That’s right—one of the main goals of having posts sorted by karma (as well as having two sections) - is to allow people to feel more comfortable posting, knowing that the best posts will rise to the top.
Of course there’s a reverse incentive here, where getting downvoted feelsbadman, and therefore you may be even less likely to want to post up unfinished thoughts, as compared to them simply getting displayed in chronological order.
The problem is that if your post got downvoted and displayed in chronological order, this often means you will get even more downvotes (in parts because having things in chronological order means people vote more harshly because people want to directly discourage people posting bad content, and also because your visibility doesn’t reduce, which means more people have the opportunity to downvote)
Hacker news has downvotes, though they are locked behind a karma threshold, though overall I see more comments downvoted on HN than on LW or the EA Forum (you can identify them by the text being more greyish and harder to read).
That’s right—one of the main goals of having posts sorted by karma (as well as having two sections) - is to allow people to feel more comfortable posting, knowing that the best posts will rise to the top.
Of course there’s a reverse incentive here, where getting downvoted feelsbadman, and therefore you may be even less likely to want to post up unfinished thoughts, as compared to them simply getting displayed in chronological order.
The problem is that if your post got downvoted and displayed in chronological order, this often means you will get even more downvotes (in parts because having things in chronological order means people vote more harshly because people want to directly discourage people posting bad content, and also because your visibility doesn’t reduce, which means more people have the opportunity to downvote)
Yes, this is more an argument for “don’t have downvotes at all” like hacker news or traditional forum.
Note I think your team has made the correct tradeoffs so far, this was more paying devils advocate.
Hacker news has downvotes, though they are locked behind a karma threshold, though overall I see more comments downvoted on HN than on LW or the EA Forum (you can identify them by the text being more greyish and harder to read).