Having spent significant time around both the EA and the LW community and having written several controversial posts and then subsequently talked with folks who downvoted those posts, I now have strong reason to believe that most downvotes are in fact “boos” rather than anything more substantive. When people have substantive disagreements with posts they more often post comments indicating that and just don’t vote on a post either way.
I’m sure this is not universally true but it’s been my experience, so when I see downvotes on a post that isn’t obviously spam, trolling, or otherwise clearly low-quality (rather than in this case just not containing much content, a kind of post that is clearly not universally downvoted because many low content posts get either neutral or positive responses, which I must assume given their lack of content is a function of agreement with the idea presented), I find it reasonable to ask “why ‘boo’ at this?”. Hence my comment as a possible explanation for more “boos” than “yays”.
I agree it would be preferable if people didn’t use votes as “boos” and “yays”, and I think we could fix this—maybe by only allowing people who comment on a post to vote on it, although I think that risks creating lots of meaningless comments because people just want to vote, so there is probably some other solution that would work better—but unfortunately my experience suggests that’s exactly how most people vote on posts and comments.
Having spent significant time around both the EA and the LW community and having written several controversial posts and then subsequently talked with folks who downvoted those posts, I now have strong reason to believe that most downvotes are in fact “boos” rather than anything more substantive. When people have substantive disagreements with posts they more often post comments indicating that and just don’t vote on a post either way.
I’m sure this is not universally true but it’s been my experience, so when I see downvotes on a post that isn’t obviously spam, trolling, or otherwise clearly low-quality (rather than in this case just not containing much content, a kind of post that is clearly not universally downvoted because many low content posts get either neutral or positive responses, which I must assume given their lack of content is a function of agreement with the idea presented), I find it reasonable to ask “why ‘boo’ at this?”. Hence my comment as a possible explanation for more “boos” than “yays”.
I agree it would be preferable if people didn’t use votes as “boos” and “yays”, and I think we could fix this—maybe by only allowing people who comment on a post to vote on it, although I think that risks creating lots of meaningless comments because people just want to vote, so there is probably some other solution that would work better—but unfortunately my experience suggests that’s exactly how most people vote on posts and comments.