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ciphergoth 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.
Median-based, stars-out-of-five voting might encourage downvoting, because you can make it clear with your vote that you're saying "not all that great" rather than "terrible, should be burned".
Still, there's a separate exercise in persuading people that thinking "this comment is just trash" doesn't necessarily mean you're hopelessly in the grip of confirmation bias. This probably deserves a top-level post of its own.
The hesitation to make a vote that is too strong leads to the lack of voting. So, in the light of my observation about hard/soft voting, I suggest making 4 buttons that explicate the distinction: (--, -, +, ++), where the central buttons correspond to the soft votes, and outside buttons to more aggressive hard votes.