter is categorically bad in any environment where we don’t also establish the former norm.)
I’m not confident of what the right answer is; this is just me laying out some counter-considerations. I like Mako’s comment because it’s advocating for an important value, and expressing a not-obviously-wrong concern about that value getting compromised. I lean toward ‘don’t make down-votes this salient’ right now. I’d like more clarity inside my head about how much the downvote-hiding worry is shaped like ‘we need to make downvotes more salient so we can actually get the important intellectual work done’ vs. ‘we need to make downvotes more salient so we can better symbolize/resemble Rationality’.
Possible compromise idea: send everyone their karma upvotes along with downvotes regularly, but send the upvotes in daily batches and the downvotes in monthly batches. Having your downvotes sent to you at known, predictable times rather than in random bursts, and having the updates occur less often, might let users take in the relevant information without having it totally dominate their day-to-day experience of visiting the site. This also makes it easier to spot patterns and to properly discount very small aversive changes in vote totals.
On the whole, I’m not sure how useful this would be as a sitewide default. Some concerns:
It’s not clear to me that karma on its own is all that useful or contentful. Ray recently noted that a comment of his had gotten downvoted somewhat, and that this had been super salient and pointed feedback for him. But I’m pretty sure that the ‘downvote’ Ray was talking about was actually just me turning a strong upvote into a normal upvote for minor / not-worth-independently-tracking reasons. Plenty of people vote for obscure or complicated or just-wrong reasons.
The people who get downvoted the most are likely to have less familiarity with LW norms and context, so they’ll be especially ill-equipped to extract actionable information from downvotes. If all people are learning is ‘<confusing noisy social disapproval>’, I’m not sure that’s going to help them very much in their journey as a rationalist.
Upvotes tend to be a clearer signal in my experience, while needing to meet a lower bar. (Cf.: we have a higher epistemic bar for establishing a norm ‘let’s start insulting/criticizing/calling out our colleagues whenever they make a mistake’ than for establishing a norm ‘let’s start complimenting/praising/thanking our colleagues whenever they do something cool’, and it would be odd to say that the latter is categorically bad in any environment where we don’t also establish the former norm.)
I’m not confident of what the right answer is; this is just me laying out some counter-considerations. I like Mako’s comment because it’s advocating for an important value, and expressing a not-obviously-wrong concern about that value getting compromised. I lean toward ‘don’t make down-votes this salient’ right now. I’d like more clarity inside my head about how much the downvote-hiding worry is shaped like ‘we need to make downvotes more salient so we can actually get the important intellectual work done’ vs. ‘we need to make downvotes more salient so we can better symbolize/resemble Rationality’.