I don’t know that there’s been that much downvoting, when on balance the score is −1, but it does say that it’s been 55% downvoted, so that implies that before I arrived there were 4 up, 5 down, most likely. First, I’ll say that the top link you provide is about encouraging more voting behavior, not discouraging downvotes.
Second, I’ll provide my best guess on the reasons for downvotes.
This author has been posting… a lot. This is the third post in the last 48 hours, and the EA Forum often goes 48 hours without any posts at all. Furthermore, each post is also shared on 3-5+ EA Facebook groups.
This would be fine but, at the risk of overgeneralizing, the posts seem to score just so-so on some key considerations that make some other posts on the EA Forum great. Things these posts score just so-so on are compellingness/proof, understanding/engagement/knowledge of EA, relevance to EA, non-obviousness, and uniqueness. It doesn’t help that they seem to pattern-match quite strongly for self-promotion, and that the author is new to the community with unknown background (meaning there’s a higher hurdle for believability in expertise and engagement).
I think it’s great for people new to the community to put their thoughts out there, but as often as this has occurred, in this manner, and on the EA Forum, perhaps aren’t the best fit. EA Hangout and EA Movement Building are two Facebook groups that might be a better match, although I’d also suggest that these types of posts would benefit from more humility/restraint as well.
As someone who’s still on the newish side of EA, I’ve been struggling with some of these same things as well, learning how to craft a post that is really compelling with the EA community. I’m working to improve myself, and while I maybe haven’t gotten the downvotes that this one received, I’ve gotten feedback that’s been highly upvoted on my other posts and has shown that I have work to do in my writing here.
Regarding the self-promotional stuff, I will repeat what I stated earlier. I generally have an approach of saying the things that I will do, and then doing them, and then getting feedback from the community about them. My goal is to try to improve based on feedback. This helps explain the multiple posts, I think.
I can see how it might come off as self-promotional to some, though—they can’t read my mind about my motivations. Having gotten some feedback about the perception of self-promotional just a bit earlier, I will aim to mention Intentional Insights less in my posts—for example, in the post above, I did not mention it once. I will also decrease the number of EA forum postings.
Regarding FB groups, I find that many people find it easier to engage on FB than in the EA forum, and so I make a longer post on the EA forum, and then let folks know about it on FB. It promotes a more dynamic form of discussion. Similar to what Tom did with raising the question regarding downvoting on FB, in some ways. I do hear what you’re saying about posting to several groups, though, and will keep in mind to reduce the FB group posts.
I see the downvoting trend as a symptom of some potentially problematic community dynamics. I think this warrants a top-level post so we can hash out what the purpose, value, and risks are of downvotes.
Ironic that your comment was downvoted by someone. I think this exemplifies the need for a top-level post.
It seems that the point of upvoting and downvoting is not for people to use it for purposes of popularity and anonymity, but to evaluate quality of ideas independent of who they came from, and also to signal to others whether they should engage with the post or not. For example, a good policy change is for people explain their justifications for downvoting as part of downvoting something.
I’d also be interested to know that. I want to optimize what I’m doing, and the downvoting doesn’t really encourage optimization—I don’t know what people are reacting to. Comments are much more helpful :-)
Hi Gleb,
I was the first person who voted on this post at all and it was a downvote. I didn’t explain it immediately because people’s preferences for whether they like explanations or not seem to differ.
My reasons were the same that other people have mentioned before—you write a lot in a small forum, that can come across as overwhelming and I think it would be preferable if you (had) made one long post with all your ideas.
Your posts also have a weak feeling of being self-promotional to me.
I wasn’t sure whether you preferred public or private feedback, if you prefer private feedback, I’m happy to delete this comment.
(I also just decided not to approve your posts in the ‘Effektiver Altruismus’ FB group for roughly the same reasons.)
Denise, thanks a lot for the explanation! Really appreciate it.
I generally have a perspective that we’re all in this movement together, and have some disagreements about getting to shared goals. But if we don’t give each other feedback, how will we learn and improve? Private feedback is fine, or public feedback if you think others should see it, but some kind of feedback is super-helpful :-)
Regarding the many posts, I’d like to understand more how it might come across as overwhelming. After all, people may choose to read them or not.
On the point of writing one long post versus more smaller ones, what I tend to find is that as I get feedback on smaller posts, I update, think more, have more interactions, and then my ideas develop to write another post. I see this as the essence of community engagement—co-creating ideas collaboratively, not me coming up with ideas in isolation and then writing about them.
I accept your choice for the FB group. I’m curious what are the attitudes of members of the group about this. If you want to figure it out, it should be easy enough to do via a FB poll. Not saying you need to do it, and I’m fine with your choice just based on your say-so, but this would be the way of gathering evidence that I would take if I wanted evidence.
I hear you about the self-promotional stuff. I generally have an approach of saying the things that I will do, and then doing them, and then getting feedback from the community about them. My goal is to try to improve based on feedback. I can see how it might come off as self-promotional to some, though—they can’t read my mind about my motivations. Having gotten some feedback about the perception of self-promotional just a bit earlier, I will aim to mention Intentional Insights less in my posts—for example, in the post above, I did not mention it once.
I didn’t explain it immediately because people’s preferences for whether they like explanations or not seem to differ.
This makes sense. :) Ideally people should get to specify whether they prefer to have public versus private criticism, as having public criticism forced on them without their requesting it would likely put a lot of people off entering into EA discussions altogether.
Should people downvote just because they disagree? I’m not saying they shouldn’t, just that it’d be good to have a discussion of this. :) I’ve just started one in the latest open thread. I’ve heard people argue that they shouldn’t, and the text that appears when you other over the upvote/downvote icons suggests as much.
It’s a pretty universal standard on websites with comment voting that you shouldn’t downvote to indicate disagreement. People still do it anyway though.
Yup, people do it anyway, I just hoped EAs would be better about it. We’re all in this together, after all—we share the same goal, even if disagreeing somewhat about the methods.
You misunderstand me. I don’t think the person is down voting because they disagree, but the fact they are down voting without commenting is an indication they disagree that a down vote requires a comment.
That’s not ironic.
Why the heavy downvoting? There have been relevant recent discussions of this, and they include http://effective-altruism.com/ea/qj/meta_up_and_down_voting_should_be_added_next_to/ and http://effective-altruism.com/ea/q7/my_coming_of_age_as_an_ea_12_problems_with/5o8?context=1#comments
I don’t know that there’s been that much downvoting, when on balance the score is −1, but it does say that it’s been 55% downvoted, so that implies that before I arrived there were 4 up, 5 down, most likely. First, I’ll say that the top link you provide is about encouraging more voting behavior, not discouraging downvotes.
Second, I’ll provide my best guess on the reasons for downvotes.
This author has been posting… a lot. This is the third post in the last 48 hours, and the EA Forum often goes 48 hours without any posts at all. Furthermore, each post is also shared on 3-5+ EA Facebook groups.
This would be fine but, at the risk of overgeneralizing, the posts seem to score just so-so on some key considerations that make some other posts on the EA Forum great. Things these posts score just so-so on are compellingness/proof, understanding/engagement/knowledge of EA, relevance to EA, non-obviousness, and uniqueness. It doesn’t help that they seem to pattern-match quite strongly for self-promotion, and that the author is new to the community with unknown background (meaning there’s a higher hurdle for believability in expertise and engagement).
I think it’s great for people new to the community to put their thoughts out there, but as often as this has occurred, in this manner, and on the EA Forum, perhaps aren’t the best fit. EA Hangout and EA Movement Building are two Facebook groups that might be a better match, although I’d also suggest that these types of posts would benefit from more humility/restraint as well.
As someone who’s still on the newish side of EA, I’ve been struggling with some of these same things as well, learning how to craft a post that is really compelling with the EA community. I’m working to improve myself, and while I maybe haven’t gotten the downvotes that this one received, I’ve gotten feedback that’s been highly upvoted on my other posts and has shown that I have work to do in my writing here.
Thanks for the feedback, helpful stuff!
Regarding the self-promotional stuff, I will repeat what I stated earlier. I generally have an approach of saying the things that I will do, and then doing them, and then getting feedback from the community about them. My goal is to try to improve based on feedback. This helps explain the multiple posts, I think.
I can see how it might come off as self-promotional to some, though—they can’t read my mind about my motivations. Having gotten some feedback about the perception of self-promotional just a bit earlier, I will aim to mention Intentional Insights less in my posts—for example, in the post above, I did not mention it once. I will also decrease the number of EA forum postings.
Regarding FB groups, I find that many people find it easier to engage on FB than in the EA forum, and so I make a longer post on the EA forum, and then let folks know about it on FB. It promotes a more dynamic form of discussion. Similar to what Tom did with raising the question regarding downvoting on FB, in some ways. I do hear what you’re saying about posting to several groups, though, and will keep in mind to reduce the FB group posts.
I see the downvoting trend as a symptom of some potentially problematic community dynamics. I think this warrants a top-level post so we can hash out what the purpose, value, and risks are of downvotes.
Ironic that your comment was downvoted by someone. I think this exemplifies the need for a top-level post.
It seems that the point of upvoting and downvoting is not for people to use it for purposes of popularity and anonymity, but to evaluate quality of ideas independent of who they came from, and also to signal to others whether they should engage with the post or not. For example, a good policy change is for people explain their justifications for downvoting as part of downvoting something.
I’d also be interested to know that. I want to optimize what I’m doing, and the downvoting doesn’t really encourage optimization—I don’t know what people are reacting to. Comments are much more helpful :-)
Hi Gleb, I was the first person who voted on this post at all and it was a downvote. I didn’t explain it immediately because people’s preferences for whether they like explanations or not seem to differ.
My reasons were the same that other people have mentioned before—you write a lot in a small forum, that can come across as overwhelming and I think it would be preferable if you (had) made one long post with all your ideas.
Your posts also have a weak feeling of being self-promotional to me.
I wasn’t sure whether you preferred public or private feedback, if you prefer private feedback, I’m happy to delete this comment.
(I also just decided not to approve your posts in the ‘Effektiver Altruismus’ FB group for roughly the same reasons.)
Denise, thanks a lot for the explanation! Really appreciate it.
I generally have a perspective that we’re all in this movement together, and have some disagreements about getting to shared goals. But if we don’t give each other feedback, how will we learn and improve? Private feedback is fine, or public feedback if you think others should see it, but some kind of feedback is super-helpful :-)
Regarding the many posts, I’d like to understand more how it might come across as overwhelming. After all, people may choose to read them or not.
On the point of writing one long post versus more smaller ones, what I tend to find is that as I get feedback on smaller posts, I update, think more, have more interactions, and then my ideas develop to write another post. I see this as the essence of community engagement—co-creating ideas collaboratively, not me coming up with ideas in isolation and then writing about them.
I accept your choice for the FB group. I’m curious what are the attitudes of members of the group about this. If you want to figure it out, it should be easy enough to do via a FB poll. Not saying you need to do it, and I’m fine with your choice just based on your say-so, but this would be the way of gathering evidence that I would take if I wanted evidence.
I hear you about the self-promotional stuff. I generally have an approach of saying the things that I will do, and then doing them, and then getting feedback from the community about them. My goal is to try to improve based on feedback. I can see how it might come off as self-promotional to some, though—they can’t read my mind about my motivations. Having gotten some feedback about the perception of self-promotional just a bit earlier, I will aim to mention Intentional Insights less in my posts—for example, in the post above, I did not mention it once.
This makes sense. :) Ideally people should get to specify whether they prefer to have public versus private criticism, as having public criticism forced on them without their requesting it would likely put a lot of people off entering into EA discussions altogether.
Maybe it would be useful to have a rule that you can only downvote after you post a comment?
I like that idea! Then people can choose to avoid revealing that they downvoted, but would have to post comments at least.
Again, ironic that someone downvoted your comment—I upvoted it when I posted this.
Not really ironic—just clearly someone who disagrees.
Should people downvote just because they disagree? I’m not saying they shouldn’t, just that it’d be good to have a discussion of this. :) I’ve just started one in the latest open thread. I’ve heard people argue that they shouldn’t, and the text that appears when you other over the upvote/downvote icons suggests as much.
Thanks for starting the discussion, Tom!
It’s a pretty universal standard on websites with comment voting that you shouldn’t downvote to indicate disagreement. People still do it anyway though.
Yup, people do it anyway, I just hoped EAs would be better about it. We’re all in this together, after all—we share the same goal, even if disagreeing somewhat about the methods.
Why is that an universal agreement?
Common reasons I hear:
Downvoting for disagreement creates an insular environment where people only see popular opinions.
We should vote based on quality, not agreement, so that the top comments are high quality even if a lot of people disagree with them.
You misunderstand me. I don’t think the person is down voting because they disagree, but the fact they are down voting without commenting is an indication they disagree that a down vote requires a comment. That’s not ironic.
Ah ok, gotcha. Sorry for misunderstanding.
I didn’t downvote, but something I didn’t like was citing pieces in support of claims which are subtly different from the claims they actually make.
[I do support allowing people to down vote without explanation, although of course explanation is better where possible.]
I responded about this below.