For what it’s worth, I generally downvote a post only when I think “This post should not have been written in the first place”, and relatedly I will often upvote posts I disagree with.
If that’s typical, then the “controversial” posts you found may be “the most meta-level controversial” rather than “the most object-level controversial”, if you know what I mean.
The EA Forum could maybe fairly trivially collect some data on this by sending an alert randomly to a subset of instances of up/down votes across the user population that collects feedback on the reasons for the up/down vote. Obviously it would need to be balanced by ensuring not to cause too much friction for users.
For what it’s worth, I generally downvote a post only when I think “This post should not have been written in the first place”, and relatedly I will often upvote posts I disagree with.
If that’s typical, then the “controversial” posts you found may be “the most meta-level controversial” rather than “the most object-level controversial”, if you know what I mean.
That’s still interesting though.
The EA Forum could maybe fairly trivially collect some data on this by sending an alert randomly to a subset of instances of up/down votes across the user population that collects feedback on the reasons for the up/down vote. Obviously it would need to be balanced by ensuring not to cause too much friction for users.