I think the post ended up around 0 or 1 karma, is that right? (I mean before people changed their voting based on hindsight!) I think it’s important to distinguish between “got downvoted a lot but ended up at neutral karma” vs. “got downvoted double digits into no longer being visible.” The former reflects somewhat poorly on EA, the latter very poorly.
I think the most informative signal here is not the exact karma that comment ended up with but rather that the author ended up deleting it despite believing that what he was saying was potentially important and not receiving any reasons to think he was wrong. A culture where people feel compelled to silence themselves is worse than one where some comments are wrongly downvoted without much consequence to the author.
I think the most important data points here are any comments that were left, and the net karma of the comment. People have in fact been known to overreact, or react in idiosyncratic ways, in forum discussions; I haven’t seen the thread in question, but if the responses were friendly and the comment got ~0 net karma, then that would be a large update for me.
I definitely took “that got downvoted a lot” to mean that the comment got a lot of net downvotes, not just that people offset its upvotes to keep it around a neutral 0. I think it’s pretty bad to describe vote patterns that misleadingly, if it was hovering around 0.
No, I was talking about Stuart Buck’s initial comment in that same thread, which is still up and now has high upvotes.
But Stuart also mentioned he deleted a second comment after it got downvoted too, so that must be the one you’re linking to. (We also don’t know if some people retroactively upvoted the deleted comment, it’s at +6 now but could’ve been negative at the time of deletion. I think I’m still able to vote on the deleted comment – though maybe that’s just because I had already voted on it before it got deleted [strong upvote and weak agree vote]).
Either way it seems highly unlikely that the deleted comment I linked to had lots of negative votes. It had a few disagree votes but very likely not more than 1-2 karma downvotes.
I think the post ended up around 0 or 1 karma, is that right? (I mean before people changed their voting based on hindsight!) I think it’s important to distinguish between “got downvoted a lot but ended up at neutral karma” vs. “got downvoted double digits into no longer being visible.” The former reflects somewhat poorly on EA, the latter very poorly.
I think the most informative signal here is not the exact karma that comment ended up with but rather that the author ended up deleting it despite believing that what he was saying was potentially important and not receiving any reasons to think he was wrong. A culture where people feel compelled to silence themselves is worse than one where some comments are wrongly downvoted without much consequence to the author.
I think the most important data points here are any comments that were left, and the net karma of the comment. People have in fact been known to overreact, or react in idiosyncratic ways, in forum discussions; I haven’t seen the thread in question, but if the responses were friendly and the comment got ~0 net karma, then that would be a large update for me.
I definitely took “that got downvoted a lot” to mean that the comment got a lot of net downvotes, not just that people offset its upvotes to keep it around a neutral 0. I think it’s pretty bad to describe vote patterns that misleadingly, if it was hovering around 0.
Good point. :S
Are we talking about this deleted comment? It has 6 overall karma in 9 votes, and −3 agreement in 5 votes.
No, I was talking about Stuart Buck’s initial comment in that same thread, which is still up and now has high upvotes.
But Stuart also mentioned he deleted a second comment after it got downvoted too, so that must be the one you’re linking to. (We also don’t know if some people retroactively upvoted the deleted comment, it’s at +6 now but could’ve been negative at the time of deletion. I think I’m still able to vote on the deleted comment – though maybe that’s just because I had already voted on it before it got deleted [strong upvote and weak agree vote]).
Either way it seems highly unlikely that the deleted comment I linked to had lots of negative votes. It had a few disagree votes but very likely not more than 1-2 karma downvotes.