One solution would be to demand that every down-vote comes with a reason, to which the original poster can reply.
This has been proposed a couple of times before (/removing downvotes entirely), and I get the sentiment than writing something and having someone ‘drive-by-downvote’ is disheartening/frustrating (it doesn’t keep me up at night, but a lot of my posts and comments have 1-2 downvotes on them even if they end up net-positive, but I don’t really have a steer as to what problem the downvoters wanted to highlight).
That said, I think this is a better cost to bear than erecting a large barrier for expressions of ‘less of this’. I might be inclined to downvote some extremely long and tendentious line-by-line ‘fisking’ criticism, without having to become the target of a similar reply myself by explaining why I downvoted it. I also expect a norm of ‘explaining your reasoning’ will lead to lots of unedifying ‘rowing with the ref’ meta-discussions (“I downvoted your post because of X”/ “How dare you, that’s completely unreasonable! So I have in turn downvoted your reply!”)
Hey Gregory, thanks for commenting on this. The problem with the idea that downvoting signifies “less of this” is that the poster has no clue as for what that refers to, and hence they’re at a loss in trying to reduce less of that. And after all, why would they? All one can conclude is: “There are people here who don’t like reading this. Well, that tells me more about this audience (unable to critically engage with my points) and their biased viewpoints than about my post. In fact, it doesn’t tell me anything about the arguments provided in my post.”
As for meta-discussions on the reasons for down-voting, I think they’d be rather healthy: they’d expose both expectations, values and even biases held by the forum’s participants.
One downside of critical comments is they tend to draw attention to the discussion. Mass downvoting suggests that something is so low quality you don’t have to pay attention to it.
Yeah, in case of obvious crap posts (like spams) they’ll be massively downvoted. Otherwise, I’ve never seen here any of the serious posts massively only downvoted. Rather, you’d have some downvotes, some upvotes, and the case you describe doesn’t capture this situation. In fact, an initial row of downvotes may misleadingly give such an impression, leading to some people ignoring the issue, while later on a row of upvotes may actually show the issue is controversial, and as such indeed deserves further discussion.
Hey Dunja, it’s true that a downvote provides less information than a comment, but I think it does provide some information, and that people can update based on that information, particularly if they get similar feedback on multiple comments: e.g. I might notice “Oh, when I write extremely short comments, they’re more likely to be downvoted, and less likely to be upvoted. I’ll elaborate more in the future” or similar.
Hi Max! I agree, it indeed provides information, but the problem is that the information is too vague, and it may easily reflect a sheer bias (as in: “I don’t like any posts that question the work of OpPhil”). I think this is a strong sentiment in this community and as an academic who is not affiliated with OpPhil or any other EA organization, I’ve noticed numerous cases of silent rejection of a certain problem. I don’t think the issues are relevant for any “mainstream” EA topic (points on which the majority here agrees). But as soon as it comes to the polarized issues (say, the funding of non-academic institutions to conduct academic research), the majority that downvotes doesn’t say a word. I found it quite entertaining (but also disappointing) when I made a longer post on this topic, only to find bunch of downvotes without concrete engagement in the topic. My interpretation of what’s happened there: people dislike someone making waves in their little pond.
I understand you may wish to proceed as you’ve suggested, but eventually this community will push away dissenters, who are very fond of EA, but who just don’t see any point in presenting critical arguments on this platform.
This has been proposed a couple of times before (/removing downvotes entirely), and I get the sentiment than writing something and having someone ‘drive-by-downvote’ is disheartening/frustrating (it doesn’t keep me up at night, but a lot of my posts and comments have 1-2 downvotes on them even if they end up net-positive, but I don’t really have a steer as to what problem the downvoters wanted to highlight).
That said, I think this is a better cost to bear than erecting a large barrier for expressions of ‘less of this’. I might be inclined to downvote some extremely long and tendentious line-by-line ‘fisking’ criticism, without having to become the target of a similar reply myself by explaining why I downvoted it. I also expect a norm of ‘explaining your reasoning’ will lead to lots of unedifying ‘rowing with the ref’ meta-discussions (“I downvoted your post because of X”/ “How dare you, that’s completely unreasonable! So I have in turn downvoted your reply!”)
Hey Gregory, thanks for commenting on this. The problem with the idea that downvoting signifies “less of this” is that the poster has no clue as for what that refers to, and hence they’re at a loss in trying to reduce less of that. And after all, why would they? All one can conclude is: “There are people here who don’t like reading this. Well, that tells me more about this audience (unable to critically engage with my points) and their biased viewpoints than about my post. In fact, it doesn’t tell me anything about the arguments provided in my post.”
As for meta-discussions on the reasons for down-voting, I think they’d be rather healthy: they’d expose both expectations, values and even biases held by the forum’s participants.
One downside of critical comments is they tend to draw attention to the discussion. Mass downvoting suggests that something is so low quality you don’t have to pay attention to it.
Yeah, in case of obvious crap posts (like spams) they’ll be massively downvoted. Otherwise, I’ve never seen here any of the serious posts massively only downvoted. Rather, you’d have some downvotes, some upvotes, and the case you describe doesn’t capture this situation. In fact, an initial row of downvotes may misleadingly give such an impression, leading to some people ignoring the issue, while later on a row of upvotes may actually show the issue is controversial, and as such indeed deserves further discussion.
Hey Dunja, it’s true that a downvote provides less information than a comment, but I think it does provide some information, and that people can update based on that information, particularly if they get similar feedback on multiple comments: e.g. I might notice “Oh, when I write extremely short comments, they’re more likely to be downvoted, and less likely to be upvoted. I’ll elaborate more in the future” or similar.
Hi Max! I agree, it indeed provides information, but the problem is that the information is too vague, and it may easily reflect a sheer bias (as in: “I don’t like any posts that question the work of OpPhil”). I think this is a strong sentiment in this community and as an academic who is not affiliated with OpPhil or any other EA organization, I’ve noticed numerous cases of silent rejection of a certain problem. I don’t think the issues are relevant for any “mainstream” EA topic (points on which the majority here agrees). But as soon as it comes to the polarized issues (say, the funding of non-academic institutions to conduct academic research), the majority that downvotes doesn’t say a word. I found it quite entertaining (but also disappointing) when I made a longer post on this topic, only to find bunch of downvotes without concrete engagement in the topic. My interpretation of what’s happened there: people dislike someone making waves in their little pond.
I understand you may wish to proceed as you’ve suggested, but eventually this community will push away dissenters, who are very fond of EA, but who just don’t see any point in presenting critical arguments on this platform.