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OrphanWilde comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (254)
Site suggestion:
When somebody attempts to post a comment with the words "why", "comment", and "downvoted", it should open a prompt directing them to an FAQ explaining most likely reasons for their downvote, and also warning them prior to actually submitting the comment that it's likely to be unproductive and just lead to more downvotes.
(Personally I think this site needs to have a little more patience with people asking these questions, as they almost always come from new users who are still getting accustomed to the community norms, but that's just me.)
This suggestions conflicts with the advice of the Welcome Thread, which says:
And yet I persistently see requests for explanations downvoted. The advice of the welcome thread does not actually correspond to downvoting behavior.
If the advice of the welcome thread doesn't match the actual LW norms, we should change either the welcome thread or the norms.
Do the requests remain downvoted? In my experience, they may be downvoted for a while, but then get voted back up.
It depends a bit on why the original post was downvoted. Asking for explanation when the problem is obvious, or on a forbidden topic tends not to get back to neutral.
Obvious to regular users != obvious to new user
Monkeymind knew why he was being downvoted.
Edit: But, I agree with your point that many community norms that will get one downvoted are not accessible to new members.
The Welcome Thread doesn't set official policy.
In my opinion, downvoting is necessary for forum moderation, and people don't downvote enough. It is rather easy to get a lot of karma by simply writing a lot, because the average karma of a comment (this is just my estimate) is around 1. I would prefer if the average was closer to 0.
Asking about downvoting is ok, per se (assuming that the person does not do it with every single damned comment which fell to -1 temporarily). But sometimes it seems to contain a connotation that "you should not downvote my comments unless you explain why". Which I completely disagree with and consider it actively harmful, so I automatically downvote any comment that feels like this. (Yes, there is a chance that I misunderstood the author's intentions. Well, I am not omniscient, and I don't want to get paralyzed by my lack of omniscience.)
I just downvote people complaining about downvotes
Do you make a distinction between complaining and asking?
A little? Most "asking about downvotes" are functionally indistinguishable from complaints although phrased as a question in the sense of "I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted (implying it doesn't make sense and you are wrong to do so)". If someone posts an in depth post and it gets downvoted and they ask for which specific parts of their giant post were bad, I give that more leeway.
If I see a question about downvotes that's below 0, I'm going to upvote it.
I don't think I need to ask why that got downvoted.
This and other variants of it have been tried on other forums before, with no real change in new user behavior.