People say that the rules are pretty general, but there was once a user that was banned for using the downvote in a way that people weren’t comfortable with. I think it might be a sensible idea for mods to be very clear about what is off limits.
There have been explicit mod statements against retributive downvoting (though they rely on a not-entirely-obvious reading of the content deletion policy): see here. We could probably use better and more obvious policy articles on the wiki, granted.
Aside from that, as long as you’re not playing voting games with sockpuppets, writing scripts to automate voting, or spending hours of your time on delivering votes and nothing else, I’d say you’re pretty safe. There’s not a lot of policy because not a lot of policy is needed to regulate typical voting behavior; behave typically in your voting (i.e. vote manually, after reading content, and don’t go looking for content to downvote) and you’ll be fine.
there was once a user that was banned for using the downvote in a way that people weren’t comfortable with
There was one such user in about ten years of LessWrong existence. (Okay, two user accounts, but most likely they belonged to the same person.) The rules as they are now seem sufficient for 99.9% of users to avoid this fate.
People say that the rules are pretty general, but there was once a user that was banned for using the downvote in a way that people weren’t comfortable with. I think it might be a sensible idea for mods to be very clear about what is off limits.
There have been explicit mod statements against retributive downvoting (though they rely on a not-entirely-obvious reading of the content deletion policy): see here. We could probably use better and more obvious policy articles on the wiki, granted.
Aside from that, as long as you’re not playing voting games with sockpuppets, writing scripts to automate voting, or spending hours of your time on delivering votes and nothing else, I’d say you’re pretty safe. There’s not a lot of policy because not a lot of policy is needed to regulate typical voting behavior; behave typically in your voting (i.e. vote manually, after reading content, and don’t go looking for content to downvote) and you’ll be fine.
I think having a proper policy article on the wiki stating much what you’ve just outlined would be a good thing.
Having it somewhere more obvious, like the front page, would .be good as well.
There was one such user in about ten years of LessWrong existence. (Okay, two user accounts, but most likely they belonged to the same person.) The rules as they are now seem sufficient for 99.9% of users to avoid this fate.