People have to make a tradeoff between many different options, one of which is providing criticism or explanations for downvotes. I guess there could be a simple “lurk moar”, “read the sequences” or “get a non-sycophantic LLM to provide you feedback” (I recommend Kimi k2) buttons, but at the end of the day downvotes allow for filtering bad content from good. By Sturgeon’s law there is too much bad content to give explanations for all of it.
Just downvoting a post without context feels unkind, unless kindness is not among the goals. Also, if you spent some time assessing a 5-minute post, then you can probably spend 10 seconds writing some words to explain the downvote.
Being slightly and illegibly unkind is somewhat effective at driving people away (or even motivating a change in behavior, but that’s harder) without too much drama (there are ways of expressing this in person, but online you need some UI feature to substitute), which is occasionally very useful. With downvoting, this doesn’t happen that much when contributions tend to be good, and happens often when not, so directionally it should be working well.
And the alternative to explaining-rather-than-downvoting (which is slightly inconvenient and therefore rarely happens) is mostly not providing any feedback, which in the long run lets the site content drift where the readers wouldn’t want it to.
I don’t see why the site’s content would drift if you simply ignore posts. People would eventually stop posting on their own. So I don’t think that justifies being unkind or driving people right away.
In the end, I don’t think it matters much whether a post has +500, 0, or −500. The score doesn’t seem to be an accurate reflection of quality or of what readers actually want. To be honest, it feels more like it fosters some sort of “smart” bias and tribalism. Probably a range −10/10 is more than enough.
If you feel strongly, positively or negatively, about a post, you should be able to take a moment to express that in a few words.
The only downside I can imagine is that it would take up more disk space since there would be more posts (if I understand the algorithm correctly). But that’s a trivial amount of space.
On the otherside, you get the benefits of boosting the amount comments and normalising the votes. It seems there are always much more votes than comments, possibly creating an echo chamber.
I agree that it’s better. I often try to explain my downvotes, but sometimes I think it’s a lost cause so I downvote for filtering and move on. Voting is a public good, after all.
People have to make a tradeoff between many different options, one of which is providing criticism or explanations for downvotes. I guess there could be a simple “lurk moar”, “read the sequences” or “get a non-sycophantic LLM to provide you feedback” (I recommend Kimi k2) buttons, but at the end of the day downvotes allow for filtering bad content from good. By Sturgeon’s law there is too much bad content to give explanations for all of it.
(I’ve weakly downvoted your comment.)
IMO it’s better to either:
1- downvote and explain why,
2- upvote just a negative comment, or
3- simply not downvote at all.
Just downvoting a post without context feels unkind, unless kindness is not among the goals. Also, if you spent some time assessing a 5-minute post, then you can probably spend 10 seconds writing some words to explain the downvote.
Being slightly and illegibly unkind is somewhat effective at driving people away (or even motivating a change in behavior, but that’s harder) without too much drama (there are ways of expressing this in person, but online you need some UI feature to substitute), which is occasionally very useful. With downvoting, this doesn’t happen that much when contributions tend to be good, and happens often when not, so directionally it should be working well.
And the alternative to explaining-rather-than-downvoting (which is slightly inconvenient and therefore rarely happens) is mostly not providing any feedback, which in the long run lets the site content drift where the readers wouldn’t want it to.
I don’t see why the site’s content would drift if you simply ignore posts. People would eventually stop posting on their own. So I don’t think that justifies being unkind or driving people right away.
In the end, I don’t think it matters much whether a post has +500, 0, or −500. The score doesn’t seem to be an accurate reflection of quality or of what readers actually want. To be honest, it feels more like it fosters some sort of “smart” bias and tribalism. Probably a range −10/10 is more than enough.
If you feel strongly, positively or negatively, about a post, you should be able to take a moment to express that in a few words.
The only downside I can imagine is that it would take up more disk space since there would be more posts (if I understand the algorithm correctly). But that’s a trivial amount of space.
On the otherside, you get the benefits of boosting the amount comments and normalising the votes. It seems there are always much more votes than comments, possibly creating an echo chamber.
I agree that it’s better. I often try to explain my downvotes, but sometimes I think it’s a lost cause so I downvote for filtering and move on. Voting is a public good, after all.