Anyone else find it weird that we can strongly upvote our own comments and posts? It doesn’t seem to do anything except promote the content of certain people who are happy to upvote themselves, at the expense of those who aren’t.
Relatedly, should we have a strong dispreference for upvoting (especially strong upvoting ) people who work in the same org as us, or whom we otherwise may have a nonacademic interest in promoting*? Deliberately soliciting upvotes on the Forum is clearly verbotten, yet in practice I know that I’m much more likely to read work by somebody else if I had a prior relationship with them**, and since I only upvote posts I’ve read, this means that I’m disproportionately likely to upvote posts by people who I work with, which seems bad.
On the flip side, I guess you can argue that any realistic pattern of non-random upvoting is a mild conflict of interest. For example, I’m more likely to read forecasting posts on the Forum, and I’m much more likely to upvote (and I rarely downvote) posts about forecasting. This in turn has a very small effect of raising awareness/attention/prestige of forecasting within EA, which has a very small but nonzero probability of having material consequences for me later.
So broadly, there are actions along the spectrum of “upvoting things you find interesting may lead to the movement being more interested in things you find interesting, which in turn may have a positive effect on your future material consequences” all the way up to “full astroturfing.”
A possible solution to this is for people to reflect on how they came across the article and chose to read it. If the honest answer is “I’m unlikely to have read this article if not for a prior connection with the author,” then opt against upvoting it***.
It’s also possible I’m overthinking this, and other people don’t think this is a problem in practice.
*(eg funders/fundees, mentors/mentees, members of the same cohort, current project partners, romantic relationships, etc)
**I haven’t surveyed others so I don’t know if this reading pattern is unusual. I will be slightly surprised if it is though.
***or flip a coin, biased towards your counterfactual probability of reading the article without that prior connection.
I strong-upvote when I feel like my comment is underappreciated, and don’t think of it as too different from strong-upvoting someone else’s comment. The existence of the strong-upvote already allows someone to strong-upvote whatever they want, which doesn’t seem to be a problem.
I think of this as different from voting for another person’s content. When I read a comment with e.g. 3 upvotes and 10 karma, I assume “the author supports this, and I guess at least one other person really strongly agrees.” If the “other person” who strongly agrees is actually the author, I get a skewed sense of how much support their view has.
Given the tiny sample sizes that voting represents, this isn’t a major problem, but it still seems to make the karma system work a bit less well. As a moderator/admin, I’d discourage strong-upvoting yourself, though the Forum doesn’t have an official ban on it.
Oh, I think the functionality is currently net-positive. I was just commenting on the technical difficulty of implementing it if the EA Forum thought it was worth the change.
On a related question: I just posted a question to the forum, and once the page refreshed on the question I had just asked, it already had one vote. Is this an auto-setting where my questions get automatically upvoted by me, or did someone really upvote it in the few (mili)seconds before submitting it and the page reloading?
All of your posts start with a strong upvote from “you” automatically. Your comments start with a normal-strength upvote from “you” (as they do on Reddit). You can undo these votes the same way you’d undo any of your other votes.
Anyone else find it weird that we can strongly upvote our own comments and posts? It doesn’t seem to do anything except promote the content of certain people who are happy to upvote themselves, at the expense of those who aren’t.
EDIT: I strongly upvoted this comment
Yeah, this has been discussed before. I think that it should not be possible to strongly upvote one’s own comments.
Relatedly, should we have a strong dispreference for upvoting (especially strong upvoting ) people who work in the same org as us, or whom we otherwise may have a nonacademic interest in promoting*? Deliberately soliciting upvotes on the Forum is clearly verbotten, yet in practice I know that I’m much more likely to read work by somebody else if I had a prior relationship with them**, and since I only upvote posts I’ve read, this means that I’m disproportionately likely to upvote posts by people who I work with, which seems bad.
On the flip side, I guess you can argue that any realistic pattern of non-random upvoting is a mild conflict of interest. For example, I’m more likely to read forecasting posts on the Forum, and I’m much more likely to upvote (and I rarely downvote) posts about forecasting. This in turn has a very small effect of raising awareness/attention/prestige of forecasting within EA, which has a very small but nonzero probability of having material consequences for me later.
So broadly, there are actions along the spectrum of “upvoting things you find interesting may lead to the movement being more interested in things you find interesting, which in turn may have a positive effect on your future material consequences” all the way up to “full astroturfing.”
A possible solution to this is for people to reflect on how they came across the article and chose to read it. If the honest answer is “I’m unlikely to have read this article if not for a prior connection with the author,” then opt against upvoting it***.
It’s also possible I’m overthinking this, and other people don’t think this is a problem in practice.
*(eg funders/fundees, mentors/mentees, members of the same cohort, current project partners, romantic relationships, etc)
**I haven’t surveyed others so I don’t know if this reading pattern is unusual. I will be slightly surprised if it is though.
***or flip a coin, biased towards your counterfactual probability of reading the article without that prior connection.
I strong-upvote when I feel like my comment is underappreciated, and don’t think of it as too different from strong-upvoting someone else’s comment. The existence of the strong-upvote already allows someone to strong-upvote whatever they want, which doesn’t seem to be a problem.
I think of this as different from voting for another person’s content. When I read a comment with e.g. 3 upvotes and 10 karma, I assume “the author supports this, and I guess at least one other person really strongly agrees.” If the “other person” who strongly agrees is actually the author, I get a skewed sense of how much support their view has.
Given the tiny sample sizes that voting represents, this isn’t a major problem, but it still seems to make the karma system work a bit less well. As a moderator/admin, I’d discourage strong-upvoting yourself, though the Forum doesn’t have an official ban on it.
Is it difficult to remove the possibility of strongly upvoting yourself?
Not particularly hard. My guess is half an hour of work or so, maybe another half hour to really make sure that there are no UI bugs.
Ah OK it may be worth doing then
This hasn’t been implemented yet, was it forgotten about or just not worth it?
Oh, I think the functionality is currently net-positive. I was just commenting on the technical difficulty of implementing it if the EA Forum thought it was worth the change.
On a related question: I just posted a question to the forum, and once the page refreshed on the question I had just asked, it already had one vote. Is this an auto-setting where my questions get automatically upvoted by me, or did someone really upvote it in the few (mili)seconds before submitting it and the page reloading?
All of your posts start with a strong upvote from “you” automatically. Your comments start with a normal-strength upvote from “you” (as they do on Reddit). You can undo these votes the same way you’d undo any of your other votes.