Perhaps the most straightforward way you can help is by being more active on the Forum. I often see posts and comments that don’t receive enough upvotes (IMO), so even voting more is useful.
I’ve noticed that comments with more disagree than agree votes often have more karma votes than karma. Whether this is good or bad depends on the quality of the comment, but sometimes the comments are productive and helpful, and so the fact that people are downvoting them seems bad for a few reasons: first, it disincentivizes commenting; second, it incentivizes saying things that you think people will agree with, even at the expense of saying what is true. (Of course, it’s good to try to frame things more persuasively when this doesn’t come at the cost of speaking honestly.) The edit here provides an example of how I think this threatens to undermine epistemic and discursive norms on the Forum.
I’m not sure what the solution is here—I’ve suggested this previously, but am not sure it’d be helpful or effective. And it may turn out that this issue—how does the Forum incentivize making/promote helpful comments that people disagree with?—is relatively intractable, or hard to solve without making sacrifices in other domains. (Another thought that occurred to me is doing what websites like the NYT do: having “NYT recommended comments” and “reader recommended comments,” but I assume the mods don’t want to be in the business of weighing in on the merits of particular comments.)
Yeah thanks for flagging this, I was going to mention the same thing. The vote count when you hover over the karma includes users who only reacted and didn’t vote on the karma portion. I do think this gives people the overall impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are. :( I put up a PR to try to fix this.
EDIT: Oops sorry I should have watched the video first, it was not the same thing I was thinking of… 😅 But I think the bug I mentioned is worse in any case so hopefully we can deploy a fix.
Weird bug. But it only happens when someone votes and unvotes multiple times, and when you vote again the count resets. So this is unlikely to skew anything by much.
Thanks for flagging that! I want to acknowledge that, independent of the bug I mentioned earlier, there could still be an issue of users downvoting in a way that does not align with Forum norms. One thing we could do is update the wording of the tooltip that explains karma voting, since I think “How much do you like this overall?” is not exactly the right question to ask. I agree that asking whether the content is productive or like, contributing value to the discussion, is closer. I also agree that we don’t want to disincentivize people from productively saying things that they expect others to disagree with.
We have actually considered asking moderators to highlight good comments in a way similar to what you suggest. :) I’ve also considered bringing back the Forum prize but just for comments (I actually currently feel quite optimistic about experimenting with a Forum prize of some kind).
Yeah, I think these are great ideas! I’d love to see the Forum prize come back; even if there was only a nominal amount of (or no) money attached, I think it would still be motivating; people like winning stuff.
Policing strong downvotes better may be a relatively low-cost way to mitigate this. The status quo risks disincentivizes making comments to which a few people who are willing to use their strongvote hammers will react negatively.
With the caveat that underlying data are unavailable, I get the sense that some users are too trigger-happy on the strong downvote button for content with which they disagree. I’ve suggested requiring strong downvoters to check a box or enter text justifying their vote—which might serve as a “stop and think” moment against reflexive use of the button. The voting norms are relatively restrictive on what rises to the level of justifying a strong downvote, although these are not exclusive:
It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning
It’s manipulative or breaks our norms in significant ways (consider reporting it)
I wouldn’t be opposed to giving mods the power to downgrade strong downvotes to standard ones in certain circumstances. For example, where there is a significant number of upvotes on a post or comment, that discrepancy suggests that the strong reaction of a strong downvote may be outside the range of reasonable responses to the post or comment. Requiring that kind of objective indicator would prevent mods from downgrading strong downvotes willy-nilly.
Thanks for writing this! Re this:
I’ve noticed that comments with more disagree than agree votes often have more karma votes than karma. Whether this is good or bad depends on the quality of the comment, but sometimes the comments are productive and helpful, and so the fact that people are downvoting them seems bad for a few reasons: first, it disincentivizes commenting; second, it incentivizes saying things that you think people will agree with, even at the expense of saying what is true. (Of course, it’s good to try to frame things more persuasively when this doesn’t come at the cost of speaking honestly.) The edit here provides an example of how I think this threatens to undermine epistemic and discursive norms on the Forum.
I’m not sure what the solution is here—I’ve suggested this previously, but am not sure it’d be helpful or effective. And it may turn out that this issue—how does the Forum incentivize making/promote helpful comments that people disagree with?—is relatively intractable, or hard to solve without making sacrifices in other domains. (Another thought that occurred to me is doing what websites like the NYT do: having “NYT recommended comments” and “reader recommended comments,” but I assume the mods don’t want to be in the business of weighing in on the merits of particular comments.)
Note that the number of karma votes is not accurate, I think it gives users the impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are.
Yeah thanks for flagging this, I was going to mention the same thing. The vote count when you hover over the karma includes users who only reacted and didn’t vote on the karma portion. I do think this gives people the overall impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are. :( I put up a PR to try to fix this.
EDIT: Oops sorry I should have watched the video first, it was not the same thing I was thinking of… 😅 But I think the bug I mentioned is worse in any case so hopefully we can deploy a fix.
Weird bug. But it only happens when someone votes and unvotes multiple times, and when you vote again the count resets. So this is unlikely to skew anything by much.
Thanks for flagging that! I want to acknowledge that, independent of the bug I mentioned earlier, there could still be an issue of users downvoting in a way that does not align with Forum norms. One thing we could do is update the wording of the tooltip that explains karma voting, since I think “How much do you like this overall?” is not exactly the right question to ask. I agree that asking whether the content is productive or like, contributing value to the discussion, is closer. I also agree that we don’t want to disincentivize people from productively saying things that they expect others to disagree with.
We have actually considered asking moderators to highlight good comments in a way similar to what you suggest. :) I’ve also considered bringing back the Forum prize but just for comments (I actually currently feel quite optimistic about experimenting with a Forum prize of some kind).
Yeah, I think these are great ideas! I’d love to see the Forum prize come back; even if there was only a nominal amount of (or no) money attached, I think it would still be motivating; people like winning stuff.
Policing strong downvotes better may be a relatively low-cost way to mitigate this. The status quo risks disincentivizes making comments to which a few people who are willing to use their strongvote hammers will react negatively.
With the caveat that underlying data are unavailable, I get the sense that some users are too trigger-happy on the strong downvote button for content with which they disagree. I’ve suggested requiring strong downvoters to check a box or enter text justifying their vote—which might serve as a “stop and think” moment against reflexive use of the button. The voting norms are relatively restrictive on what rises to the level of justifying a strong downvote, although these are not exclusive:
I wouldn’t be opposed to giving mods the power to downgrade strong downvotes to standard ones in certain circumstances. For example, where there is a significant number of upvotes on a post or comment, that discrepancy suggests that the strong reaction of a strong downvote may be outside the range of reasonable responses to the post or comment. Requiring that kind of objective indicator would prevent mods from downgrading strong downvotes willy-nilly.