(I’ve downvoted this for a rather unusual reason: it starts a big thread under the top most comment, and I wish it wasn’t in the way of seeing the next-most-upvoted comment.
This is pretty weird, cos I think this is a fine comment in isolation. I’m trying out downvoting more (that is, being a more active “micro-moderator”) and I’m sure I’ll do it wrong in lots of situations).
I (genuinely) appreciate the downvotes, disagrees and critical comments. I want to expand a bit on my thinking, so people can give me pushback that will convince me more.
In threaded commenting systems like ours, replying to popular comments makes your comment much more visible than it would be as a top-level comment. This feature is common enough, that on Reddit (another threaded commenting system) people talk about “hijacking” a top comment to broadcast something they’re interested in.
I think it’s pretty plausible that people should have a higher bar for commenting on highly upvoted comments (especially ones without much discussion underneath them). I’m definitely not sure though; if I imagine people doing that, I worry about the responses that get lost.
But the responses do come with a cost. Take a look at www.lesswrong.com/moderation: I don’t think it would be better if more people had to read the rejected content (enough people for each piece of content that it got sufficiently downvoted). So I think it does seem worth, in some circumstances, risking a bit of silence for a better signal:noise ratio.
On a slightly more meta level: lately I’ve been thinking about Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism and its exhortations to downvote more. As Ben Pace once said: sometimes, when I notice I’m undershooting a goal, I like to make sure I overshoot it for a bit, and then dial back. So I am trying out more votes of “I wish this comment hadn’t happened to me at this point”, regardless of whether it was a good comment in some contextless way.
I’d also been reading this thread on why people don’t explain their downvotes, and that tipped me even further in the direction of explaining my downvote, as I’d get a bit more data on what it was like (of course, every good downvote is alike, and every bad downvote is bad in its own way, so I’m sure I’m only getting a very particular sample).
I appreciate your explanation of your explanation of your downvote.
I expect these kinds of problems to be solved by the LW karma system and the “off-topic?” reacts. I believe the LW karma system is robust, well-implemented, and generally used very properly by users. I also believe it typically functions very well in terms of elevating desirable comments and punishing/downgrading lower-value ones. It’s not perfect, but it’s not only better than literally every other comment ranking system I have come across, but also perfectly adequate (IMO) to handle potential hijacking situations.
I am struck by the extent to which you, as a mod running this site and implementing this very system, don’t seem to agree with me on this. If it was just this one comment, I wouldn’t say much. But I recall @habryka also said at some point during the unfortunate kerfuffle a month and a half ago:
If we had a better karma system, I think there are some tools that I might want to make available to people that are better than banning. Maybe things like karma thresholds, or some other way of making it so a user needs to be in particular good standing to leave a comment. But unfortunately, our current karma system is not robust enough for that, and indeed, leaving many bad comments, is still unfortunately a way to get lots of karma.
Karma doesn’t reliably work as a visibility mechanism for comments.
[...]
Overall, I think you should model karma as currently approximately irrelevant for managing visibility of comments due to limited volume of comments, and the thread structure making strict karma sorting impossible, so anything of the form “but isn’t comment visibility handled by the karma system” is basically just totally wrong, without substantial changes to the karma system and voting.
Is this something the entire LW mod team agrees with, broadly? It seems entirely incompatible with my own experience on this site.
I think you’re asking if the whole mod team agrees with “the LW karma system is NOT robust, well-implemented and generally used very properly by users”.
I think in general the LW team thinks that the karma system is generally used properly by users (not sure about “very properly”, for example I think we’re probably not skilled enough, as a userbase, at using it. Habryka might even disagree with “properly”, because he so strongly wants more. downvotes).
I don’t know what opinions people have about the implementation. I think, for example, most people on the team think that agreement voting is quite good, that having weak/strong votes is good, and that our vote scaling is good.
For “robust”, I think most people think it fails sometimes on the actual website, and not just in possible corner cases.
(We’re really getting into the weeds about which color to paint the bike-shed here[1], but nonetheless....)
Thinking aloud… One issue is that this is a pretty unexpected reason, and I currently would not be able to raise this hypothesis as why I was being downvoted. Normally it means the substance of the comment was bad or somehow norm-violating, I have little-to-no sense that ppl downvote for hijacking threads on LW.
On the other hand I think I was slightly hijacking the thread. Well, that’s not right. I felt the comment section was very overwhelming with a sense of “You are wrong and you are doing empathy wrong”, and my comment agreeing with the post got little-to-no traction in-spite of being the very first comment on the post, so I came to find someone in-particular to argue with. I think it was probably good for the discourse for me to post a counterargument under the top comment. I thought the top comment was a pretty good encapsulation of the view I disagreed with (I did look at the other comments and felt this was most appropriate to disagree with). I could’ve written a shortform or top-level post, but I guess I don’t think that responding to a prominent comment is a bad place for me to provide counterarguments. In my model many of the other comments are primarily provide social force rather than unique and additional points/arguments (e.g. multiple instances of “you’re just switching yourself into their decisions, not their psychology” highly upvoted, a claim I disagree with), so I wasn’t especially pushing out much substantive content, and again, providing a counterargument is not off-topic, so I think this isn’t relevantly a hijacking.
Perhaps we should have a feature for comments for when your comment is a nitpick / off-topic / aside, where you can choose to make your comment be collapsed-by-default and at the bottom of the set of immediate replies.
Also, this thread could be a good option for the “move thread to open thread” feature, with a two-way link.
I think your comment was a little bit “cheating” against LW’s systems, and thus deserving of a little downvote. I don’t know if a norm exists against this kind of cheating, but I think it should.
IIRC, I kinda perceived that you were trying to pushback against a general vibe spread throughout the comment section. Your comment is basically not engaging with cata’s comment at all. You reference the video, which cata doesn’t, and you reference “believing everyone is doing the best they can”, which is not something cata says. You were pushing against the general zeitgeist, and you did it in a way that uses a quirk of the commenting system to give it prominence.
I think you should have written a top-level comment pushing back against the other comments, perhaps linking to them. And then the karma system could have buoyed it to the top, or not.
I think it’s pretty plausible that people should have a higher bar for commenting on highly upvoted comments (especially ones without much discussion underneath them). I’m definitely not sure though; if I imagine people doing that, I worry about the responses that get lost.
The obvious consequence of such a norm is comments having to say things like “don’t upvote this comment too much, because otherwise you will be robbing me of replies which I would otherwise get” or “please downvote this comment, so that it gets pushed down, so that I can get people replying to me, instead of staying silent because of a weird and incidental fact of comment section sorting”. This would be very bad, obviously.
The things which you are trying to do with the karma system would destroy its usefulness.
In threaded commenting systems like ours, replying to popular comments makes your comment much more visible than it would be as a top-level comment. This feature is common enough, that on Reddit (another threaded commenting system) people talk about “hijacking” a top comment to broadcast something they’re interested in.
Comments that hijack an unrelated thread can be downvoted (and thus hidden), or their authors censured for abusing the commenting system. This is a non-problem on Less Wrong.
I’d also been reading this thread on why people don’t explain their downvotes, and that tipped me even further in the direction of explaining my downvote, as I’d get a bit more data on what it was like (of course, every good downvote is alike, and every bad downvote is bad in its own way, so I’m sure I’m only getting a very particular sample).
I approve of explaining your downvotes. This is good, because it gives us the opportunity to discuss why those downvotes might be a bad idea.
The obvious consequence of such a norm is comments having to say things like “don’t upvote this comment too much, because otherwise you will be robbing me of replies which I would otherwise get” or “please downvote this comment, so that it gets pushed down, so that I can get people replying to me, instead of staying silent because of a weird and incidental fact of comment section sorting”. This would be very bad, obviously.
I agree it’s obvious that it at least pushes some in this direction. I think some versions of this could be very bad, though mostly it would be not that bad.
The things which you are trying to do with the karma system would destroy its usefulness.
By “destroy its usefulness”, how much less useful do you mean to say it would become?
Comments that hijack an unrelated thread can be downvoted (and thus hidden), or their authors censured for abusing the commenting system. This is a non-problem on Less Wrong.
I didn’t mean, in that comment, to imply that Ben was hijacking. I was just trying to provide at least one example of a pathological interaction with threading and karma.
The things which you are trying to do with the karma system would destroy its usefulness.
By “destroy its usefulness”, how much less useful do you mean to say it would become?
That would depend on how widespread your way of using it became. If very widespread—then basically all of the usefulness would be lost. If somewhat widespread—then only most of the usefulness would be lost. If only a handful of people did as you propose to do—then much of the usefulness would be lost, though not most.
If by “very widespread” you mean like ~10% of votes, I disagree. Do you mean that?
If only a handful of people did as you propose to do—then much of the usefulness would be lost, though not most.
If by “much of the usefulness would be lost” you mean something like “people would see comments that they liked <90% as much” or “people would get less than 90% of the information about what some kind of weighted LessWrong-consensus thought”, I disagree. Do you mean that?
If by “very widespread” you mean like ~10% of votes, I disagree. Do you mean that?
I mean something like “a majority of the most active users do this regularly”.
If by “much of the usefulness would be lost” you mean something like “people would see comments that they liked <90% as much” or “people would get less than 90% of the information about what some kind of weighted LessWrong-consensus thought”, I disagree. Do you mean that?
Those are very weak criteria, much weaker than anything I had in mind… and you still disagree that any such thing would happen? I do not see how such a view is supportable.
Fwiw I don’t find this very convincing. If a comment gets highly up voted for instance, it has the consequence of getting more dumb replies, but mostly people just accept that rather than having to caveat their comments and asking not to up vote.
If a comment gets highly up voted for instance, it has the consequence of getting more dumb replies
Also has the consequence of getting more smart replies, simply as a result of getting more replies overall due to being more popular.
If writing good comments resulted in stupid comments in response (a drawback) with no corresponding benefit, then people would write fewer good comments. The reason we don’t observe the latter to be happening isn’t because stupid responses aren’t a disincentive, but because good responses (alongside stuff like increased karma, reputation, the intrinsic desire to communicate deeply-held beliefs, the feeling that Someone is Wrong on the Internet, etc.) are a sufficiently good incentive that overcomes this disincentive.
People don’t ask not to upvote because receiving upvotes is obviously a desirable thing for the comment-writer.[1] To the extent your confusing comment tries to imply otherwise, it appears entirely out of tune with reality.
A comment getting up voted has highs status implications, and gets their ideas seen more. I think that’s the main desirable thing of high up votes, more discussion is really hit or miss in terms of desire ability.
Which is the point of my comment, there’s tons of externalities to the system of up voting and down voting that we just put up with because the system basically works.
And when you change the system by imposing an additional constraint/disincentive on receiving karma, without a corresponding benefit (unlike in the case of bad responses, which come attached with good responses), the balance of externalities changes. Therefore, so does commenters’ behavior.
Moreover, I disagree with the notion that more discussion is neutral on average/in expectancy. That’s only if the original comment writer[1] can’t easily distinguish between productive and unproductive responses or can’t bring themselves emotionally to ignore the latter and focus only on the former. If the person can do that, then they obtain positive value from the responses overall (they get to learn something new or have their misconceptions corrected, for example), even if the majority of them are useless.
In fact, I just did a quick-and-dirty check. I went to my comments feed on GreaterWrong, sorting by “Top” (i.e., in descending karma value order). I then opened up the first 10 comments in the list. Then, I set the “offset” URL parameter to 1000 (i.e., went to the 51st page of the list, showing my 1001st through 1020th highest-rated comments), and opened up the first 10 comments on that page. For each comment, I counted the number of direct replies which I would consider to be dumb (not wrong, but dumb). The counts:
Total number of dumb replies to my 1st through 10th highest-upvoted comments: 2
Total number of dumb replies to my 1001st through 1010th highest-upvoted comments: 1
Given the sample sizes, I’m going to mark this one down as “no difference detected”.
This is an insane reason to downvote something. (Also, the fact that it even sort of makes sense to you to do this—especially given your strong familiarity with the Less Wrong commenting system—is a sign that something is very wrong… maybe with the commenting UI, perhaps, or… with something.)
(Really, though, what a terrible, terrible reason to downvote. What the hell?)
(I’ve downvoted this for a rather unusual reason: it starts a big thread under the top most comment, and I wish it wasn’t in the way of seeing the next-most-upvoted comment.
This is pretty weird, cos I think this is a fine comment in isolation. I’m trying out downvoting more (that is, being a more active “micro-moderator”) and I’m sure I’ll do it wrong in lots of situations).
I (genuinely) appreciate the downvotes, disagrees and critical comments. I want to expand a bit on my thinking, so people can give me pushback that will convince me more.
In threaded commenting systems like ours, replying to popular comments makes your comment much more visible than it would be as a top-level comment. This feature is common enough, that on Reddit (another threaded commenting system) people talk about “hijacking” a top comment to broadcast something they’re interested in.
I think it’s pretty plausible that people should have a higher bar for commenting on highly upvoted comments (especially ones without much discussion underneath them). I’m definitely not sure though; if I imagine people doing that, I worry about the responses that get lost.
But the responses do come with a cost. Take a look at www.lesswrong.com/moderation: I don’t think it would be better if more people had to read the rejected content (enough people for each piece of content that it got sufficiently downvoted). So I think it does seem worth, in some circumstances, risking a bit of silence for a better signal:noise ratio.
On a slightly more meta level: lately I’ve been thinking about Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism and its exhortations to downvote more. As Ben Pace once said: sometimes, when I notice I’m undershooting a goal, I like to make sure I overshoot it for a bit, and then dial back. So I am trying out more votes of “I wish this comment hadn’t happened to me at this point”, regardless of whether it was a good comment in some contextless way.
I’d also been reading this thread on why people don’t explain their downvotes, and that tipped me even further in the direction of explaining my downvote, as I’d get a bit more data on what it was like (of course, every good downvote is alike, and every bad downvote is bad in its own way, so I’m sure I’m only getting a very particular sample).
I appreciate your explanation of your explanation of your downvote.
I expect these kinds of problems to be solved by the LW karma system and the “off-topic?” reacts. I believe the LW karma system is robust, well-implemented, and generally used very properly by users. I also believe it typically functions very well in terms of elevating desirable comments and punishing/downgrading lower-value ones. It’s not perfect, but it’s not only better than literally every other comment ranking system I have come across, but also perfectly adequate (IMO) to handle potential hijacking situations.
I am struck by the extent to which you, as a mod running this site and implementing this very system, don’t seem to agree with me on this. If it was just this one comment, I wouldn’t say much. But I recall @habryka also said at some point during the unfortunate kerfuffle a month and a half ago:
And also:
Is this something the entire LW mod team agrees with, broadly? It seems entirely incompatible with my own experience on this site.
I think you’re asking if the whole mod team agrees with “the LW karma system is NOT robust, well-implemented and generally used very properly by users”.
I think in general the LW team thinks that the karma system is generally used properly by users (not sure about “very properly”, for example I think we’re probably not skilled enough, as a userbase, at using it. Habryka might even disagree with “properly”, because he so strongly wants more. downvotes).
I don’t know what opinions people have about the implementation. I think, for example, most people on the team think that agreement voting is quite good, that having weak/strong votes is good, and that our vote scaling is good.
For “robust”, I think most people think it fails sometimes on the actual website, and not just in possible corner cases.
(We’re really getting into the weeds about which color to paint the bike-shed here[1], but nonetheless....)
Thinking aloud… One issue is that this is a pretty unexpected reason, and I currently would not be able to raise this hypothesis as why I was being downvoted. Normally it means the substance of the comment was bad or somehow norm-violating, I have little-to-no sense that ppl downvote for hijacking threads on LW.
On the other hand I think I was slightly hijacking the thread. Well, that’s not right. I felt the comment section was very overwhelming with a sense of “You are wrong and you are doing empathy wrong”, and my comment agreeing with the post got little-to-no traction in-spite of being the very first comment on the post, so I came to find someone in-particular to argue with. I think it was probably good for the discourse for me to post a counterargument under the top comment. I thought the top comment was a pretty good encapsulation of the view I disagreed with (I did look at the other comments and felt this was most appropriate to disagree with). I could’ve written a shortform or top-level post, but I guess I don’t think that responding to a prominent comment is a bad place for me to provide counterarguments. In my model many of the other comments are primarily provide social force rather than unique and additional points/arguments (e.g. multiple instances of “you’re just switching yourself into their decisions, not their psychology” highly upvoted, a claim I disagree with), so I wasn’t especially pushing out much substantive content, and again, providing a counterargument is not off-topic, so I think this isn’t relevantly a hijacking.
Perhaps we should have a feature for comments for when your comment is a nitpick / off-topic / aside, where you can choose to make your comment be collapsed-by-default and at the bottom of the set of immediate replies.
Also, this thread could be a good option for the “move thread to open thread” feature, with a two-way link.
I think your comment was a little bit “cheating” against LW’s systems, and thus deserving of a little downvote. I don’t know if a norm exists against this kind of cheating, but I think it should.
IIRC, I kinda perceived that you were trying to pushback against a general vibe spread throughout the comment section. Your comment is basically not engaging with cata’s comment at all. You reference the video, which cata doesn’t, and you reference “believing everyone is doing the best they can”, which is not something cata says. You were pushing against the general zeitgeist, and you did it in a way that uses a quirk of the commenting system to give it prominence.
I think you should have written a top-level comment pushing back against the other comments, perhaps linking to them. And then the karma system could have buoyed it to the top, or not.
Some fair points; I don’t quite agree, but I think a marginal downvote is not worth a lot of discussion, I’ll bow out here.
The obvious consequence of such a norm is comments having to say things like “don’t upvote this comment too much, because otherwise you will be robbing me of replies which I would otherwise get” or “please downvote this comment, so that it gets pushed down, so that I can get people replying to me, instead of staying silent because of a weird and incidental fact of comment section sorting”. This would be very bad, obviously.
The things which you are trying to do with the karma system would destroy its usefulness.
Comments that hijack an unrelated thread can be downvoted (and thus hidden), or their authors censured for abusing the commenting system. This is a non-problem on Less Wrong.
I approve of explaining your downvotes. This is good, because it gives us the opportunity to discuss why those downvotes might be a bad idea.
I agree it’s obvious that it at least pushes some in this direction. I think some versions of this could be very bad, though mostly it would be not that bad.
By “destroy its usefulness”, how much less useful do you mean to say it would become?
I didn’t mean, in that comment, to imply that Ben was hijacking. I was just trying to provide at least one example of a pathological interaction with threading and karma.
Having refreshed myself on Ben’s comment and its parent, I now think he was doing something continuous with hijacking.
That would depend on how widespread your way of using it became. If very widespread—then basically all of the usefulness would be lost. If somewhat widespread—then only most of the usefulness would be lost. If only a handful of people did as you propose to do—then much of the usefulness would be lost, though not most.
If by “very widespread” you mean like ~10% of votes, I disagree. Do you mean that?
If by “much of the usefulness would be lost” you mean something like “people would see comments that they liked <90% as much” or “people would get less than 90% of the information about what some kind of weighted LessWrong-consensus thought”, I disagree. Do you mean that?
I mean something like “a majority of the most active users do this regularly”.
Those are very weak criteria, much weaker than anything I had in mind… and you still disagree that any such thing would happen? I do not see how such a view is supportable.
Fwiw I don’t find this very convincing. If a comment gets highly up voted for instance, it has the consequence of getting more dumb replies, but mostly people just accept that rather than having to caveat their comments and asking not to up vote.
Also has the consequence of getting more smart replies, simply as a result of getting more replies overall due to being more popular.
If writing good comments resulted in stupid comments in response (a drawback) with no corresponding benefit, then people would write fewer good comments. The reason we don’t observe the latter to be happening isn’t because stupid responses aren’t a disincentive, but because good responses (alongside stuff like increased karma, reputation, the intrinsic desire to communicate deeply-held beliefs, the feeling that Someone is Wrong on the Internet, etc.) are a sufficiently good incentive that overcomes this disincentive.
People don’t ask not to upvote because receiving upvotes is obviously a desirable thing for the comment-writer.[1] To the extent your confusing comment tries to imply otherwise, it appears entirely out of tune with reality.
Unless you impose a cost big enough to render this claim false, which would be the case if something-like-kave’s-proposal gets implemented
A comment getting up voted has highs status implications, and gets their ideas seen more. I think that’s the main desirable thing of high up votes, more discussion is really hit or miss in terms of desire ability.
Which is the point of my comment, there’s tons of externalities to the system of up voting and down voting that we just put up with because the system basically works.
And when you change the system by imposing an additional constraint/disincentive on receiving karma, without a corresponding benefit (unlike in the case of bad responses, which come attached with good responses), the balance of externalities changes. Therefore, so does commenters’ behavior.
Moreover, I disagree with the notion that more discussion is neutral on average/in expectancy. That’s only if the original comment writer[1] can’t easily distinguish between productive and unproductive responses or can’t bring themselves emotionally to ignore the latter and focus only on the former. If the person can do that, then they obtain positive value from the responses overall (they get to learn something new or have their misconceptions corrected, for example), even if the majority of them are useless.
Or the audience!
I have never found this to be the case.
In fact, I just did a quick-and-dirty check. I went to my comments feed on GreaterWrong, sorting by “Top” (i.e., in descending karma value order). I then opened up the first 10 comments in the list. Then, I set the “offset” URL parameter to
1000(i.e., went to the 51st page of the list, showing my 1001st through 1020th highest-rated comments), and opened up the first 10 comments on that page. For each comment, I counted the number of direct replies which I would consider to be dumb (not wrong, but dumb). The counts:Total number of dumb replies to my 1st through 10th highest-upvoted comments: 2
Total number of dumb replies to my 1001st through 1010th highest-upvoted comments: 1
Given the sample sizes, I’m going to mark this one down as “no difference detected”.
This is an insane reason to downvote something. (Also, the fact that it even sort of makes sense to you to do this—especially given your strong familiarity with the Less Wrong commenting system—is a sign that something is very wrong… maybe with the commenting UI, perhaps, or… with something.)
(Really, though, what a terrible, terrible reason to downvote. What the hell?)
Not sure whether that makes sense, but FWIW you can just hit the [-] symbol to collapse the whole subthread.
I’m aware! It doesn’t help because I had to read the subthread first to see if I want to read it.