I think we should stop having downvotes on the EA Forum
I agree with this. Contra Buck, I think people use downvotes to express things they ultimately disagree with, rather that because they genuinely find someone’s comments ‘unhelpful’, i.e. malicious, lazy, something like that. I might also prompt people to say what they didn’t like with the other person’s vote, rather than just voting anonymously (and snarkily) with karma points.
I might also prompt people to say what they didn’t like with the other person’s vote, rather than just voting anonymously (and snarkily) with karma points.
The problem is that this takes a lot of time, and people with good judgement are more likely to have a high opportunity cost of time; you want to make it as cheap as possible for people with good judgement to discourage bad comments; I think that the current downvoting system is working pretty well for that purpose. (One suggestion that’s better than yours is to only allow a subset of people (perhaps those with over 500 karma) to downvote; Hacker News for example does this.)
Another (possibly bad, but want to put it out there) solution is to list names of people who downvoted. That of course has downsides, but it would have more accountability, especially when it comes to my suspicion that it’s a few people doing a lot of the downvoting against certain people/ideas.
Another is to have downvotes ‘cost’ karma, e.g. if you have 500 total karma, that allows you to make 50 downvotes.
I agree with this. Contra Buck, I think people use downvotes to express things they ultimately disagree with, rather that because they genuinely find someone’s comments ‘unhelpful’, i.e. malicious, lazy, something like that. I might also prompt people to say what they didn’t like with the other person’s vote, rather than just voting anonymously (and snarkily) with karma points.
The problem is that this takes a lot of time, and people with good judgement are more likely to have a high opportunity cost of time; you want to make it as cheap as possible for people with good judgement to discourage bad comments; I think that the current downvoting system is working pretty well for that purpose. (One suggestion that’s better than yours is to only allow a subset of people (perhaps those with over 500 karma) to downvote; Hacker News for example does this.)
Please let’s not give people any more incentives to game the karma system than they already have.
Another (possibly bad, but want to put it out there) solution is to list names of people who downvoted. That of course has downsides, but it would have more accountability, especially when it comes to my suspicion that it’s a few people doing a lot of the downvoting against certain people/ideas.
Another is to have downvotes ‘cost’ karma, e.g. if you have 500 total karma, that allows you to make 50 downvotes.
This would make it harder for people to downvote on topics like this one where it’s really risky to admit disagreeing with people.