I think people don’t appreciate how much upvotes and especially downvotes can encourage conformity.
Suppose a forum user has drafted “Comment C”, and they estimate an 90% chance that it will be upvoted to +4, and a 10% chance it will be downvoted to −1.
Do we want them to post the comment? I’d say we do—if we take score as a proxy for utility, the expected utility is positive.
However, I submit that for most people, the 10% chance of being downvoted to −1 is much more salient in their mind—the associated rejection/humiliation of −1 is a bigger social punishment than +4 is a social reward, and people take those silly “karma” numbers surprisingly seriously.
It seems to me that there are a lot of users on this forum who have almost no comments voted below 0, suggesting a revealed preference to leave things like “Comment C” unposted (or even worse, they don’t think the thoughts that would lead to “Comment C” in the first place). People (including me) just don’t seem very willing to be unpopular. And as a result, we aren’t just losing stuff that would be voted to −1. We’re losing stuff which people thought might be voted to −1.
(I also don’t think karma is a great proxy for utility. People are more willing to find fault with & downvote comments that argue for unpopular views, but I’d say arguments for unpopular views have higher value-of-information and are therefore more valuable to post.)
In terms of solutions… downvoting less is an obvious one. I like how Hacker News hides comment scores. Another idea is to disable scores on a thread-specific basis, e.g. in shortform.
I think people don’t appreciate how much upvotes and especially downvotes can encourage conformity.
Suppose a forum user has drafted “Comment C”, and they estimate an 90% chance that it will be upvoted to +4, and a 10% chance it will be downvoted to −1.
Do we want them to post the comment? I’d say we do—if we take score as a proxy for utility, the expected utility is positive.
However, I submit that for most people, the 10% chance of being downvoted to −1 is much more salient in their mind—the associated rejection/humiliation of −1 is a bigger social punishment than +4 is a social reward, and people take those silly “karma” numbers surprisingly seriously.
It seems to me that there are a lot of users on this forum who have almost no comments voted below 0, suggesting a revealed preference to leave things like “Comment C” unposted (or even worse, they don’t think the thoughts that would lead to “Comment C” in the first place). People (including me) just don’t seem very willing to be unpopular. And as a result, we aren’t just losing stuff that would be voted to −1. We’re losing stuff which people thought might be voted to −1.
(I also don’t think karma is a great proxy for utility. People are more willing to find fault with & downvote comments that argue for unpopular views, but I’d say arguments for unpopular views have higher value-of-information and are therefore more valuable to post.)
In terms of solutions… downvoting less is an obvious one. I like how Hacker News hides comment scores. Another idea is to disable scores on a thread-specific basis, e.g. in shortform.