Suggestion for the forum: prompt anyone who downvotes a (new) post to leave a comment
If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you’ll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted. Yet a lot of these posts clearly involved a lot of work and are well intended. I imagine that to put so much effort into a post only to be immediately downvoted, and possibly have your post disappear from the front page and be read by very few people as a result, must be quite disheartening.
Of course many of these posts have flaws. But it would be good then for anyone who downvotes it—or even disagree-votes—to say why and provide feedback. I think requiring this would be too much, but if downvoting triggered a comment-box to pop up, that might help to encourage such feedback to be given. I’m imagining this working the same way voting on a poll prompts you to also add a comment. And if doing this across the board seems too annoying, it could be made to apply only to posts with, idk, <10 karma?
If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you’ll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted.
I don’t think this is correct, you can mouseover the karma score of a post to see the number of votes. E.g. here it has 1 karma from 1 vote (the automatic self-vote that is given when you post) and no downvotes
I think these posts are either not being shown on the frontpage to most people, or don’t get voted on before disappearing
Oh! I had the idea that new posts start with 3 karma, but then I was wrong.
In that case, I suppose downvoting is less common than I thought. I did still see one or two new posts with 0 or −1 karma, so my argument would still stand for them. But this is clearly less of an issue than I thought.
Suggestion for the forum: prompt anyone who downvotes a (new) post to leave a comment
If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you’ll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted. Yet a lot of these posts clearly involved a lot of work and are well intended. I imagine that to put so much effort into a post only to be immediately downvoted, and possibly have your post disappear from the front page and be read by very few people as a result, must be quite disheartening.
Of course many of these posts have flaws. But it would be good then for anyone who downvotes it—or even disagree-votes—to say why and provide feedback. I think requiring this would be too much, but if downvoting triggered a comment-box to pop up, that might help to encourage such feedback to be given. I’m imagining this working the same way voting on a poll prompts you to also add a comment. And if doing this across the board seems too annoying, it could be made to apply only to posts with, idk, <10 karma?
I don’t think this is correct, you can mouseover the karma score of a post to see the number of votes. E.g. here it has 1 karma from 1 vote (the automatic self-vote that is given when you post) and no downvotes
I think these posts are either not being shown on the frontpage to most people, or don’t get voted on before disappearing
Oh! I had the idea that new posts start with 3 karma, but then I was wrong.
In that case, I suppose downvoting is less common than I thought. I did still see one or two new posts with 0 or −1 karma, so my argument would still stand for them. But this is clearly less of an issue than I thought.
They start with a self-strong-upvote, which depends on the user karma https://github.com/centre-for-effective-altruism/ea-forum/blob/27d24f53b7dce59b770040e6ac9ff05fcb9c4b16/src/lib/votes/voteHelpers.ts#L71-L91