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AnnaSalamon comments on On Comments, Voting, and Karma - Part I - Less Wrong
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I don't think there's enough downvoting going on - in particular, comments of such low quality that I would not wish them to insult the eyes of new users judging us, are not successfully voted down to -4 and hidden. It seems we're wandering into a norm where 0 is insult enough, -1 is terrible, -4 is hardly imaginable.
Those of you who are not familiar with the literature on online communities should bear in mind that online communities die primarily as a result of failing to solve the problem of quality control, and that refusing to accept the unfortunate necessity of quality control is a primary reason. So there are broken windows and they attract hoodlums, and the higher-quality recruits encountering the community for the first time decide to go elsewhere. And this has happened over and over again since before the days of the Eternal September.
Here, the quality control is downvoting, but people are refusing to use it. It has turned into something awful, horrible, unspeakable, a punch in the nose that requires a full-blown court drama. No community can defend its quality standards in such a fashion.
Downvoting really should not be that awful. And so I hope that starting all comments out at 0 will encourage more downvoting, which will make a score of -1 seem less awful, which will encourage even more downvoting, and so LW will not go the way of so many other online communities that tried to be nice and refused to defend their quality standards.
How would the separate agree/disagree button help?
The agree/disagree button gives people an easy way of expressing disagreement. If they have no such easy way, many will downvote instead.
When that happens, the quality control aspect of the voting system is severely impaired. All posts for positions that most LW readers disagree with would have a de facto handicap, since they would get many negative votes that they should not have gotten based on quality.
I somewhat suspect though that even with a disagree button, voting down will sometimes be used to express disagreement, just because its effect is more visible and of more consequence. In this respect, I think that a agree/disagree system will be effective to the extent that it has real noticeable effects (just as karma has a real effect in terms of granting privileges and conveying virtual status). If all it does is change a number attached to the comment, I think people will still succumb to abusing downvoting, albeit much less frequently than presently.
Quality of argument and correctness aren't necessarily linked. You might easily wish to encourage postings of similar quality and yet say that you don't agree with the position taken. At present, feedback has only one axis along which to vary, and it's not clear what that axis is supposed to represent.