Having recently wrote a post that got a lot of silent downvotes, I’ve been thinking more about the general role of silent downvotes and how we could mitigate their downsides. (See some earlier discussion here.)
Silent downvotes are important for content ranking/visibility and providing a rough high-level signal of what the Forum community values/disvalues, but they have some pretty important disadvantages, especially when they represent a preponderance of a post’s karma:
They can be badly demoralising to authors, without providing the kind of actionable feedback they could use to do better. (I’ve seen plenty of plaintive comments asking people to explain their downvotes, often with no responses.)
They create an atmosphere of tension and adversariality that I think tends to degrade the quality of discourse (as well as being generally stressful for many people).
There’s already a feature that allows authors to hide comment karma on selected posts. I’m not sure entirely how it works, but I think it means that if the author chooses, nobody can see karma scores on that post?
That might be what some authors want, and is maybe preferable to seeing lots of silent downvotes, but at least for me it seems way worse than seeing downvotes and knowing why. I want to be able to make that update, but it’s often hard to do that based on silent downvotes alone.
It would be great to get more information from people about their downvotes, but any system for doing that needs to be super quick, simple, and easy – if a silent downvoter had time/energy/interest in providing an in-depth explanation of their downvote they’d just write a comment. But I think getting even a couple of bits more information from silent downvoters would be super valuable to authors.
The solution I have in mind for this right now is to provide a little optional pop-up next to the post karma total with a few common reasons for downvoting, plus an “Other” option (with or without the option to specify). You’d probably want to iterate a few times on the options, but my first pass would be:
I don’t like the tone (rude/tendentious/uncharitable)
I disagree with core claims
It has bad priorities / misses key considerations in a way that makes it unhelpful, even if its narrow claims are true (this one is obviously too long as-is)
It’s badly written / hard to read
Other
Then show the results to the author somehow (e.g. on the analytics tab).
You could also do this for upvotes; this might be nice and would reduce asymmetry with downvotes, but I’m not too concerned about it. You could also extend it to comment downvotes, though this seems lower priority to me.
I’m guessing a new feature like this would be a fairly significant lift code-wise, but I tentatively think it would be worth it – right now I see this as a fairly big problem with quality of discourse and community on the Forum.
Thank you for the link. That mockup is in some ways very close to my suggestion, which is exciting, but in some ways importantly different.
Less confidently, I feel iffy about having votes along these additional axes be public. I can see arguments for it (I think I’d feel better about being publicly downvoted for unclarity than for mystery reasons) but I’d also worry that it could make the intimidation effects worse for some (perhaps many) authors. That feels like an empirical question, though, and I wouldn’t be super surprised to be wrong.
More confidently, I would absolutely hate it if the Forum started letting people post emoji reactions on posts. I really don’t want the Forum to be more like Slack or Facebook in that way, and I think it would singlehandedly reduce my interest in posting on the Forum by >40%. This especially applies in cases where users can post custom reactions, but even if the reactions are pre-set I think it’s pretty bad.
Having recently wrote a post that got a lot of silent downvotes, I’ve been thinking more about the general role of silent downvotes and how we could mitigate their downsides. (See some earlier discussion here.)
Silent downvotes are important for content ranking/visibility and providing a rough high-level signal of what the Forum community values/disvalues, but they have some pretty important disadvantages, especially when they represent a preponderance of a post’s karma:
They can be badly demoralising to authors, without providing the kind of actionable feedback they could use to do better. (I’ve seen plenty of plaintive comments asking people to explain their downvotes, often with no responses.)
They create an atmosphere of tension and adversariality that I think tends to degrade the quality of discourse (as well as being generally stressful for many people).
There’s already a feature that allows authors to hide comment karma on selected posts. I’m not sure entirely how it works, but I think it means that if the author chooses, nobody can see karma scores on that post?
That might be what some authors want, and is maybe preferable to seeing lots of silent downvotes, but at least for me it seems way worse than seeing downvotes and knowing why. I want to be able to make that update, but it’s often hard to do that based on silent downvotes alone.
It would be great to get more information from people about their downvotes, but any system for doing that needs to be super quick, simple, and easy – if a silent downvoter had time/energy/interest in providing an in-depth explanation of their downvote they’d just write a comment. But I think getting even a couple of bits more information from silent downvoters would be super valuable to authors.
The solution I have in mind for this right now is to provide a little optional pop-up next to the post karma total with a few common reasons for downvoting, plus an “Other” option (with or without the option to specify). You’d probably want to iterate a few times on the options, but my first pass would be:
I don’t like the tone (rude/tendentious/uncharitable)
I disagree with core claims
It has bad priorities / misses key considerations in a way that makes it unhelpful, even if its narrow claims are true (this one is obviously too long as-is)
It’s badly written / hard to read
Other
Then show the results to the author somehow (e.g. on the analytics tab).
You could also do this for upvotes; this might be nice and would reduce asymmetry with downvotes, but I’m not too concerned about it. You could also extend it to comment downvotes, though this seems lower priority to me.
I’m guessing a new feature like this would be a fairly significant lift code-wise, but I tentatively think it would be worth it – right now I see this as a fairly big problem with quality of discourse and community on the Forum.
+1
You might be interested in providing feedback on this mockup from LW (which the EA Forum might implement, if they develop it)
I forgot to respond to this!
Thank you for the link. That mockup is in some ways very close to my suggestion, which is exciting, but in some ways importantly different.
Less confidently, I feel iffy about having votes along these additional axes be public. I can see arguments for it (I think I’d feel better about being publicly downvoted for unclarity than for mystery reasons) but I’d also worry that it could make the intimidation effects worse for some (perhaps many) authors. That feels like an empirical question, though, and I wouldn’t be super surprised to be wrong.
More confidently, I would absolutely hate it if the Forum started letting people post emoji reactions on posts. I really don’t want the Forum to be more like Slack or Facebook in that way, and I think it would singlehandedly reduce my interest in posting on the Forum by >40%. This especially applies in cases where users can post custom reactions, but even if the reactions are pre-set I think it’s pretty bad.
Thanks! That’s helpful
Thanks for the suggestion! I think you are right that this would be a fairly big project, but I’ve added it to our backlog for triage.