We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments’ karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one’s own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.
There was a good amount of agreement about this previously.
As to whether voting on overall karma for one’s own comment should be eliminated, I would prefer deactivating voting to a default strong-upvote, however a third option that I think might be better would beto default-normal-upvote and disable strong-upvote on one’s own comment.
A fourth option (that I think I’d prefer the most) would be to retain the ability to strong upvote one’s own comments while making the default for everyone normal-upvote or no-upvote (to preserve the ability to self-boost unusually important comments). Some other mechanism would be needed to prevent abuse of this.
For example, the mechanism could be that self-strong-upvoting only works if nobody else downvotes your comment.
Or it could be that you could only self-strong-upvote your comment if you strong-upvoted less than 9 in 10 (or whatever fraction) of your previous comments.
I think the key problem, both for upvoting and agreement-voting is that is that it hurts much more to have your comments in the negatives than it feels good to have your comments in the positives (and indeed, whenever I see a negative number, it feels really harsh and it does give me a sense that the community overall disapproves or disagrees with the content).
I think usually when a discussion is heated, I prefer the equilibrium where the two primary discussion partners have votes that cancel each other out, instead of an equilibrium where just all the comments are in the negatives.
This includes the case where the person you are responding to is strong-downvoting your comment, and then I think it can make sense to strong-upvote your comment, in order to not give the false impression that there is a consensus against your comment.
I don’t currently know a good way to handle this. I also dislike the recent change to disagreement-voting for that reason, and would prefer a world where we also make agreement-votes automatically self-apply, since my brain definitely parses a discussion with everything in the negatives on agreement voting as “there is consensus against this” as opposed to “there are two people disagreeing”.
I do think the thing where you can but don’t automatically agree with your own post is confusing. Right now if I see something with one agree and one disagree vote it’s ambiguous whether two other people voted, plus the comment writer surely agrees with themself, or if the one agree is from the comment writer so it’s 1 to 1.
I think usually when a discussion is heated, I prefer the equilibrium where the two primary discussion partners have votes that cancel each other out, instead of an equilibrium where just all the comments are in the negatives.… This includes the case where the person you are responding to is strong-downvoting your comment, and then I think it can make sense to strong-upvote your comment, in order to not give the false impression that there is a consensus against your comment.
This problem won’t arise if everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default.
The main downside to everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default in my view is that it punishes new users (or those with lower karma and thus weaker strong-upvotes) too much. Maybe this isn’t that important of a factor?
Yeah, but I think the problem is then that in the case of comments the consensus seems actually too dominated by people’s initial strong-vote, and arguing against Eliezer on LW with a 10 karma upvote would make it feel like consensus is heavily stacked against you in a way I also don’t like.
I mean, that would just make the total karma system in 90% of cases worse. For example I think it totally makes sense for posts by Eliezer to start with that much karma, since I think there is a strong prior that they are going to be pretty good.
Ah, yeah, I think that’s a kind of reasonable thing to do. My primary hesitation is that it’s not super intuitive and adds complexity, but it seems like one of the reasonable ways forward.
The third proposal seems fine to me, but the fourth is complex, and still rewards users who strong-upvote their own comments as much as the rules allow.
I strongly agree about eliminating the ability to agree/disagree-vote on one’s own comment. I expect everyone to agree with what they write by default unless e.g. they say they’re playing devil’s advocate. Giving people the option to agree-vote on their own comment just adds unnecessary uncertainty by making it so people can’t tell if an agreement vote on a comment is coming from the author or another user.
We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments’ karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one’s own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.
There was a good amount of agreement about this previously.
This has now been implemented. You cannot strong upvote your own comments, nor vote along the agreement axis.
Thank you!
Great, thanks!
As to whether voting on overall karma for one’s own comment should be eliminated, I would prefer deactivating voting to a default strong-upvote, however a third option that I think might be better would be to default-normal-upvote and disable strong-upvote on one’s own comment.
A fourth option (that I think I’d prefer the most) would be to retain the ability to strong upvote one’s own comments while making the default for everyone normal-upvote or no-upvote (to preserve the ability to self-boost unusually important comments). Some other mechanism would be needed to prevent abuse of this.
For example, the mechanism could be that self-strong-upvoting only works if nobody else downvotes your comment.
Or it could be that you could only self-strong-upvote your comment if you strong-upvoted less than 9 in 10 (or whatever fraction) of your previous comments.
I think the key problem, both for upvoting and agreement-voting is that is that it hurts much more to have your comments in the negatives than it feels good to have your comments in the positives (and indeed, whenever I see a negative number, it feels really harsh and it does give me a sense that the community overall disapproves or disagrees with the content).
I think usually when a discussion is heated, I prefer the equilibrium where the two primary discussion partners have votes that cancel each other out, instead of an equilibrium where just all the comments are in the negatives.
This includes the case where the person you are responding to is strong-downvoting your comment, and then I think it can make sense to strong-upvote your comment, in order to not give the false impression that there is a consensus against your comment.
I don’t currently know a good way to handle this. I also dislike the recent change to disagreement-voting for that reason, and would prefer a world where we also make agreement-votes automatically self-apply, since my brain definitely parses a discussion with everything in the negatives on agreement voting as “there is consensus against this” as opposed to “there are two people disagreeing”.
I do think the thing where you can but don’t automatically agree with your own post is confusing. Right now if I see something with one agree and one disagree vote it’s ambiguous whether two other people voted, plus the comment writer surely agrees with themself, or if the one agree is from the comment writer so it’s 1 to 1.
This problem won’t arise if everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default.
The main downside to everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default in my view is that it punishes new users (or those with lower karma and thus weaker strong-upvotes) too much. Maybe this isn’t that important of a factor?
To me, that sounds like a feature, not a bug, given how the influx of users has degraded average post quality recently.
Yeah, but I think the problem is then that in the case of comments the consensus seems actually too dominated by people’s initial strong-vote, and arguing against Eliezer on LW with a 10 karma upvote would make it feel like consensus is heavily stacked against you in a way I also don’t like.
Most people have strong upvote strength 3-7 though. Anyway, if this is a big problem, then just cap self-upvote strength around 5?
I mean, that would just make the total karma system in 90% of cases worse. For example I think it totally makes sense for posts by Eliezer to start with that much karma, since I think there is a strong prior that they are going to be pretty good.
I was thinking just for comments.
Ah, yeah, I think that’s a kind of reasonable thing to do. My primary hesitation is that it’s not super intuitive and adds complexity, but it seems like one of the reasonable ways forward.
The third proposal seems fine to me, but the fourth is complex, and still rewards users who strong-upvote their own comments as much as the rules allow.
I strongly agree about eliminating the ability to agree/disagree-vote on one’s own comment. I expect everyone to agree with what they write by default unless e.g. they say they’re playing devil’s advocate. Giving people the option to agree-vote on their own comment just adds unnecessary uncertainty by making it so people can’t tell if an agreement vote on a comment is coming from the author or another user.
I agree. This has been discussed for quite some time (it was first raised three years ago) so it would be good to reach a decision.