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billswift comments on Open Thread: February 2010 - Less Wrong
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Since Karma Changes was posted, there have been 20 top level posts. With one exception, all of those posts are presently at positive karma. EDIT: I was using the list on the wiki, which is not up to date. Incorporating the posts between the last one on that list and now, there is a total of 76 posts between Karma Changes and today. This one is the only new data point on negatively rated posts, so it's 2 of 76.
I looked at the 40 posts just prior to Karma Changes, and of the forty, six of them are still negative. It looks like before the change, many times more posts were voted into the red. I have observed that a number of recent posts were in fact downvoted, sometimes a fair amount, but crept back up over time.
Hypothesis: the changes included removing the display minimum of 0 for top-level posts. Now that people can see that something has been voted negative, instead of just being at 0 (which could be the result of indifference), sympathy kicks in and people provide upvotes.
Is this a behavior we want? If not, what can we do about it?
I wouldn't necessarily call it sympathy. Sometimes I will up- (or down-) vote something if I think it is better (or worse) than its current score suggests. The purpose of karma on articles should be to identify those most worth reading to those who haven't yet read them, not to be a popularity contest where everyone who disliked it votes it down forever.
I also tend to vote posts up or down based on what I think the score ought to be. But it seems clear that sympathy plays a part. Liked posts spiral freely off towards infinity but disliked posts don't ever spiral down in a similar way. This gives a distinct bias to the expected payoff of posting borderline posts and so is probably not desirable.