The silence is deafening – Devon Zuegel

I'm sure you could think of a dozen solutions to fill this out into a well-defined system if you spent 5 minutes thinking about it.

Zuegel's point is that you want some people to be able to express implicit or tacit disapproval in a less legible way than leaving a public criticism. To continue the dinner party analogy: you don't go to a dinner party with 10 people chosen at random from billions of people; they are your friends, relatives, coworkers, people you look up to, famous people etc. A look of disapproval or a conspicuous silence from them is very different from context collapse causing a bunch of Twitter bluechecks swarming your replies to crush dissent. So the question is who to choose.

You could, for example, just disable these implicit downvotes for anyone you do not 'follow', or anyone you have not 'liked' frequently. You could have explicit opt-in where you whitelist specific accounts to enable feedback. You could borrow from earlier schemes for soft-voting or weighting of votes like Avogadro: votes are weighted by the social graph, and the more disconnected someone is from you, the less their anonymous downvote counts (falling off rapidly with distance).

So far I have found the LW voting behavior instructive and reasonable. It seems like LW'ers do vote on your epistemology rather than the content of your post (like in reddit). It's very cool.

I don't think the post was about LessWrong specifically (at all); think Twitter or Facebook or random blog comments.

Here on this site, yes both downvotes and the absence of upvotes are strong mostly-legible signals.

People only receive feedback from people that are engaged enough to give it.

On The Internet, that's generally true. But that's not so true IRL, face-to-face. And the point of the post is that we could engineer feedback-by-default like the reactions people mostly can't help having when they're visible (or audible) in small groups.