A single user with a decent amount of karma can unilaterally decide to censor a post and hide it from the front page with a strong downvote. Giving people unilateral and anonymous censorship power like this seems bad.
I would be in favor of eliminating strong downvotes entirely. If a post or comment is going to be censored or given less visibility, it should be because a lot of people wanted that to happen rather than just two or three.
I dunno, I also strong downvote things that don’t break the rules but present ideas that I find likely really harmful (e.g. if someone started proposing eugenics as a cause area).
I’d also include norms against promoting violence or coercion.
I think there should be a place to discuss voluntary eugenics, i.e. parents selecting for certain positive traits or against certain negative traits in their children before birth, and if there should be anywhere it can be discussed publicly online where basically anyone can participate, I think the EA Forum may be among the best places. If you were to strong downvote a post discussing it, I would hope you’d explain why in the comments (or someone else would).
Previously, I’ve recommended strong downvotes be required to be accompanied by explanations. The explanations could still be anonymous, although I’m not sure whether it’s better or worse for them to be anonymous.
I think there should be a place to discuss voluntary eugenics, i.e. parents selecting for certain positive traits or against certain negative traits in their children before birth… If you were to strong downvote a post discussing it, I would hope you’d explain why
I’d almost surely downvote it, but whether it’s a strong downvote will depend on details (e.g. if there’s an elitist call to “improve humanity by genetic selection”). The reason is that I think it’s a rabbit hole that starts out looking innocent but quickly develops, whether by the forum users or by whomever their discussion might influence, into something very bad.
I do the same, but I think we should be transparent about what those harmful ideas are. Have posted rules about what words or topics are beyond the pale, which a moderator can enforce unilaterally with an announcement, much like they do on private Facebook groups or Reddit threads. Where a harmful comment doesn’t explicitly violate a rule, users can still downvote it into oblivion—but it shouldn’t be up to one or two people’s unilateral discretion.
Enough people look at the All-Posts page that this is rarely an issue, at least on LessWrong where I’ve looked at the analytics for this. Indeed, many of the most active voters prefer to use the all-posts page, and a post having negative karma tends to actually attract a bit more attention than a post having low karma.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of the All-Posts page. That’s helpful, but I’d wonder if it’s also being used as much on the EA Forum. I’m probably relatively active on the EA Forum, and I only check Pinned Posts and Frontpage Posts, and I sometimes hit “Load more” for the latter.
Note also that one strong downvote might not put a post into negative karma, but just low positive karma, if the submitter has enough karma themself or others have upvoted the post.
As a datum I rarely look beyond the front page posts, and tbh the majority of my engagement probably comes from the EA forum digest recommendations, which I imagine are basically a curated version of the same.
Does this happen often enough for it to be a significant worry? I agree that this is a way the karma system could be abused, but what matters is whether it is in fact frequently abused in this way.
It’s not clear people would even know it’s an abuse of the system to strong downvote a post early on, rather than wait.
I don’t have access to data on this, but a few related anecdotes, although not directly instances of it.
This post itself was starting to pick up upvotes and then I think either received a bunch of downvotes or a strong downvote (or people removed upvotes), so I switched my regular upvote into a strong one. I think it went from 20-25 karma to 11-16. I’d guess this wouldn’t be enough to hide it from the front page, though, but if it had been hidden early on, I might not have made my comment starting this thread.
I’ve seen a few suffering-focused ethics-related comments get strong downvoted by users with substantial karma, in particular a few of my own comments on my shortform (some that I had shared on the 80,000 Hours website, and another in an SFE/NU FB group) and a comment about utilitarianism.net omitting discussion of negative utilitarianism. I’m not aware of this happening to posts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if such users would do the same to posts, including early on. These might have been 2 years ago by now, though.
I think there are some posts that should be made invisible; and that it’s good if strong downvotes make them so. Thus, I would like empirical evidence that such a reform would do more good than harm. My hunch is that it wouldn’t.
A single user with a decent amount of karma can unilaterally decide to censor a post and hide it from the front page with a strong downvote. Giving people unilateral and anonymous censorship power like this seems bad.
I would be in favor of eliminating strong downvotes entirely. If a post or comment is going to be censored or given less visibility, it should be because a lot of people wanted that to happen rather than just two or three.
Ya, I agree. I think the only things I strong downvote are things worth reporting as norm-breaking, like spam or hostile/abusive comments.
We could also just weaken (strong) downvotes relative to upvotes.
I dunno, I also strong downvote things that don’t break the rules but present ideas that I find likely really harmful (e.g. if someone started proposing eugenics as a cause area).
I’d also include norms against promoting violence or coercion.
I think there should be a place to discuss voluntary eugenics, i.e. parents selecting for certain positive traits or against certain negative traits in their children before birth, and if there should be anywhere it can be discussed publicly online where basically anyone can participate, I think the EA Forum may be among the best places. If you were to strong downvote a post discussing it, I would hope you’d explain why in the comments (or someone else would).
Previously, I’ve recommended strong downvotes be required to be accompanied by explanations. The explanations could still be anonymous, although I’m not sure whether it’s better or worse for them to be anonymous.
I don’t want to digress so I’ll keep this short.
I’d almost surely downvote it, but whether it’s a strong downvote will depend on details (e.g. if there’s an elitist call to “improve humanity by genetic selection”). The reason is that I think it’s a rabbit hole that starts out looking innocent but quickly develops, whether by the forum users or by whomever their discussion might influence, into something very bad.
I do the same, but I think we should be transparent about what those harmful ideas are. Have posted rules about what words or topics are beyond the pale, which a moderator can enforce unilaterally with an announcement, much like they do on private Facebook groups or Reddit threads. Where a harmful comment doesn’t explicitly violate a rule, users can still downvote it into oblivion—but it shouldn’t be up to one or two people’s unilateral discretion.
Enough people look at the All-Posts page that this is rarely an issue, at least on LessWrong where I’ve looked at the analytics for this. Indeed, many of the most active voters prefer to use the all-posts page, and a post having negative karma tends to actually attract a bit more attention than a post having low karma.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of the All-Posts page. That’s helpful, but I’d wonder if it’s also being used as much on the EA Forum. I’m probably relatively active on the EA Forum, and I only check Pinned Posts and Frontpage Posts, and I sometimes hit “Load more” for the latter.
Note also that one strong downvote might not put a post into negative karma, but just low positive karma, if the submitter has enough karma themself or others have upvoted the post.
As a datum I rarely look beyond the front page posts, and tbh the majority of my engagement probably comes from the EA forum digest recommendations, which I imagine are basically a curated version of the same.
Does this happen often enough for it to be a significant worry? I agree that this is a way the karma system could be abused, but what matters is whether it is in fact frequently abused in this way.
It’s not clear people would even know it’s an abuse of the system to strong downvote a post early on, rather than wait.
I don’t have access to data on this, but a few related anecdotes, although not directly instances of it.
This post itself was starting to pick up upvotes and then I think either received a bunch of downvotes or a strong downvote (or people removed upvotes), so I switched my regular upvote into a strong one. I think it went from 20-25 karma to 11-16. I’d guess this wouldn’t be enough to hide it from the front page, though, but if it had been hidden early on, I might not have made my comment starting this thread.
I’ve seen a few suffering-focused ethics-related comments get strong downvoted by users with substantial karma, in particular a few of my own comments on my shortform (some that I had shared on the 80,000 Hours website, and another in an SFE/NU FB group) and a comment about utilitarianism.net omitting discussion of negative utilitarianism. I’m not aware of this happening to posts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if such users would do the same to posts, including early on. These might have been 2 years ago by now, though.
One option could be disabling strong downvotes (or their impact on sorting) on posts for the first X hours a post is up. Maybe 24 hours?
I think there are some posts that should be made invisible; and that it’s good if strong downvotes make them so. Thus, I would like empirical evidence that such a reform would do more good than harm. My hunch is that it wouldn’t.