An Invitation to Refrain from Downvoting Posts into Net-Negative Karma

Eh, I hate strategic voting. "Yes means yes, no means no" has a certain elegance that "I mean no, but I am saying yes because other people are saying no, except now there are suddenly more yes's than no's and no one knows whether that actually means that most people agree or that too many people are voting strategically" misses.

A bad article should get negative feedback. The problem is that the resulting karma penalty may be too harsh for a new author. Perhaps there could be a way to disentangle this? For example, to limit the karma damage (to new authors only?); for example no matter how negative score you get for the article, the resulting negative karma is limited to, let's say, "3 + the number of strong downvotes". But for the purposes of hiding the article from the front page the original negative score would apply.

(Or maybe, in addition to upvote and downvote, there could be a third kind of vote, a "no-vote" that gives 0 karma, and only appears on the articles of new users? Meaning "I don't like it, but I don't want to discourage the author". But the author could see e.g. total karma +1, 100 votes, so clearly the article was unpopular rather than unnoticed.)

When I came upon this post, it had a negative karma score. I don't think it's good form to have posts receiving negative net karma (except in extreme cases), so I upvoted to provide this with a positive net karma.

Well, at this moment the article has a +4 karma, and what exactly that means? The article was actually popular, it just had bad luck because the first readers didn't like it. Or the article was unpopular, but many people who didn't like it upvoted it anyway because... reasons? No one knows. And that is a problem, IMHO. The tool made to provide a signal now generates noise.

The policy you propose seems that every substack writer should be encouraged to crosspost all their posts to LessWrong if they start crossposting any. When it comes to posts like the one you linked to that are not primarily written for the LessWrong audience, downvoting them when they aren't fitting is useful.

Personally I try to leave a comment explaining my vote in such cases, as many voters don't. If someone worked to post something and it's not the kind of thing I want to see on LessWrong, the only way the author is likely to know what I and others here would like to see is to explain it, as the vote on the post is low bandwidth and only kind of useful as a feedback signal if a person posts a lot.

I'm still likely to downvote if I think a post is really bad, even if it has gone negative, although sometimes I refrain and just leave my comment about how I think the post could be better.

Sadly I don't have time to do this for all such posts and I end up ignoring most of them.

How many users you can point to who started out making posts that regularly got downvoted to negative karma and later became good contributors? Or, alternatively, specific ideas that were initially only presented by users who got regularly downvoted that were later recognized as correct and valuable? My starting assumption is that it's basically wishful thinking that this would happen much under any community circumstances, people who write badly will mostly keep writing badly and people who end up writing outstanding stuff mostly start out writing better than average stuff.

Low positive and actively negative scores seen to me to send different signals. A low score can be confused for general apathy, imagining that few people having taken notice of the post enough to vote on it. A negative score communicates clearly that something about the post was objectionable or mistaken.

If the purpose of the scoring system is to aggregate opinions, then negative opinions are a necessary input for an accurate score.

Strikes me as inelegant for the final score to depend on the order in which readers happened to encounter the post. Which would happen under this rule, unless people who refrained from voting were checking back later to deliver their vote against a post they thought was bad, once its score has gone up enough to so so without driving it negative (which seems unlikely).

Avoiding negativity would also negate the part of the system where accumulating very negative karma can restrict a user from posting so often.

It's curious that LWers are polite when they comment, but pretty brutal with the anonymous downvotes.

I think people are just setting too low a threshold for downvotes. That does tempt me to save posts from negative scores just to encourage the authors not to give up. I think people are giving downvotes whenever they didn't personally benefit from a post, and they should often be giving no vote instead.

I think the official guidance for upvoted and downvotes. is "I want more like this" and "I want less like this". I reserve downvotes for posts that are so bad that they risk making us less correct and effective. Bad writing with no ideas, evidence, or virwpoints that are new to me specifically just gets no vote either way.

I don't buy this argument because I think the threshold of 0 is largely arbitrary. Many years ago when LW2.0 was still young, I posted something about anthropic probabilities that I spent months (I think, I don't completely remember) of time on, and it got like +1 or -1 net karma (from where my vote put it), and I took this extremely hard. I think I avoided the site for like a year. Would I have taken it any harder if it were negative karma? I honestly don't think so. I could even imagine that it would have been less painful because I'd have preferred rejection over "this isn't worth engaging with".

So I don't see a reason why expectations should turn on +/- 0^[1] (why would I be an exception?), so I don't think that works as a rule -- and in general, I don't see how you can solve this problem with a rule at all. Consequently I think "authors will get hurt by people not appreciating their work" is something we just have to accept, even if it's very harsh. In individual cases, the best thing you can probably do is write a comment explaining why the rejection happened (if in fact you know the reason), but I don't think anything can be done with norms or rules.