Can we have what I’d call ‘responsible downvoting’ on the forum from coming year onwards?
I recently saw that one of my recent comments from a post on EAGxIndia pointing out a relevant fact which got upvoted before- has now been downvoted heavily, without any follow-up questions or a reason.
I read it as an attribution of a thought process to one party in a dispute in a way that doesn’t come off as super friendly to my ears ~ not as a pure “fact.”
There are two schools of thought about karma voting on the Forum—in one, each voter votes independently, in the other voters consider the current karma count and whether the post is underscored or over scored.
+3 does not strike me as an unreasonable score for this comment. I would have it a bit higher if the tone were more collaborative.
to be honest, have seen much unfriendlier counters here in the forum. I don’t understand why is being friendly even a topic here? I have been following this post, the person below me,must be a group organiser from India, was agreeably much more “collaborative” and I literally saw her upvotes going from like 5 to 3. So I do not agree to the point that friendliness or collaborative tone has to do anything with this.
It is a different factor that down-voters might have different motives altogether which does not help anyone (neither the commentor nor the others reading) if the reason is not provided.
There are hints of unusual voting dynamics on that post, on both sides. Looking at karma counts and vote totals, I think there’s a good possibility that a few people on each side were voting from the hip in ways I don’t think are great. If I recall correctly, ~10% of all karmavotes are downvotes—which doesn’t suggest there is a broad-scope downvoting problem here. My suspicion—which is hard to prove without non-public data—is that a lot of the posts with iffy downvoting also have iffy upvoting, and the latter may often cancel the former out (or even exceed it!) on net.
Whether people should explain downvotes has been discussed before. The argument against has been stated thusly: “Downvotes aren’t primarily to help the person being downvoted. They help other readers, which after all there are many more of than writers. Creating an expectation that they should all be explained increases the burden on the downvoter significantly, making them less likely to be used and therefore less useful.”
I’ve argued before that the system should solicit an anonymous explanation for strong downvotes, as they can have an outsized impact on karma count. (Note that I use those rarely, and did not do so here.) Moreover, I think it is reasonable to expect a strong downvoter to have a clear, articulable justification for that action. I don’t think that is so for ordinary downvotes. Furthermore, if the Forum implemented a low-friction way to explain ordinary downvotes, it probably wouldn’t be particularly helpful (e.g., someone clicked “weak reasoning” on my post, what does that mean?). If the way was not low-friction, it would disrupt the current balance between upvotes and downvotes (which I think is on average about the right balance).
Could be because yours was succinct and not a long diplomatic one :) I feel its okay to use fewer words and express than trying to appear polite and verbose unnecessarily.
Unfortunately, some people use the karma downvote as a disagree vote, even though it’s supposed to be used to indicate the quality of a contribution, rather than whether you agree or disagree.
If you see a comment you disagree with but is civil and attempts to make a constructive contribution to the discussion, ideally you should disagree vote it and either not karma vote it or karma upvote it. But some people will karma downvote.
Yea agreeably so! In order to prevent this, it would be helpful to atleast set a reasoning dialogue box before downvoting. If possible the names should also be displayed for both upvoters and downvoters. This brings transparency and responsibility.
P.S: I’m referring to healthy transparency and responsible behaviour. I can’t help but think that the coordinating team who did not have valid justifications for their claims or an answer to my comment, could have done the heavy downvoting instead of owning up the situation and turn up responsibly.
If possible the names should also be displayed for both upvoters and downvoters. This brings transparency and responsibility.
In my view, this would be very harmful. For example, it’s not uncommon for a post to criticize a person or organization with significant power or influence in EA. Giving the criticized organization a list of people who upvoted criticisms and/or downvoted defenses would seriously chill and distort voting. We want people to vote their honest viewpoints without calculating whether their vote could come back to cost them in career opportunities or the like. (Similar problems exist when the poster/commenter is powerful or influential.)
We have a mechanism to address directly-involved people casting iffy upvotes/downvotes: the rest of the community can use their votes to correct the situation if they think the karma on the post/comment is too high or too low. The mechanism isn’t perfect, but I don’t think there’s a better one out there.
Personally, I would prefer that people with significant direct involvement (here, the organizers and the people who were directly and significantly harmed by the challenged decision) not karma-vote at all. But that is not a viable restriction to implement at a technical level (in part because the mods would have to know whose votes to disable on both sides).
out of all places, I’d like to believe that EA community should not be the zone where people have to think of costs for being transparent or honest. If it is the case, it is unfortunate and we might want to change a lot internally before trying to think about the world outside EA.
I guess what we can work on is trying to keep a check on how to prevent EA Forum getting into reddit-y vibe.
Maria I did check your comment, I’ve checked most of the comments on that post and I see where you’re coming from.
I also think, your proposal is a bit high-fi and might not be feasible for the engineers of this forum’s interface (again I am not sure). They can definitely give a try though! That’d be a nice experiment!
Nonetheless, yes! your comment has no reasonable follow ups (as you’ve cited) but I’d say that does not diminish its value for real :)
Can we have what I’d call ‘responsible downvoting’ on the forum from coming year onwards?
I recently saw that one of my recent comments from a post on EAGxIndia pointing out a relevant fact which got upvoted before- has now been downvoted heavily, without any follow-up questions or a reason.
If it is this comment:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7qGHbvbMpCbfJ5gbS/eagxindia-2025-a-call-for-safety-caution?commentId=mtpXigfm22CiZT7HR
I read it as an attribution of a thought process to one party in a dispute in a way that doesn’t come off as super friendly to my ears ~ not as a pure “fact.”
There are two schools of thought about karma voting on the Forum—in one, each voter votes independently, in the other voters consider the current karma count and whether the post is underscored or over scored.
+3 does not strike me as an unreasonable score for this comment. I would have it a bit higher if the tone were more collaborative.
to be honest, have seen much unfriendlier counters here in the forum. I don’t understand why is being friendly even a topic here? I have been following this post, the person below me,must be a group organiser from India, was agreeably much more “collaborative” and I literally saw her upvotes going from like 5 to 3. So I do not agree to the point that friendliness or collaborative tone has to do anything with this.
It is a different factor that down-voters might have different motives altogether which does not help anyone (neither the commentor nor the others reading) if the reason is not provided.
I can’t explain other people’s vote—only my own.
There are hints of unusual voting dynamics on that post, on both sides. Looking at karma counts and vote totals, I think there’s a good possibility that a few people on each side were voting from the hip in ways I don’t think are great. If I recall correctly, ~10% of all karmavotes are downvotes—which doesn’t suggest there is a broad-scope downvoting problem here. My suspicion—which is hard to prove without non-public data—is that a lot of the posts with iffy downvoting also have iffy upvoting, and the latter may often cancel the former out (or even exceed it!) on net.
Whether people should explain downvotes has been discussed before. The argument against has been stated thusly: “Downvotes aren’t primarily to help the person being downvoted. They help other readers, which after all there are many more of than writers. Creating an expectation that they should all be explained increases the burden on the downvoter significantly, making them less likely to be used and therefore less useful.”
I’ve argued before that the system should solicit an anonymous explanation for strong downvotes, as they can have an outsized impact on karma count. (Note that I use those rarely, and did not do so here.) Moreover, I think it is reasonable to expect a strong downvoter to have a clear, articulable justification for that action. I don’t think that is so for ordinary downvotes. Furthermore, if the Forum implemented a low-friction way to explain ordinary downvotes, it probably wouldn’t be particularly helpful (e.g., someone clicked “weak reasoning” on my post, what does that mean?). If the way was not low-friction, it would disrupt the current balance between upvotes and downvotes (which I think is on average about the right balance).
Could be because yours was succinct and not a long diplomatic one :) I feel its okay to use fewer words and express than trying to appear polite and verbose unnecessarily.
Unfortunately, some people use the karma downvote as a disagree vote, even though it’s supposed to be used to indicate the quality of a contribution, rather than whether you agree or disagree.
If you see a comment you disagree with but is civil and attempts to make a constructive contribution to the discussion, ideally you should disagree vote it and either not karma vote it or karma upvote it. But some people will karma downvote.
Agree with this, although for completeness: some people use the karma upvote as a agree vote, which also poses problems.
Yea agreeably so! In order to prevent this, it would be helpful to atleast set a reasoning dialogue box before downvoting. If possible the names should also be displayed for both upvoters and downvoters. This brings transparency and responsibility.
P.S: I’m referring to healthy transparency and responsible behaviour. I can’t help but think that the coordinating team who did not have valid justifications for their claims or an answer to my comment, could have done the heavy downvoting instead of owning up the situation and turn up responsibly.
In my view, this would be very harmful. For example, it’s not uncommon for a post to criticize a person or organization with significant power or influence in EA. Giving the criticized organization a list of people who upvoted criticisms and/or downvoted defenses would seriously chill and distort voting. We want people to vote their honest viewpoints without calculating whether their vote could come back to cost them in career opportunities or the like. (Similar problems exist when the poster/commenter is powerful or influential.)
We have a mechanism to address directly-involved people casting iffy upvotes/downvotes: the rest of the community can use their votes to correct the situation if they think the karma on the post/comment is too high or too low. The mechanism isn’t perfect, but I don’t think there’s a better one out there.
Personally, I would prefer that people with significant direct involvement (here, the organizers and the people who were directly and significantly harmed by the challenged decision) not karma-vote at all. But that is not a viable restriction to implement at a technical level (in part because the mods would have to know whose votes to disable on both sides).
out of all places, I’d like to believe that EA community should not be the zone where people have to think of costs for being transparent or honest. If it is the case, it is unfortunate and we might want to change a lot internally before trying to think about the world outside EA.
I guess what we can work on is trying to keep a check on how to prevent EA Forum getting into reddit-y vibe.
Maria I did check your comment, I’ve checked most of the comments on that post and I see where you’re coming from.
I also think, your proposal is a bit high-fi and might not be feasible for the engineers of this forum’s interface (again I am not sure). They can definitely give a try though! That’d be a nice experiment!
Nonetheless, yes! your comment has no reasonable follow ups (as you’ve cited) but I’d say that does not diminish its value for real :)