Comment quality was approximately as high on Overcoming Bias before the founding of Less Wrong, and there was no voting on OB.
Voting did greatly reduce the need for editors to moderate comments. In particular, part of the reason that comment quality was extremely high on Overcoming Bias is that Eliezer moderated comments on Eliezer's posts and Robin moderated comments (with a heavier hand in my experience than Eliezer did BTW) on Robin's posts, and if voting had not been introduced (by Eliezer, the Future of Humanity Institute and Tricycle Development) Eliezer would have stopped moderating comments so that he could use the time and mental energy for other pursuits.
Note that Eliezer stopped posting (or more precisely drastically reduced the volume of his writing on the site) about 3 months after the introduction of voting.
Although it is unlikely that comment quality would have stayed high after Eliezer stopped posting and moderating if voting had never been introduced, it is extremely unlikely that voting by itself would have produced a community capable of the quality of conversation we see on LW today. In other words, the nature of the core content was the cause of the excellence of the community although the introduction of voting gave the community a mechanism to prevent the rapid deterioration of the community after Eliezer became uninterested in continuing to post daily and to moderate.
Voting by itself is not a particularly robust quality-protection mechanism IMHO. In particular, a sharp increase in new LW users has the potential to cause a catastrophic decrease in comment quality IMHO.
Voting by itself is not a particularly robust quality-protection mechanism IMHO. In particular, a sharp increase in new users has the potential to cause a catastrophic decrease in comment quality IMHO.
Oh yeah. It's not a bulletproof shield, even slightly. I'm saying that I see no reason that tweaking it would actually make the place better.
I wasn't familiar with the details of just how well the tone was set, thank you!
Eliezer Yudkowsky has passed an arbitrary milestone: 100,000 karma points on Less Wrong. Allow me just a moment to celebrate this like we celebrate other arbitrary milestones, like birthdays.
I think that Eliezer's karma score vastly under-rates his relative contribution to this site. For example, his score is only about 13x my own score, but I think it's obvious he has contributed far more than 13x as much value to this community as I have.
This is probably due to the fact that good posts today get far more upvotes than earlier good posts, when I suspect the community was smaller. For example, my rather simple and insignificant post Secure Your Beliefs received 34 upvotes, which is more than almost any of Eliezer's epic and brilliant posts of the past have received, for example Terminal Values and Instrumental Values.
So at this arbitrary milestone, I'd just like to say a quick word to Eliezer:
Thanks.
You've done a lot.
Okay, that's all! I hope this doesn't come across as "sucking up to the Dear Leader," but instead as the sincere appreciation it is. There is a good reason I list Eliezer as one of my heroes-even-though-we-shouldn't-have-'heroes' over here.