The problem with down-voting is that it allows for views to be dismissed without any argument provided. It’s kind of bizarre to give a detailed explanation why you think X is Y, only to see someone has down-voted this without explaining a tad bit why they disagree (or why they “don’t find it useful”). I just can’t reconcile that approach with the idea of rational deliberation.
One solution would be to demand that every down-vote comes with a reason, to which the original poster can reply.
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.
Yes, that’s a good point, I’ve been wondering about this as well. According to one (pretty common) approach to argumentation, an argument is acceptable unless challenged by a counterargument. From that perspective:
upvoting = an acknowledgement of the absence of a counterargument.
downvoting = an observation that there is a counterargument, in which case it should be stated.
This is just an idea from the top of my head, I’d be curious to discuss this in more detail since I find it genuinely curious :)
How about making it so that a menu pops up when you click the downvote button? There could be a number of default options (e.g. personal attack, unsupported assertion, spam etc.) and an option to write-in a brief explanation (perhaps limited to 140 characters). That would ensure that the poster gets some feedback without requiring every downvoter to provide an explanation.
That’d probably be already better than nothing ;) Then again, I’m afraid most people would still just (anonymously) downvote without giving reasons. It’s much easier to hide behind an anonymous veil than take a stance and open yourself for debate.
In fact, I’d be curious to see some empirical data on how correlated the act of downvoting and the absence of commenting are. My guess is that those who provide comments (including critical ones) mostly don’t downvote except in extreme cases (e.g. discrimination, obviously off-topic for the forum, obviously misinformation, etc.).
Just to clarify, my proposal is that the downvote would only be counted if the person selected a reason. When I said “without requiring every downvoter to provide an explanation,” I meant without requiring every one of them to type out their own explanation (since they can rely on the defaults or on what a previous person has written).
Ahh, now I get you! Yeah, that sounds like a good idea!
Like I’ve mentioned in another reply, I wouldn’t require the same from upvotes because they may imply the lack of counterarguments, while a downvote implies a recognition that there is a problem, in which case it’d only be fair to state which one it is.
The problem with down-voting is that it allows for views to be dismissed without any argument provided. It’s kind of bizarre to give a detailed explanation why you think X is Y, only to see someone has down-voted this without explaining a tad bit why they disagree (or why they “don’t find it useful”). I just can’t reconcile that approach with the idea of rational deliberation.
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.
Many of these concerns seem to be symmetric, and would also imply we should make it harder to upvote.
Yes, that’s a good point, I’ve been wondering about this as well. According to one (pretty common) approach to argumentation, an argument is acceptable unless challenged by a counterargument. From that perspective:
upvoting = an acknowledgement of the absence of a counterargument.
downvoting = an observation that there is a counterargument, in which case it should be stated.
This is just an idea from the top of my head, I’d be curious to discuss this in more detail since I find it genuinely curious :)
How about making it so that a menu pops up when you click the downvote button? There could be a number of default options (e.g. personal attack, unsupported assertion, spam etc.) and an option to write-in a brief explanation (perhaps limited to 140 characters). That would ensure that the poster gets some feedback without requiring every downvoter to provide an explanation.
I think that this looks like a promising feature, I’ll add it to our list of things we might do once the beta is stable.
That’d probably be already better than nothing ;) Then again, I’m afraid most people would still just (anonymously) downvote without giving reasons. It’s much easier to hide behind an anonymous veil than take a stance and open yourself for debate.
In fact, I’d be curious to see some empirical data on how correlated the act of downvoting and the absence of commenting are. My guess is that those who provide comments (including critical ones) mostly don’t downvote except in extreme cases (e.g. discrimination, obviously off-topic for the forum, obviously misinformation, etc.).
Just to clarify, my proposal is that the downvote would only be counted if the person selected a reason. When I said “without requiring every downvoter to provide an explanation,” I meant without requiring every one of them to type out their own explanation (since they can rely on the defaults or on what a previous person has written).
Ahh, now I get you! Yeah, that sounds like a good idea! Like I’ve mentioned in another reply, I wouldn’t require the same from upvotes because they may imply the lack of counterarguments, while a downvote implies a recognition that there is a problem, in which case it’d only be fair to state which one it is.