I’m new here too, and have been curious about this. Like you, I’ve been hesitant to give down votes. But I think that if I ever down vote, it will only be when (1) someone seems inappropriately confident in what they’re saying or (2) a comment was needlessly (and it’s always needlessly) mean and condescending to someone else.
Also, I wouldn’t down vote a reply to one of my own comments, since I might be biased. I’d down vote only as an objective observer of other conversations.
As for upvotes, I’m a bit more generous with discussion posts than comments. It takes more time to come up with a good post than a good comment. For longer posts, it would be cool to have an option to give the writer between 1-3 karma. I sometimes reread posts from the Rationality ebook on here and am surprised to see they have only 30 or so karma points and wish I could give them more than one thumbs-up.
There are many other categories suitable for downvoting which I’ve seen over the years. I’ve seen blatantly incoherent streams of thought, comments containing ‘facts’ known to be flat out wrong, posts with an extremely high percentage of spelling and grammatical errors, and material I simply don’t want to see here (rape and pedophilia related stuff springs to mind.) These are just the categories that spring to mind at the moment.
Only downvoting based on confidence and ‘being mean’ may cover most cases, but it still leaves a lot of significant bases uncovered.
My upvote/downvote rule has been “Do I want to see more of this type of thing on LW or not?” The three possible responses that I use are yes (+1), no (-1), and ‘meh’ (0).
Upvoted :)
I’m new here too, and have been curious about this. Like you, I’ve been hesitant to give down votes. But I think that if I ever down vote, it will only be when (1) someone seems inappropriately confident in what they’re saying or (2) a comment was needlessly (and it’s always needlessly) mean and condescending to someone else.
Also, I wouldn’t down vote a reply to one of my own comments, since I might be biased. I’d down vote only as an objective observer of other conversations.
As for upvotes, I’m a bit more generous with discussion posts than comments. It takes more time to come up with a good post than a good comment. For longer posts, it would be cool to have an option to give the writer between 1-3 karma. I sometimes reread posts from the Rationality ebook on here and am surprised to see they have only 30 or so karma points and wish I could give them more than one thumbs-up.
There are many other categories suitable for downvoting which I’ve seen over the years. I’ve seen blatantly incoherent streams of thought, comments containing ‘facts’ known to be flat out wrong, posts with an extremely high percentage of spelling and grammatical errors, and material I simply don’t want to see here (rape and pedophilia related stuff springs to mind.) These are just the categories that spring to mind at the moment.
Only downvoting based on confidence and ‘being mean’ may cover most cases, but it still leaves a lot of significant bases uncovered.
My upvote/downvote rule has been “Do I want to see more of this type of thing on LW or not?” The three possible responses that I use are yes (+1), no (-1), and ‘meh’ (0).
Yeah, you’re right, those are more good reasons, and I’d probably downvote for them too!