I don’t instinctively like downvotes either, and I suspect it’s mostly my personality that magnifies everything negative out of proportion i.e. there’s depressive bias. However, if I get downvoted for something really stupid, I find the punishment a very useful deterrent that also works for my personal life. It’s the inexplicable votes that bug me the most, but hey, you can’t please everyone.
I subscribed to Eliezer’s fb feed about a month ago and I’m glad he doesn’t post such unpolished ideas here. I think he also posts there because the commenters are better selected and not anonymous. I might be in favor of an upvote only system, if it weren’t for the really terrible outlier posters who need to be hidden quickly. For upvotes only , we would need a completely different visibility system.
One way this is often addressed is replacing downvote with flag, and with enough flags it gets hidden (flags and upvotes aren’t inverses of each other).
That doesn’t seem to scale well with the number of readers. Some discussions attract more people than others; so in the less popular discussions almost nothing would be flagged, but in the more popular ones, any slightly controversial comment would be flagged.
I don’t instinctively like downvotes either, and I suspect it’s mostly my personality that magnifies everything negative out of proportion i.e. there’s depressive bias. However, if I get downvoted for something really stupid, I find the punishment a very useful deterrent that also works for my personal life. It’s the inexplicable votes that bug me the most, but hey, you can’t please everyone.
I subscribed to Eliezer’s fb feed about a month ago and I’m glad he doesn’t post such unpolished ideas here. I think he also posts there because the commenters are better selected and not anonymous. I might be in favor of an upvote only system, if it weren’t for the really terrible outlier posters who need to be hidden quickly. For upvotes only , we would need a completely different visibility system.
One way this is often addressed is replacing downvote with flag, and with enough flags it gets hidden (flags and upvotes aren’t inverses of each other).
That doesn’t seem to scale well with the number of readers. Some discussions attract more people than others; so in the less popular discussions almost nothing would be flagged, but in the more popular ones, any slightly controversial comment would be flagged.
You are assuming a fixed cutoff which I was not.