What Dagon said. Your advice makes sense if the main signal people received is “this received one −5 vote, two −4 votes, one −1 vote, three +1 votes, and five +2 votes”, but not if people are just receiving a “net upvotes” summary number. By default, the aggregate effect of everyone trying to “vote according to what’s really in their heart” and disregard current vote totals is that either (a) lots of content gets absurdly, unwarrantedly high/low karma totals because people’s opinions are correlated, or (b) lots of content gets no upvotes or downvotes at all because people are trying to correct for the possibility that things will be over-voted (even though they can see with their own eyes whether a vote total is currently too high or too low).
Perhaps this is a reason to replace the “net upvotes” system with one that lists the number of votes (at different levels).
I briefly had it display totals of each vote type, and immediately found myself having a bad experience whenever I saw downvotes. Although I can still figure it out roughly from the list of total-number-of-votes and total-score, it felt fine instead of upsetting.
Not sure if that generalizes but it’s the reason we have the current configuration.
I suspect your reaction is a common one, but not universal and I have no way to guess whether it’s the majority. I STRONGLY prefer to see my downvotes, and at times have sought to make posts that were controversial (got both up- and down-votes) rather than popular.
lots of content gets absurdly, unwarrantedly high/low karma totals because people’s opinions are correlated
How is this absurd and unwarranted? The numerical value doesn’t have any inherent meaning (as it would if any posters who received at least 1000 karma were given moderating powers, ferex). Is it that it produces an unusual vote distribution? A possible solution would be to adjust total votes downward by a factor that increases with total votes, if this is a problem, but I disagree that any solution is needed.
“People’s opinions are correlated” is just another way of stating “many people agree about X”, and that sounds like something that the voting system should be able to record (perhaps the only thing—isn’t the voting system just a way of recording public opinion on a post?).
Votes determine comment order, which is a counterexample to my claim of “the numbers don’t really matter,” but that’s scale-invariant so my point holds. But perhaps low-value posts are inflated more than high-value posts? But if LW voters tend to upvote low-value posts, then I think there’s a larger issue that can’t be solved by people occasionally throwing a wrench into inflating post-votes (how do we know that the strategic downvotes will correlate with low-value posts when upvotes can’t do the same?).
lots of content gets no upvotes or downvotes at all because people are trying to correct for the possibility that things will be over-voted (even though they can see with their own eyes whether a vote total is currently too high or too low).
All the votes, past and future, are combined into one total. If someone aims for the final vote to be X, and their expected final vote is X, then why should they vote? That’s just rational strategic voting. (However, possible details that reverse the optimal decision: everybody acts the same way and nobody votes. But wouldn’t people realize that they all think that way? Alternatively, snowballing votes means that your vote could tip the final vote to either zero or larger than your wanted value, but only if people look at the total vote when deciding how to vote, which wouldn’t happen in this hypothetical scenario where people vote from their hearts.)
What Dagon said. Your advice makes sense if the main signal people received is “this received one −5 vote, two −4 votes, one −1 vote, three +1 votes, and five +2 votes”, but not if people are just receiving a “net upvotes” summary number. By default, the aggregate effect of everyone trying to “vote according to what’s really in their heart” and disregard current vote totals is that either (a) lots of content gets absurdly, unwarrantedly high/low karma totals because people’s opinions are correlated, or (b) lots of content gets no upvotes or downvotes at all because people are trying to correct for the possibility that things will be over-voted (even though they can see with their own eyes whether a vote total is currently too high or too low).
Perhaps this is a reason to replace the “net upvotes” system with one that lists the number of votes (at different levels).
I briefly had it display totals of each vote type, and immediately found myself having a bad experience whenever I saw downvotes. Although I can still figure it out roughly from the list of total-number-of-votes and total-score, it felt fine instead of upsetting.
Not sure if that generalizes but it’s the reason we have the current configuration.
I suspect your reaction is a common one, but not universal and I have no way to guess whether it’s the majority. I STRONGLY prefer to see my downvotes, and at times have sought to make posts that were controversial (got both up- and down-votes) rather than popular.
How is this absurd and unwarranted? The numerical value doesn’t have any inherent meaning (as it would if any posters who received at least 1000 karma were given moderating powers, ferex). Is it that it produces an unusual vote distribution? A possible solution would be to adjust total votes downward by a factor that increases with total votes, if this is a problem, but I disagree that any solution is needed.
“People’s opinions are correlated” is just another way of stating “many people agree about X”, and that sounds like something that the voting system should be able to record (perhaps the only thing—isn’t the voting system just a way of recording public opinion on a post?).
Votes determine comment order, which is a counterexample to my claim of “the numbers don’t really matter,” but that’s scale-invariant so my point holds. But perhaps low-value posts are inflated more than high-value posts? But if LW voters tend to upvote low-value posts, then I think there’s a larger issue that can’t be solved by people occasionally throwing a wrench into inflating post-votes (how do we know that the strategic downvotes will correlate with low-value posts when upvotes can’t do the same?).
All the votes, past and future, are combined into one total. If someone aims for the final vote to be X, and their expected final vote is X, then why should they vote? That’s just rational strategic voting. (However, possible details that reverse the optimal decision: everybody acts the same way and nobody votes. But wouldn’t people realize that they all think that way? Alternatively, snowballing votes means that your vote could tip the final vote to either zero or larger than your wanted value, but only if people look at the total vote when deciding how to vote, which wouldn’t happen in this hypothetical scenario where people vote from their hearts.)