Vladimir_Nesov comments on Voting etiquette - Less Wrong

8 Post author: gjm 05 April 2009 02:28PM

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Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 05 April 2009 07:59:21PM *  8 points [-]

Being more interested in voting as community feedback and less interested in getting the karmic high score, I've taken to removing the auto-upvote on any of my own comments that I would not have upvoted had someone else posted them, then continued to monitor the vote scores for the next few days. I've come to a couple conclusions:

  • Most people seem to be voting based on what they think the final score should be, not their personal approval independent of existing score. Most posts ended up at 1 or 2, independent of the default self-upvote.
  • Given roughly similar information density, people are more likely to upvote short comments.
  • People are far too likely to upvote bad jokes. For a while I think my highest-scored comment was an "Eliezer Yudkowsky Fact". Oy vey.
Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 April 2009 08:09:31PM *  8 points [-]

I believe the behavior is mostly as follows. If the comment is voted neutral (currently, 1 point), people only upvote or downvote if they feel strongly about whether it's good or bad (according to whatever valuation). If the comment is already upvoted or downvoted, people are more likely to cast an opposite vote if they feel that the comment is rated incorrectly (in the wrong direction), to "fix" its rating. Thus, if someone upvotes a 0-point comment, it doesn't mean that the comment is considered worthy of an upvote (to reach, say, 9 points), it only means that the person thought that it didn't deserve a downvote from 1 point.

Thus, there seems to be 2 modes of voting: hard voting and soft voting.

  • Hard vote is supposed to push the comment all the way in the specified direction.
  • Soft vote is supposed to push the comment in the given direction, but only towards neutral rating, and not beyond that. It's intended only to eliminate the opposing votes, not to set the vote.
Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 05 April 2009 08:15:46PM *  4 points [-]

Thus, there seems to be 2 modes of voting: hard voting and soft voting. * Hard vote is supposed to push the comment all the way in the specified direction. * Soft vote is supposed to push the comment in the given direction, but only towards neutral rating, and not beyond that.

Yes. The quandary seems, to me, that the voting system is designed for hard voting, but in practice more people are using soft voting.

Comment author: Nick_Novitski 08 April 2009 03:34:42PM 0 points [-]

So the solution is either to change the system's design, or change the user's behavior? The latter seems unlikely, so what would a system designed to utilize soft voting look like?

Comment author: khafra 04 January 2013 04:44:25PM 0 points [-]

Hacker News solved the problem by not displaying comment karma, except to the owner of the comment.

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