Weakly against asking people to explain downvotes/disagree-votes (even politely)
Quite often it’ll be clear that a post/comment is being downvoted/disagree-voted, and someone—either the OP or just a reader who likes the comment/post—writes that they’re surprised at the disagreement/downvoting, and they’d be interested to know why people are disagreeing or why they don’t like it.
Most of the time these requests are very polite and non-demanding, but I’m still (weakly) against them, because I think they contribute to an expectation that if you downvote/disagree-vote, you have to be willing and able to ‘defend’ your choice to do that. But this is a very high bar—if I was forced to defend verbally all of my voting choices—and in language according to Forum norms, no less (not “I think the post is dumb, what do you want from me”) - I would almost never vote. If people wanted to explain why they disagreed or disliked the post, they probably would have already commented!
It’s also asymmetric—I’ve never seen someone say “I don’t understand why this is getting upvoted”. So asking people to explain downvotes/disagreevotes might lead to a dynamic where there’s a mild disincentive to downvote/disagree and no comparable disincentive to upvote/agree, which means that controversial posts would appear to have more artificially more upvotes/agree-votes than they ‘deserve’.
What if users could anonymously select tags explaining why they upvoted or downvoted? This is similar to how apps like Uber and Airbnb let you provide more detailed feedback like “Ride was smooth” and “Ride was on time” when you rate drivers/hosts.
I get what you mean but I’m in favor of norms where, when a proposal or take isn’t quite right, somehow or another another option gets dropped there proactively. I do worry EAs have the habit of poo-pooing things without actually contributing to improvement
If people framed their requests more in terms of “can someone offer a better proposal in this thread please? Something they think will get upvotes by the people downvoting?” how would you feel about That?
I upvoted & disagreevoted on this, and I’m going to try to defend the ‘call for explanation’ a bit—especially for disagreevotes, I generally agree that downvote signals are more clear.
I think sometimes it’s not really clear why a post is being disagree voted, especially if it makes a number of different points. Does a disagree vote represent a vote against the points on balance, or the major point, or a particular crux of this issue? My posts/comments to be a bit on the long-side and I’ve run into this (so it may be self-inflicted). I think the call for explanation can more be seen as a call for replies focusing on a specific section and continuing from there.
For the asymmetry, I grant that’s probably true. On the other hand, it’s probably valuable for people to find cruxes of disagreement in good faith, possibly more so than just a shows of agreement—though I do think there should be more comments saying (I agree and thought paragraph 2 was an excellent statement of position X/changed my mind).
I think fundamentally there’s a collective action problem here where, no we probably don’t want every vote to be accompanied by a comment and explanation of that vote. But as everyone can free ride on others to provide that explanation, we may often find ourselves in a position where there’s a topic where there’s a lot of active disagreement, and a user posts a position but gets disagreevoted and there is no explanation of that vote at all. This might be particularly disheartening for the poster (especially if they are posting against conventional EA wisdom) if they’ve approached the topic in good faith, put a lot of time and effort into writing their comment, and provided a lot supporting evidence for it.
Tl;dr: Overall probably a co-ordination problem—I think we could get value by shifting the norms more towards exploring disagreement on Forum posts/comments more
Weakly against asking people to explain downvotes/disagree-votes (even politely)
Quite often it’ll be clear that a post/comment is being downvoted/disagree-voted, and someone—either the OP or just a reader who likes the comment/post—writes that they’re surprised at the disagreement/downvoting, and they’d be interested to know why people are disagreeing or why they don’t like it.
Most of the time these requests are very polite and non-demanding, but I’m still (weakly) against them, because I think they contribute to an expectation that if you downvote/disagree-vote, you have to be willing and able to ‘defend’ your choice to do that. But this is a very high bar—if I was forced to defend verbally all of my voting choices—and in language according to Forum norms, no less (not “I think the post is dumb, what do you want from me”) - I would almost never vote. If people wanted to explain why they disagreed or disliked the post, they probably would have already commented!
It’s also asymmetric—I’ve never seen someone say “I don’t understand why this is getting upvoted”. So asking people to explain downvotes/disagreevotes might lead to a dynamic where there’s a mild disincentive to downvote/disagree and no comparable disincentive to upvote/agree, which means that controversial posts would appear to have more artificially more upvotes/agree-votes than they ‘deserve’.
What if users could anonymously select tags explaining why they upvoted or downvoted? This is similar to how apps like Uber and Airbnb let you provide more detailed feedback like “Ride was smooth” and “Ride was on time” when you rate drivers/hosts.
I get what you mean but I’m in favor of norms where, when a proposal or take isn’t quite right, somehow or another another option gets dropped there proactively. I do worry EAs have the habit of poo-pooing things without actually contributing to improvement
If people framed their requests more in terms of “can someone offer a better proposal in this thread please? Something they think will get upvotes by the people downvoting?” how would you feel about That?
I upvoted & disagreevoted on this, and I’m going to try to defend the ‘call for explanation’ a bit—especially for disagreevotes, I generally agree that downvote signals are more clear.
I think sometimes it’s not really clear why a post is being disagree voted, especially if it makes a number of different points. Does a disagree vote represent a vote against the points on balance, or the major point, or a particular crux of this issue? My posts/comments to be a bit on the long-side and I’ve run into this (so it may be self-inflicted). I think the call for explanation can more be seen as a call for replies focusing on a specific section and continuing from there.
For the asymmetry, I grant that’s probably true. On the other hand, it’s probably valuable for people to find cruxes of disagreement in good faith, possibly more so than just a shows of agreement—though I do think there should be more comments saying (I agree and thought paragraph 2 was an excellent statement of position X/changed my mind).
I think fundamentally there’s a collective action problem here where, no we probably don’t want every vote to be accompanied by a comment and explanation of that vote. But as everyone can free ride on others to provide that explanation, we may often find ourselves in a position where there’s a topic where there’s a lot of active disagreement, and a user posts a position but gets disagreevoted and there is no explanation of that vote at all. This might be particularly disheartening for the poster (especially if they are posting against conventional EA wisdom) if they’ve approached the topic in good faith, put a lot of time and effort into writing their comment, and provided a lot supporting evidence for it.
Tl;dr: Overall probably a co-ordination problem—I think we could get value by shifting the norms more towards exploring disagreement on Forum posts/comments more
I don’t have a problem with people asking nicely; since it creates no obligation to explain I don’t think it creates a disincentive to downvoting.