Are there particular instances of complaints related to voting behavior that you can recall?
I remember seeing a couple of cases over the last ~8 months where users were concerned about low-information downvotes (people downvoting without explaining what they didn’t like). I don’t remember seeing any instances of concern around other aspects of the current system (for example, complaints about high-karma users dominating the perception of posts by strong-voting too frequently). However, I could easily be forgetting or missing comments along those lines.
Currently, you can see the number of votes a post or comment has received by hovering over its karma count. This does let you distinguish between “many upvotes and many downvotes” and “no votes”. Adding a count of upvotes and downvotes would provide more information about the distribution of strong votes (e.g. one strong upvote vs. several weak downvotes, or vice-versa). I can see how that could be useful, and I’ll bring it up with the Forum’s tech team to hear their thoughts. Thank you for the suggestion!
It’s not an instance of complain, but take it as a datapoint: I’ve switched off the karma display on all comments and my experience improved. The karma system tends to mess up with my S1 processing.
It seems plausible karma is causing harm in some hard to perceive ways. (One specific way is by people updating on karma pattern mistaking them for some voice of the community / ea movement / … )
Can you elaborate on how you turned off karma display? I would love to use your code if you’re willing to share it. I strongly dislike posting on the EA Forum because of how the karma system works, and and my experience would be vastly improved if I couldn’t see post/comment karma.
As humans, we are quite sensitive to signs of social approval and disapproval, and we have some ‘elephant in the brain’ motivation to seek social approval. This can sometimes mess up with epistemics.
The karma represents something like sentiment of people voting on a particular comment, weighted in a particular way. For me, this often did not seemed to be a signal adding any new information—when following the forum closely, usually I would have been able to predict what will get downvoted or upvoted.
What seemed problematic to me was 1. a number of times when I felt hesitation to write something because part of my S1 predicted it will get downvoted. Also I did not wanted to be primed by karma when reading other’s comments.
On a community level, overall I think the quality of the karma signal is roughly comparable to facebook likes. If people are making important decisions, evaluating projects, assigning prices… based on it, it seems plausible it’s actively harmful.
Regarding your accounting of cases, that was roughly my recollection as well. But while the posts might not address the second concern directly, I don’t think that the two concerns are separable. The actual mechanisms and results might largely overlap.
Regarding the second concern you mention specifically, I would not expect those complaints to be written down by any users. Most people on any forum are lurkers, or at the very least they will lurk a bit to get a feel for what the community is like and what it values before participating. This makes people with oft-downvoted opinions self-select out of the community before ever letting us know that this is happening.
Are there particular instances of complaints related to voting behavior that you can recall?
I remember seeing a couple of cases over the last ~8 months where users were concerned about low-information downvotes (people downvoting without explaining what they didn’t like). I don’t remember seeing any instances of concern around other aspects of the current system (for example, complaints about high-karma users dominating the perception of posts by strong-voting too frequently). However, I could easily be forgetting or missing comments along those lines.
Currently, you can see the number of votes a post or comment has received by hovering over its karma count. This does let you distinguish between “many upvotes and many downvotes” and “no votes”. Adding a count of upvotes and downvotes would provide more information about the distribution of strong votes (e.g. one strong upvote vs. several weak downvotes, or vice-versa). I can see how that could be useful, and I’ll bring it up with the Forum’s tech team to hear their thoughts. Thank you for the suggestion!
It’s not an instance of complain, but take it as a datapoint: I’ve switched off the karma display on all comments and my experience improved. The karma system tends to mess up with my S1 processing.
It seems plausible karma is causing harm in some hard to perceive ways. (One specific way is by people updating on karma pattern mistaking them for some voice of the community / ea movement / … )
Can you elaborate on how you turned off karma display? I would love to use your code if you’re willing to share it. I strongly dislike posting on the EA Forum because of how the karma system works, and and my experience would be vastly improved if I couldn’t see post/comment karma.
>> I’ve switched off the karma display on all comments and my experience improved. The karma system tends to mess up with my S1 processing.
Fully understand if you don’t want to, but I’m curious if you could elaborate on this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean.
As humans, we are quite sensitive to signs of social approval and disapproval, and we have some ‘elephant in the brain’ motivation to seek social approval. This can sometimes mess up with epistemics.
The karma represents something like sentiment of people voting on a particular comment, weighted in a particular way. For me, this often did not seemed to be a signal adding any new information—when following the forum closely, usually I would have been able to predict what will get downvoted or upvoted.
What seemed problematic to me was 1. a number of times when I felt hesitation to write something because part of my S1 predicted it will get downvoted. Also I did not wanted to be primed by karma when reading other’s comments.
On a community level, overall I think the quality of the karma signal is roughly comparable to facebook likes. If people are making important decisions, evaluating projects, assigning prices… based on it, it seems plausible it’s actively harmful.
I don’t have any specific instances in mind.
Regarding your accounting of cases, that was roughly my recollection as well. But while the posts might not address the second concern directly, I don’t think that the two concerns are separable. The actual mechanisms and results might largely overlap.
Regarding the second concern you mention specifically, I would not expect those complaints to be written down by any users. Most people on any forum are lurkers, or at the very least they will lurk a bit to get a feel for what the community is like and what it values before participating. This makes people with oft-downvoted opinions self-select out of the community before ever letting us know that this is happening.
The hovering is helpful, thank you.