What do people think should be the downvoting culture and criteria around here? I’ve seen some pretty harsh downvoting, and am concerned that this might make the forum seem less welcoming to new people.
I’ll just note that we’re pointing people somewhat in the right direction by labelling the up- and down-vote buttons “I found this useful” and “I didn’t find this useful”, in order to encourage people to appraise whether the posts are valuable and evidence-based, rather than whether they’re to the reader’s personal taste.
I think the big picture here is not whether one agrees with individual upvotes or downvotes but how the system is working overall. Largely, I think it’s identifying real differences in post quality and also the fact that about 95% of votes appear to be upvotes means that the system will encourage people to post more. So, I’m pretty encouraged by the way things are going so far. Maybe we can tilt people to consider slightly more comments ‘useful’, though.
From the point of view of highlighting the best comments to allow good reading order, I think there may not be enough downvoting. Having more downvoting as well perhaps as more upvoting would give a richer distinction and help the best stuff to rise to the top quickly, even if it’s new content on an old thread.
On the other hand from the point of view of experienced feedback, downvoting might be a turn-off, and more of it might reduce people’s inclination to post. But this effect might be reduced if downvoting were more normal.
Overall I guess I’d weakly prefer more upvoting and more downvoting—including downvoting things that you don’t disagree with but would have been happy to skip reading.
That’s a good point, though being extra sparing in your upvoting would achieve a decent fraction of the same benefits. On the other hand, that would mean that fewer people got the warm fuzzies of upvotes, so that fewer people would get demoralising downvotes.
I guess that people currently upvote in the vicinity of 20% of comments they read (this is a guess, but based on how many more upvotes the top articles/comments get than the median), and downvote somewhat under 1%.
Optimal for information in theory might be a 1⁄31⁄31⁄3 split between upvoting, downvoting and not voting. But I think higher thresholds for downvoting than that probably make sense. I guess I might like to see upvoting at about 30% and downvoting at about 3%?
Downvoted to follow my own suggestion—I’m afraid I found this confusing/confused, as I think just being more sparing with upvoting gets you no benefits at all, and you didn’t explain how it was meant to work.
There are different cultures for upvoting and downvoting for different websites:
As a passive user of Reddit, I’m aware of the voting culture there. Depending on the subreddit, it might be as bad as any other forum on the Internet which is a wilds of impoliteness and inconsideration. However, you might end up with one that’s better. Obviously, this varies widely depending on the subreddit(s) one is using.
As an active user of Less Wrong, I tend not to downvote too much. Voting there is on the basis of whether something adds to the level of discourse, in terms of moving it in a direction of greater or less quality.
I try to treat how I vote on this forum based on the sentences that go along with the votes. For example, I upvote a comment on this site if I actively find it useful, i.e., it provides a new framing or new information which clarifies or enriches my understanding of an essay’s subject matter. There are lots of comments that I don’t find ‘useful’, per se, in the sense that I don’t learn anything new from them. However, I don’t (want to) downvote those comments because I don’t want to imply anything is wrong with them when I don’t really believe that. Such comments are just-so to me. I believe I would only downvote an essay, article, or comment on this forum if I believe it was actively harmful to people’s understanding, because it would decrease clarity, or level of discourse. I would like to think I would do this regardless of whether it was from a position I agreed with it not.
Generally, I tend to be liberal with upvotes, and conservative with downvotes. However, this is a personal preference based on my perception that online communities with voting systems tend to be less friendly than I would like them to be, so I try correcting for this in the opposite direction in what small way I can as a user.
I find receiving downvotes pretty demoralising, in particular when they are given for disagreeing with the conclusion, rather than thinking something is poorly reasoned.
“This person disagrees with me” and “the person thinks my reasoning is bad” are closely related—if your reasoning was good, they’d agree with you. And even when they differ, the original author is hardly an unbiased judge.
I don’t think of it that way, because usually there are multiple important considerations on both sides of a disagreement.
If someone raised a legitimate reason for their point of view, but I disagreed with their conclusion all things considered, I would not down-vote unless I thought the reason they were focussed on in their comment didn’t make sense. That’s rarely the case here; disagreements are most often about different weight given to different considerations.
The difficulty (that no-one seems to have figured out how to solve) is a system that effectively hides low quality posts without becoming more of an echo chamber over time. While a community is small it is not too much of a problem, because even mildly down voted posts have good attention—but as it grows, highly up voted posts that reflect existing tastes or confirm existing biases increasingly dominate.
I don’t usually use forums, so I don’t know what the norm is. But I have found it somewhat demoralising so far when I’ve taken time to respond carefully and detailedly to questions, and then been downvoted with no explanation as to why people didn’t find the comment useful. (I’m very willing to believe this is just because I’m not used to forums though—I’m only used to Facebook, where you can only upvote, hence all negative feedback has to be spelled out.)
Thanks for bringing this up—seems like a useful discussion to have!
Michelle, I looked through all your posts and they’re all really good, not even controversial, so I wouldn’t assume that they were downvoted or had low points for a legit reason. If someone had a legit criticism of something you said, he should write what it is. That’s the whole point of the forum: to exchange ideas. I don’t find the points system affects that in a positive way. I think without points people would have to write what they’re criticism of a post is and defend it. Button clicking seems more like an act of emotion to me.
I personally think that if someone downvotes something, especially a post where it costs −10 on karma, then they owe that person a brief explanation for the downvote.
I haven’t seen a downvote here that I’ve agreed with, and for the moment I’d prefer an only-upvote system. I don’t know where I’d draw the line on where downvoting is acceptable to me (or what guidelines I’d use); I just know I haven’t drawn that line yet.
Having some downvoting is good, and part of the raison d’etre of this forum as opposed to the Facebook group. I agree that people downvote slightly too often, but that’s a matter of changing the norms.
This is because we want to encourage people to contribute, right? One approach is to be the norm you want to promote. If you want to encourage people to post, then upvote more posts. If you’re concerned that material is getting downvoted when it is not spam, then give it an upvote and a substantial reply. :)
I wasn’t personally saying that was a good idea, just that I thought there should (somewhat) fewer downvotes. Of note, I’m not thinking about myself getting downvotes but occasions where it happened to other people!
I loath the voting system. Actually, I have never clicked the up or down vote button once and I never will because it’s juvenile to turn commenting on something as important as how to improve the world into a popularity contest. We are adults and should be treated like adults. It’s not even useful, anyhow – I’ve found no correlation between the quality of the comment and its points. The highest rated comments are usually questions, or short comments like “thanks for this”. Does anyone else see the contradiction in a subculture that’s purports to be about rationality bringing social approval bias into the mix? I value judging people’s views solely on their merits; I don’t want my judgement to be skewed by the judgement of “the group” and likewise, I only want people to judge my views by their merits, not by how popular they are.
Besides skewing the logical reasoning of visitors to the forum, the voting system also promotes conservatism – people will naturally be too scared to write something original for fear of it having low points. I think that someone cannot think too broadly about how to help the world – crazy ideas should be welcomed! Perhaps most of them will be duds, but there only needs to be one that turns out to be a winner! Even without the voting system, posters have to deal with the judgement of other posters, but at least written comments can provide helpful feedback whereas simply having low votes will make the poster self-conscious and shy to write something against the grain.
I thought that the voting system is beneficial primarily because it allows others to “upvote” something as important. When I glance at comments, I am unlikely to read dozens of comments (limited time), but the upvotes are a simple way for me to tell which comments are more likely to provide something of value.
Upvotes are not a true demonstration of value, but they help. Consider if a comment gets 100 upvotes—that suggests there is something there that others like and I would do well to at least glance at it.
The points you raise are worth considering, though I think the benefits outweigh the concerns you have. Do you think otherwise?
If someone thinks that the better comments have higher votes, then certainly for him the points system would be helpful, especially for long threads. I don’t find that’s usually the case, which is one reason why I’m not fond of it. I find that people “like” (whether that means clicking a button on your computer, or agreeing to someone in person) things that validate their pre-existing feelings, rather than open them up to new ideas they hadn’t considered before (most respond with fear to the latter). I heard on the radio a few months ago that studies show that problem solving meetings are more productive when the people there have opposing perspectives, come from different fields, etc. IOW, the perspective you don’t want to hear is probably the one you need to.
Having said that, even if the points system doesn’t correlate with the most helpful comments it could still be net positive for other reasons: encouraging more participation than it discourages, providing support/validation for those interested in EA, being normal (since most sites have voting now, people might think it was weird if CEA didn’t).
Another thing, that just occurred to me yesterday, is that the posts on the forum seem mostly geared to people who are already involved in EA, when it could be more productive to write posts that are geared to new people learning about EA (both in terms of content and writing style). TLYCS/GWWC blogs are more like that, although they are only for poverty.
yeah, I agree that we’ve talked about effective altruism using the assumption that people already know roughly what that is and why we would care about it. It’s a good idea to post more material that is of interest to a wider audience. Although having started off with stuff that affirms the purpose of the forum and our shared identity is not a bad thing, it’s just that it’d be good to balance it out now with some materials that a wider range of people can enjoy.
What do people think should be the downvoting culture and criteria around here? I’ve seen some pretty harsh downvoting, and am concerned that this might make the forum seem less welcoming to new people.
I’ll just note that we’re pointing people somewhat in the right direction by labelling the up- and down-vote buttons “I found this useful” and “I didn’t find this useful”, in order to encourage people to appraise whether the posts are valuable and evidence-based, rather than whether they’re to the reader’s personal taste.
I think the big picture here is not whether one agrees with individual upvotes or downvotes but how the system is working overall. Largely, I think it’s identifying real differences in post quality and also the fact that about 95% of votes appear to be upvotes means that the system will encourage people to post more. So, I’m pretty encouraged by the way things are going so far. Maybe we can tilt people to consider slightly more comments ‘useful’, though.
I have mixed feelings on this.
From the point of view of highlighting the best comments to allow good reading order, I think there may not be enough downvoting. Having more downvoting as well perhaps as more upvoting would give a richer distinction and help the best stuff to rise to the top quickly, even if it’s new content on an old thread.
On the other hand from the point of view of experienced feedback, downvoting might be a turn-off, and more of it might reduce people’s inclination to post. But this effect might be reduced if downvoting were more normal.
Overall I guess I’d weakly prefer more upvoting and more downvoting—including downvoting things that you don’t disagree with but would have been happy to skip reading.
That’s a good point, though being extra sparing in your upvoting would achieve a decent fraction of the same benefits. On the other hand, that would mean that fewer people got the warm fuzzies of upvotes, so that fewer people would get demoralising downvotes.
Being sparing in your upvoting? That seems to be the worst of both worlds!
I’m imagining 2 scenarios:
1) People have a very low threshold for upvoting, so upvote most comments. They only downvote in extreme circumstances.
2) People have a high threshold for upvoting, so only upvote comments they think particularly helpful. They only downvote in extreme circumstances.
My thought is that more information about comment quality is conveyed in the second.
I guess that people currently upvote in the vicinity of 20% of comments they read (this is a guess, but based on how many more upvotes the top articles/comments get than the median), and downvote somewhat under 1%.
Optimal for information in theory might be a 1⁄3 1⁄3 1⁄3 split between upvoting, downvoting and not voting. But I think higher thresholds for downvoting than that probably make sense. I guess I might like to see upvoting at about 30% and downvoting at about 3%?
The second scenario isn’t how I started upvoting, but what I’m leaning towards now, on this forum.
Downvoted to follow my own suggestion—I’m afraid I found this confusing/confused, as I think just being more sparing with upvoting gets you no benefits at all, and you didn’t explain how it was meant to work.
Upvoted your original comment though. :)
Ha, fair enough! I tried to explain it in my reply to Ryan: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/b2/open_thread_5/1h2
There are different cultures for upvoting and downvoting for different websites:
As a passive user of Reddit, I’m aware of the voting culture there. Depending on the subreddit, it might be as bad as any other forum on the Internet which is a wilds of impoliteness and inconsideration. However, you might end up with one that’s better. Obviously, this varies widely depending on the subreddit(s) one is using.
As an active user of Less Wrong, I tend not to downvote too much. Voting there is on the basis of whether something adds to the level of discourse, in terms of moving it in a direction of greater or less quality.
I try to treat how I vote on this forum based on the sentences that go along with the votes. For example, I upvote a comment on this site if I actively find it useful, i.e., it provides a new framing or new information which clarifies or enriches my understanding of an essay’s subject matter. There are lots of comments that I don’t find ‘useful’, per se, in the sense that I don’t learn anything new from them. However, I don’t (want to) downvote those comments because I don’t want to imply anything is wrong with them when I don’t really believe that. Such comments are just-so to me. I believe I would only downvote an essay, article, or comment on this forum if I believe it was actively harmful to people’s understanding, because it would decrease clarity, or level of discourse. I would like to think I would do this regardless of whether it was from a position I agreed with it not.
Generally, I tend to be liberal with upvotes, and conservative with downvotes. However, this is a personal preference based on my perception that online communities with voting systems tend to be less friendly than I would like them to be, so I try correcting for this in the opposite direction in what small way I can as a user.
I find receiving downvotes pretty demoralising, in particular when they are given for disagreeing with the conclusion, rather than thinking something is poorly reasoned.
“This person disagrees with me” and “the person thinks my reasoning is bad” are closely related—if your reasoning was good, they’d agree with you. And even when they differ, the original author is hardly an unbiased judge.
I don’t think of it that way, because usually there are multiple important considerations on both sides of a disagreement.
If someone raised a legitimate reason for their point of view, but I disagreed with their conclusion all things considered, I would not down-vote unless I thought the reason they were focussed on in their comment didn’t make sense. That’s rarely the case here; disagreements are most often about different weight given to different considerations.
Something can be well-reasoned but still be disagreeable if it ignores an important consideration.
The difficulty (that no-one seems to have figured out how to solve) is a system that effectively hides low quality posts without becoming more of an echo chamber over time. While a community is small it is not too much of a problem, because even mildly down voted posts have good attention—but as it grows, highly up voted posts that reflect existing tastes or confirm existing biases increasingly dominate.
I don’t usually use forums, so I don’t know what the norm is. But I have found it somewhat demoralising so far when I’ve taken time to respond carefully and detailedly to questions, and then been downvoted with no explanation as to why people didn’t find the comment useful. (I’m very willing to believe this is just because I’m not used to forums though—I’m only used to Facebook, where you can only upvote, hence all negative feedback has to be spelled out.)
Thanks for bringing this up—seems like a useful discussion to have!
Michelle, I looked through all your posts and they’re all really good, not even controversial, so I wouldn’t assume that they were downvoted or had low points for a legit reason. If someone had a legit criticism of something you said, he should write what it is. That’s the whole point of the forum: to exchange ideas. I don’t find the points system affects that in a positive way. I think without points people would have to write what they’re criticism of a post is and defend it. Button clicking seems more like an act of emotion to me.
I personally think that if someone downvotes something, especially a post where it costs −10 on karma, then they owe that person a brief explanation for the downvote.
I haven’t seen a downvote here that I’ve agreed with, and for the moment I’d prefer an only-upvote system. I don’t know where I’d draw the line on where downvoting is acceptable to me (or what guidelines I’d use); I just know I haven’t drawn that line yet.
Having some downvoting is good, and part of the raison d’etre of this forum as opposed to the Facebook group. I agree that people downvote slightly too often, but that’s a matter of changing the norms.
This is because we want to encourage people to contribute, right? One approach is to be the norm you want to promote. If you want to encourage people to post, then upvote more posts. If you’re concerned that material is getting downvoted when it is not spam, then give it an upvote and a substantial reply. :)
I wasn’t personally saying that was a good idea, just that I thought there should (somewhat) fewer downvotes. Of note, I’m not thinking about myself getting downvotes but occasions where it happened to other people!
I loath the voting system. Actually, I have never clicked the up or down vote button once and I never will because it’s juvenile to turn commenting on something as important as how to improve the world into a popularity contest. We are adults and should be treated like adults. It’s not even useful, anyhow – I’ve found no correlation between the quality of the comment and its points. The highest rated comments are usually questions, or short comments like “thanks for this”. Does anyone else see the contradiction in a subculture that’s purports to be about rationality bringing social approval bias into the mix? I value judging people’s views solely on their merits; I don’t want my judgement to be skewed by the judgement of “the group” and likewise, I only want people to judge my views by their merits, not by how popular they are.
Besides skewing the logical reasoning of visitors to the forum, the voting system also promotes conservatism – people will naturally be too scared to write something original for fear of it having low points. I think that someone cannot think too broadly about how to help the world – crazy ideas should be welcomed! Perhaps most of them will be duds, but there only needs to be one that turns out to be a winner! Even without the voting system, posters have to deal with the judgement of other posters, but at least written comments can provide helpful feedback whereas simply having low votes will make the poster self-conscious and shy to write something against the grain.
I thought that the voting system is beneficial primarily because it allows others to “upvote” something as important. When I glance at comments, I am unlikely to read dozens of comments (limited time), but the upvotes are a simple way for me to tell which comments are more likely to provide something of value.
Upvotes are not a true demonstration of value, but they help. Consider if a comment gets 100 upvotes—that suggests there is something there that others like and I would do well to at least glance at it.
The points you raise are worth considering, though I think the benefits outweigh the concerns you have. Do you think otherwise?
If someone thinks that the better comments have higher votes, then certainly for him the points system would be helpful, especially for long threads. I don’t find that’s usually the case, which is one reason why I’m not fond of it. I find that people “like” (whether that means clicking a button on your computer, or agreeing to someone in person) things that validate their pre-existing feelings, rather than open them up to new ideas they hadn’t considered before (most respond with fear to the latter). I heard on the radio a few months ago that studies show that problem solving meetings are more productive when the people there have opposing perspectives, come from different fields, etc. IOW, the perspective you don’t want to hear is probably the one you need to.
Having said that, even if the points system doesn’t correlate with the most helpful comments it could still be net positive for other reasons: encouraging more participation than it discourages, providing support/validation for those interested in EA, being normal (since most sites have voting now, people might think it was weird if CEA didn’t).
Another thing, that just occurred to me yesterday, is that the posts on the forum seem mostly geared to people who are already involved in EA, when it could be more productive to write posts that are geared to new people learning about EA (both in terms of content and writing style). TLYCS/GWWC blogs are more like that, although they are only for poverty.
yeah, I agree that we’ve talked about effective altruism using the assumption that people already know roughly what that is and why we would care about it. It’s a good idea to post more material that is of interest to a wider audience. Although having started off with stuff that affirms the purpose of the forum and our shared identity is not a bad thing, it’s just that it’d be good to balance it out now with some materials that a wider range of people can enjoy.