The Forum moderation team (which includes myself) is revisiting thinking about this forum’s norms. One thing we’ve noticed is that we’re unsure to what extent users are actually aware of the norms. (It’s all well and good writing up some great norms, but if users don’t follow them, then we have failed at our job.)
Our voting guidelines are of particular concern,[1] hence this poll. We’d really appreciate you all taking part, especially if you don’t usually take part in polls but do take part in voting. (We worry that the ‘silent majority’ of our users—i.e., those who vote, and thus shape this forum’s incentive landscape, but don’t generally engage beyond voting—may be less in tune with our norms than our most visibly engaged users. Therefore, we would love to see this demographic represented in the poll above.)
Depending on the poll’s results, we may take action up to and including building new features into the forum’s UI, to help remind users of the guidelines.[2]
For reference, the tl;dr version of our voting guidelines is pasted below. You can find the full version here.[3]
Action
If…
Not if…
Strong upvote
Reading this will help people do good
You learned something important
You think many more people might benefit from seeing it
You want to signal that this sort of behavior adds a lot of value
“I agree and want others to see this opinion first.”
(but do feel free to agree-vote)
Upvote
You think it adds something to the conversation, or you found it useful
People should imitate some aspect of the behavior in the future
You want others to see it
You just generally like it
“Oh, I like the author, they’re cool.”
Downvote
There’s a relevant error
The comment or post didn’t add to the conversation, and maybe actually distracted
“There are grammatical errors in this comment.”
Strong downvote
It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning
It’s manipulative or breaks our norms in significant ways (consider reporting it)
Firstly, these guidelines are kind of buried deep within our canonical ‘Guide to the norms’ post. Secondly, one doesn’t receive feedback in response to an ‘incorrect’ vote (i.e., a vote that’s not in line with our voting guidelines) in the same way one receives feedback to an incorrect post or comment (via downvotes and replies). And so, it’s possible to continue voting in the same incorrect way, oblivious to the fact that one is voting incorrectly.
What I’ve been calling ‘guidelines’ in this quick take are technically ‘suggestions’ in our published voting norms as of right now. But this is something we are revisiting; we think ‘guidelines’ is more accurate. (We are similarly revisiting ‘rules’ versus ‘norms’—h/t @leillustrations and @richard_ngo for callingus out, here, and sorry it’s taken us so long to address the concern.)
we may take action up to and including building new features into the forum’s UI, to help remind users of the guidelines.
Random idea: for new users and/or users with less than some threshold level of karma and/or users who use the forum infrequently, Bulby pops up with a little banner that contains a tl;dr on the voting guidelines. Especially good if the banner pops up when a user hovers their cursor over the voting buttons.
Thanks, yeah, I like the idea of guidelines popping up while hovering. (Although, I’m unsure if the rest of the team like it, and I’m ultimately not the decision maker.) If going this route, my favoured implementation, which I think is pretty aligned with what you’re saying, is for the popping up to happen in line with a spaced repetition algorithm. That is, often enough—especially at the beginning—that users remember the guidelines, but hopefully not so often that the pop ups become redundant and annoying.
Funny, I thought the same thing but I voted on the opposite end of the spectrum. I suppose “how familiar are you with the voting guidelines?” is pretty open to interpretation.
Yeah, thanks for pointing this out. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m seeing that there are really three questions I want answers to:
1. Have you been voting in line with the guidelines (whether or not you’ve literally read them)?
2a. Have you literally read the guidelines? (In other words, have we succeeded in making you aware of the guidelines’ existence?)
2b. If you have read the guidelines, to what extent can you accurately recall them? (In other words, conditional on you knowing the guidelines exist, to what extent have we succeeded at drilling them into you?)
Where Isaac’s interpretation is towards 1, and your interpretation is towards 2.
The poll I’ve ended up running is essentially the above three questions rolled into one, with ~unknown amounts of each contributing to the results. This isn’t ideal (my bad!), but I think the results will still be useful, and there are already lots of votes (thank you everyone for voting!), so it’s too late to turn back now. I advise people to continue voting under whichever interpretation makes sense to you; the mods will have fun untangling your results.
‘Relevant error’ is just meant to mean a factual error or mistaken reasoning. Thanks for pointing out the ambiguity, though, we might revise this part.
The Forum moderation team (which includes myself) is revisiting thinking about this forum’s norms. One thing we’ve noticed is that we’re unsure to what extent users are actually aware of the norms. (It’s all well and good writing up some great norms, but if users don’t follow them, then we have failed at our job.)
Our voting guidelines are of particular concern,[1] hence this poll. We’d really appreciate you all taking part, especially if you don’t usually take part in polls but do take part in voting. (We worry that the ‘silent majority’ of our users—i.e., those who vote, and thus shape this forum’s incentive landscape, but don’t generally engage beyond voting—may be less in tune with our norms than our most visibly engaged users. Therefore, we would love to see this demographic represented in the poll above.)
Depending on the poll’s results, we may take action up to and including building new features into the forum’s UI, to help remind users of the guidelines.[2]
For reference, the tl;dr version of our voting guidelines is pasted below. You can find the full version here.[3]
Action
Strong upvote
Reading this will help people do good
You learned something important
You think many more people might benefit from seeing it
You want to signal that this sort of behavior adds a lot of value
“I agree and want others to see this opinion first.”
(but do feel free to agree-vote)
Upvote
You think it adds something to the conversation, or you found it useful
People should imitate some aspect of the behavior in the future
You want others to see it
You just generally like it
Downvote
There’s a relevant error
The comment or post didn’t add to the conversation, and maybe actually distracted
Strong downvote
It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning
It’s manipulative or breaks our norms in significant ways (consider reporting it)
It’s literally spam (consider reporting it)
“I disagree with this opinion.”
(but do feel free to disagree-vote)
Firstly, these guidelines are kind of buried deep within our canonical ‘Guide to the norms’ post. Secondly, one doesn’t receive feedback in response to an ‘incorrect’ vote (i.e., a vote that’s not in line with our voting guidelines) in the same way one receives feedback to an incorrect post or comment (via downvotes and replies). And so, it’s possible to continue voting in the same incorrect way, oblivious to the fact that one is voting incorrectly.
H/t @Ebenezer Dukakis for nudging us down this path of thinking.
What I’ve been calling ‘guidelines’ in this quick take are technically ‘suggestions’ in our published voting norms as of right now. But this is something we are revisiting; we think ‘guidelines’ is more accurate. (We are similarly revisiting ‘rules’ versus ‘norms’—h/t @leillustrations and @richard_ngo for calling us out, here, and sorry it’s taken us so long to address the concern.)
Random idea: for new users and/or users with less than some threshold level of karma and/or users who use the forum infrequently, Bulby pops up with a little banner that contains a tl;dr on the voting guidelines. Especially good if the banner pops up when a user hovers their cursor over the voting buttons.
Thanks, yeah, I like the idea of guidelines popping up while hovering. (Although, I’m unsure if the rest of the team like it, and I’m ultimately not the decision maker.) If going this route, my favoured implementation, which I think is pretty aligned with what you’re saying, is for the popping up to happen in line with a spaced repetition algorithm. That is, often enough—especially at the beginning—that users remember the guidelines, but hopefully not so often that the pop ups become redundant and annoying.
I wasn’t sure if I was, but reading the guidelines matched my guess of what they would say, so I think I was familiar with them.
Funny, I thought the same thing but I voted on the opposite end of the spectrum. I suppose “how familiar are you with the voting guidelines?” is pretty open to interpretation.
Yeah, thanks for pointing this out. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m seeing that there are really three questions I want answers to:
Where Isaac’s interpretation is towards 1, and your interpretation is towards 2.
The poll I’ve ended up running is essentially the above three questions rolled into one, with ~unknown amounts of each contributing to the results. This isn’t ideal (my bad!), but I think the results will still be useful, and there are already lots of votes (thank you everyone for voting!), so it’s too late to turn back now. I advise people to continue voting under whichever interpretation makes sense to you; the mods will have fun untangling your results.
What does “there’s a relevant error” mean exactly for downvite?
‘Relevant error’ is just meant to mean a factual error or mistaken reasoning. Thanks for pointing out the ambiguity, though, we might revise this part.