nyan_sandwich comments on One possible issue with radically increased lifespan - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Spectral_Dragon 30 May 2012 10:24PM

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Comment author: JenniferRM 31 May 2012 02:37:45AM 16 points [-]

Upvoted after seeing the comment. I thought about downvoting when I came to the thread and thought of doing so for a minute or three. The problem I had was the title's tone of summarizing once and for all what "the consequences of transhumanism are" and then doing the job really really poorly. I have a vague (but declining?) "my tribe"-feeling towards transhumanism and don't like seeing it bashed, or associated with straw-man-like arguments.

I think a title that avoided this inclination could have been something like "Is immortalist demography bleak?" or maybe "I fear very long lives lead to resources crunches and high gini coefficients" or you know... something specific and tentative rather than abstract and final. Basically, good microcontent.

One thing I've just had to get used to is that LWers are bad at voting. Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted. Whatever people see first, right after an article will generally get upvoted much more than normal. Its not because quality comes first when sorting by that, because if you look at ancient posts where the sort order of comments is forced to be chronological, the very first comment will frequently have many upvotes even when it is inane.

I've been wondering how to "fix it" but I have nothing concrete. I fear that it is just that "typical internet users" are habituated to clicking on accessible "like" buttons because that's how they interact with facebook, and internet communities inevitably decay absent heroically good site design/management, and so on.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 May 2012 02:51:07AM *  10 points [-]

Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted.

This. Very much this. Not a lot of my stuff gets upvoted. Yesterday I think, I had an existential crisis about it "oh my god, do I suck?". Yes that's stupid, but I often find it deeply disturbing that I am not a demigod.

LW is better than reddit, but yeah.

Another observation is that the downvoters seem to come out first. Posts (articles in discussion, specifically) that end up highly voted usually start out hovering around zero or going negative before rising. This post for example.

EDIT: Actually, I'd really like to see some graphs and stats on this from the LW database. Another thing to get more useful data is to allow people to cast a vote for which of their own comments they are most proud of, and see if this vote correlates with community vote.