In an ideal perfect compulsive nit picky utopian world which will never exist because it’s just silly, :-) down voting would be accepted and encouraged, but at least briefly explaining the down vote would be a required part of the process.
But until such a system is in place, I definitely intend to down vote this post, and there’s no way I’ll be telling anyone why. You’ll just have to guess. Which won’t be that hard. :-)
The moderation team is issuing Phil Tanny a 1-year ban for repeated violation of Forum norms (even after warning). This user repeatedly violated our norms and we didn’t see any attempts on their behalf to follow our Forum’s norms more after we warned them the first time by messaging them and responding to their comments. Some examples:
I agree with the decision because of his harmfwl response to being downvoted, but… honestly, I feel like several of those points are exaggerated/misunderstood. This is not a critique of the decision, but perhaps a suggestion for how he might have been partially misunderstood.
I agree that he responded immaturely to the downvotes, and I agree that it was counterproductive to call the contest “blowhard”. On the other hand, I feel like a lot of the downvote-ganging was immature in return. Or just insufficiently charitable.
In the comment you say he was sarcastically saying “thank you”, I actually think he meant it sincerely, since this is similar to how I would express myself (emphasising the thanks to make sure it wouldn’t be misunderstood as just a formality).
I also don’t think hubris is a good reason to downvote someone. Regardless of the other things he was doing, he was also efficiently filtering for the attention of people like me—someone eager to explore the ideas of someone who tries exceptionally hard to not conform (and I thought he might especially have interesting perspectives due to being 70).
Ok, so I’m adapting to the environment I find myself in, and am proud to announce I’ve radically changed my attitude to down voting. Instead of whining and trying to swim upstream against the cultural tide, I’m going to embrace local norms, and strive to be the Down Voting Champion of the forum! This will of course involve both receiving and giving as many down votes as I can.
So far I seem to be excelling at receiving down votes, but my performance at giving down votes is sorely lacking. Must improve on that!
The down votes I give will of course come without any kind of explanation, because that is what is expected of me by the community. In fact, no one will ever know whether I even read the posts I am down voting, because I strive for perfection in all things.
Now personally, and I know I’m biased about this, but I think this post is worth at least 10 down votes, maybe more. So c’mon people, don’t be stingy, be altruistic, a cooperative community member, and help me march forward towards my goal. It only takes a second, pound that down vote button a few times for me, will ya please? Remember, I have delivered on providing down voting worthy content here, and deserve to be rewarded. I’m sure you agree.
Next, and this seems important. If you should know who the current reigning Down Voting Champion is, please let me know so I can stalk their posts and up vote them without mercy. If that’s cheating, then you know what to do. DOWN VOTE ME!!!
What are you trying to accomplish here? No one said that it was bad to give explanations for downvotes, only that it’s ok not to do it. No one said that downvoting (or getting downvoted) should be an end goal—evaluating and signalling comment quality is the goal. Your comment reads to me like a sarcastic rant based on (wilful?) misunderstandings.
Yes, it is a sarcastic rant, correct! What I’m trying to accomplish is have a little fun, a change of pace from whining. You’ve apparently not down voted me as requested, so I’m afraid I have no choice but to punish you by up voting your comment above. That’ll teach you! :-)
Ha, I just got here and I already have 122 down votes! I’m on the path to down vote victory! But, ok, ok, if you have more down votes, go ahead and brag here, I’m trying to be fair about this.
True story: I was appointed Lil Abner on Sadie Hawkins Day in high school, given my reputation for being rather dense I guess. High school and Lil Abner seem relevant to the subject of down votes....
Phil, you’ve been making a lot of posts in very short order since you joined. The enthusiasm is great! But have you considered taking the downvotes as a sign that maybe you should increase the threshold in quality for what you decide to post? I.e. take what you would’ve posted, and only post the most substantial and informative 25% of those.
As it is, it feels kind of like an indiscriminate information dump, and I for one am already tuning out most of what you write, which I think neither of us wants.
Hi Erich, thanks for your ongoing engagement, your feedback is appreciated.
Well, instead of “indiscriminate information dump” I view my posts as a summation of more than twenty years of thinking and writing. I do agree there is a fair amount of repetitive duplication in my posts here so far, which I do regret, but that is because I am searching in earnest for people capable of understanding , engaging and adding to the insights being shared. Some progress there, which is great.
I don’t expect anybody to read everything I write, but if you feel ANY of it is worthwhile, why not engage that fraction of the posts, and ignore the posts you find less interesting? I’m totally cool with that.
Your point on quality is well received, so let’s look at that more closely. I don’t have data on this, but my guess is that many or most members here are somewhere around a half to a third my age. Where true, I’ve been thinking and writing about such subjects since before they were born. To some significant degree that I can’t quantify, THAT who has been put in charge of evaluating my posts and feeding reputation data in to the forum software.
To debunk myself, I have to agree that as I am only a novice geezer (age 70) I’ve not yet fully grasped that the inexperienced judging the experienced is the way of the world, always has been, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, certainly not me. I seem to be about half way to the goal of accepting this eternal reality in a cheerful manner. I’m getting there, but as this thread reveals, there’s work to do yet.
I would like to offer a simple solution to my fellow members. If something I’ve written sucks, as it very well might, join the thread and rip what I’ve written to shreds. I’m very receptive to such a process.
As you’ve seen, I’m afraid I don’t have much respect for high school style hit and run anonymous popularity contest mechanisms, nor those who use them.
Wow, people are down-voting you to oblivion all over the place for the ill-founded reason that you don’t look humble enough to them. I haven’t read much, and I haven’t been enlightened by what I’ve read so far, but feel free to book a conversation with me if you wish to tell me about what you think are the most important pieces of wisdom you have to share. It’s likely to be one-off, but the potential downside is negligible compared to the potential upside. : )
In an ideal perfect compulsive nit picky utopian world which will never exist because it’s just silly, :-) down voting would be accepted and encouraged, but at least briefly explaining the down vote would be a required part of the process.
But until such a system is in place, I definitely intend to down vote this post, and there’s no way I’ll be telling anyone why. You’ll just have to guess. Which won’t be that hard. :-)
The moderation team is issuing Phil Tanny a 1-year ban for repeated violation of Forum norms (even after warning). This user repeatedly violated our norms and we didn’t see any attempts on their behalf to follow our Forum’s norms more after we warned them the first time by messaging them and responding to their comments. Some examples:
This comment is unnecessarily rude (the “thank you” in particular is sarcastic).
They posted other comments that are unnecessarily rude (e.g. calling the criticism contest “blowharding.”)
Their reaction to being downvoted was hostile (accusing people of malicious intent or school-like behavior), unproductive, and off-topic.
Thank you, I think that’s the right decision. I think bans for this type of behaviour could improve the forum.
I agree with the decision because of his harmfwl response to being downvoted, but… honestly, I feel like several of those points are exaggerated/misunderstood. This is not a critique of the decision, but perhaps a suggestion for how he might have been partially misunderstood.
I agree that he responded immaturely to the downvotes, and I agree that it was counterproductive to call the contest “blowhard”. On the other hand, I feel like a lot of the downvote-ganging was immature in return. Or just insufficiently charitable.
In the comment you say he was sarcastically saying “thank you”, I actually think he meant it sincerely, since this is similar to how I would express myself (emphasising the thanks to make sure it wouldn’t be misunderstood as just a formality).
I also don’t think hubris is a good reason to downvote someone. Regardless of the other things he was doing, he was also efficiently filtering for the attention of people like me—someone eager to explore the ideas of someone who tries exceptionally hard to not conform (and I thought he might especially have interesting perspectives due to being 70).
Ok, so I’m adapting to the environment I find myself in, and am proud to announce I’ve radically changed my attitude to down voting. Instead of whining and trying to swim upstream against the cultural tide, I’m going to embrace local norms, and strive to be the Down Voting Champion of the forum! This will of course involve both receiving and giving as many down votes as I can.
So far I seem to be excelling at receiving down votes, but my performance at giving down votes is sorely lacking. Must improve on that!
The down votes I give will of course come without any kind of explanation, because that is what is expected of me by the community. In fact, no one will ever know whether I even read the posts I am down voting, because I strive for perfection in all things.
Now personally, and I know I’m biased about this, but I think this post is worth at least 10 down votes, maybe more. So c’mon people, don’t be stingy, be altruistic, a cooperative community member, and help me march forward towards my goal. It only takes a second, pound that down vote button a few times for me, will ya please? Remember, I have delivered on providing down voting worthy content here, and deserve to be rewarded. I’m sure you agree.
Next, and this seems important. If you should know who the current reigning Down Voting Champion is, please let me know so I can stalk their posts and up vote them without mercy. If that’s cheating, then you know what to do. DOWN VOTE ME!!!
What are you trying to accomplish here? No one said that it was bad to give explanations for downvotes, only that it’s ok not to do it. No one said that downvoting (or getting downvoted) should be an end goal—evaluating and signalling comment quality is the goal. Your comment reads to me like a sarcastic rant based on (wilful?) misunderstandings.
Yes, it is a sarcastic rant, correct! What I’m trying to accomplish is have a little fun, a change of pace from whining. You’ve apparently not down voted me as requested, so I’m afraid I have no choice but to punish you by up voting your comment above. That’ll teach you! :-)
Ha, I just got here and I already have 122 down votes! I’m on the path to down vote victory! But, ok, ok, if you have more down votes, go ahead and brag here, I’m trying to be fair about this.
True story: I was appointed Lil Abner on Sadie Hawkins Day in high school, given my reputation for being rather dense I guess. High school and Lil Abner seem relevant to the subject of down votes....
Phil, you’ve been making a lot of posts in very short order since you joined. The enthusiasm is great! But have you considered taking the downvotes as a sign that maybe you should increase the threshold in quality for what you decide to post? I.e. take what you would’ve posted, and only post the most substantial and informative 25% of those.
As it is, it feels kind of like an indiscriminate information dump, and I for one am already tuning out most of what you write, which I think neither of us wants.
Hi Erich, thanks for your ongoing engagement, your feedback is appreciated.
Well, instead of “indiscriminate information dump” I view my posts as a summation of more than twenty years of thinking and writing. I do agree there is a fair amount of repetitive duplication in my posts here so far, which I do regret, but that is because I am searching in earnest for people capable of understanding , engaging and adding to the insights being shared. Some progress there, which is great.
I don’t expect anybody to read everything I write, but if you feel ANY of it is worthwhile, why not engage that fraction of the posts, and ignore the posts you find less interesting? I’m totally cool with that.
Your point on quality is well received, so let’s look at that more closely. I don’t have data on this, but my guess is that many or most members here are somewhere around a half to a third my age. Where true, I’ve been thinking and writing about such subjects since before they were born. To some significant degree that I can’t quantify, THAT who has been put in charge of evaluating my posts and feeding reputation data in to the forum software.
To debunk myself, I have to agree that as I am only a novice geezer (age 70) I’ve not yet fully grasped that the inexperienced judging the experienced is the way of the world, always has been, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, certainly not me. I seem to be about half way to the goal of accepting this eternal reality in a cheerful manner. I’m getting there, but as this thread reveals, there’s work to do yet.
I would like to offer a simple solution to my fellow members. If something I’ve written sucks, as it very well might, join the thread and rip what I’ve written to shreds. I’m very receptive to such a process.
As you’ve seen, I’m afraid I don’t have much respect for high school style hit and run anonymous popularity contest mechanisms, nor those who use them.
Wow, people are down-voting you to oblivion all over the place for the ill-founded reason that you don’t look humble enough to them. I haven’t read much, and I haven’t been enlightened by what I’ve read so far, but feel free to book a conversation with me if you wish to tell me about what you think are the most important pieces of wisdom you have to share. It’s likely to be one-off, but the potential downside is negligible compared to the potential upside. : )
FYI the forum team gave him a 1 year ban for not following forum norms and he may not ever read your comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LpCewmJgosEaz7ZkW/open-thread-june-september-2022?commentId=jRYMLyCg2sKfvjg9j