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drethelin comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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If they wanted to explain with a comment, they would've. The point of downvotes is to create a system of feedback that is easy to provide and doesn't clutter up the boards with millions of comments saying "Me too!" or "I think your point was written in a demeaning fashion"
Advice given to newbies, from the current intro thread:
So which way is it?
As the one who wrote that, I'm obviously in favor of asking for explanations, but drethelin's point (that the first few upvotes or downvotes are not always the start of a cascade) is important to bear in mind before concluding that LW feels really strongly in general.
In addition to random noise, there's the phenomenon that immediate votes are usually from the very active users who are reading Recent Comments, and that those users are often more critical in their voting behavior than the people who only check in sporadically.
I don't read the intro thread or write it. Opinions written by Drethelin do not represent in whole or in part the views of Lesswrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Quirinus Quirrel
Alright, so the community is divided on this matter. So then, when you were telling me never to complain about karma, were you advising me on how to optimize for the community's approval, or for your approval?
Some prior discussion of this issue. Short summary:
The intro thread is a simplification of the community norm about asking for explanation of downvotes. In fact, the particular simplification is very misleading of the fairly complex community norm on this issue (and votes are such a small percentage of readers that any particular post could easily be voted quite differently than the community norm might predict).
Karma as a feedback mechanism allows users' perceptions of whether someone is contributing positively or negatively to take on lasting status associations, in a way that comments do not. Plus, it encourages users to provide feedback more frequently than they would if they had no way of doing so other than leaving comments. Karma would most likely continue to fulfill these purposes even if people leaving downvotes or upvotes always explained themselves on request, as requests are infrequent enough that the possibility of having to explain oneself would probably not be a powerful deterrent to voting.