I wouldn’t concern yourself much with downvotes on this forum. People use downvotes for a lot more than the useful/not useful distinction they’re designed for (most common other reason is to just signal against views they disagree with when they see an opening). I was recently talking to someone about what big improvements I’d like to see in the EA community’s online discussion norms, and honestly if I could either remove bad comment behavior or remove bad liking/voting behavior, it’d actually be the latter.
To put it another way, though I’m still not sure exactly how to explain this, I think no downvotes and one thoughtful comment explaining why your comment is wrong (and no upvotes on that comment) should do more to change your mind than a large number of downvotes on your comment.
I’m really still in favor of just removing downvotes from this forum, since this issue has been so persistent over the years. I think there would be downsides, but the hostile/groupthink/dogpiling environment that the downvoting behavior facilitates is just really really terrible.
I previously defended keeping down-votes, I confess I’m not so sure now.
A fairly common trait is people conflate some viewpoint independent metric of ‘quality’ with ‘whether I like this person of the view they espouse’. I’m sure most users have voting patterns that line up with these predictors pretty strongly, although there is some residual signal from quality: I imagine a view where one has a pretty low threshold for upvoting stuff sympathetic to ones view, and a very high one for upvoting non-sympathetic, and vice versa for downvotes.
I’m not sure how the dynamic changes if you get rid of downvotes though. Assuredly there’s a similar effect where people just refrain to upvote your stuff and slavishly upvote your opponents. There probably is some value in ‘nuking’ really low quality remarks to save everyone time. Unsure.
I wouldn’t concern yourself much with downvotes on this forum. People use downvotes for a lot more than the useful/not useful distinction they’re designed for (most common other reason is to just signal against views they disagree with when they see an opening). I was recently talking to someone about what big improvements I’d like to see in the EA community’s online discussion norms, and honestly if I could either remove bad comment behavior or remove bad liking/voting behavior, it’d actually be the latter.
To put it another way, though I’m still not sure exactly how to explain this, I think no downvotes and one thoughtful comment explaining why your comment is wrong (and no upvotes on that comment) should do more to change your mind than a large number of downvotes on your comment.
I’m really still in favor of just removing downvotes from this forum, since this issue has been so persistent over the years. I think there would be downsides, but the hostile/groupthink/dogpiling environment that the downvoting behavior facilitates is just really really terrible.
I previously defended keeping down-votes, I confess I’m not so sure now.
A fairly common trait is people conflate some viewpoint independent metric of ‘quality’ with ‘whether I like this person of the view they espouse’. I’m sure most users have voting patterns that line up with these predictors pretty strongly, although there is some residual signal from quality: I imagine a view where one has a pretty low threshold for upvoting stuff sympathetic to ones view, and a very high one for upvoting non-sympathetic, and vice versa for downvotes.
I’m not sure how the dynamic changes if you get rid of downvotes though. Assuredly there’s a similar effect where people just refrain to upvote your stuff and slavishly upvote your opponents. There probably is some value in ‘nuking’ really low quality remarks to save everyone time. Unsure.
Yeah, I’m totally onboard with all of that, including the uncertainty.
My view on downvoting is less that we need to remove it, and more that the status quo is terrible and we should be trying really hard to fix it.