Constant comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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Comments (726)
I don't understand why downvote this. It does sound like an accurate representation of the outside view.
Given that a certain fraction of comments are foolish, you can expect that an even larger fraction of votes are foolish, because there are fewer controls on votes (e.g. a voter doesn't risk his reputation while a commenter does).
Which is why Slashdot (which was a lot more worthwhile in the past than it is now) introduced voting on how other people vote (which Slashdot called metamoderation). Worked pretty well: the decline of Slashdot was mild and gradual compared to the decline of almost every other social site that ever reached Slashdot's level of quality.
Yes: votes should probably not be anonymous - and on "various other" social networking sites, they are not.
Metafilter, for one. It is hard for an online community to avoid becoming worthless, but Metafilter has avoided that for 10 years.