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Apprentice comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
What are you supposed to do when you've nailed up a post that is generally disliked? I figured that once this got to -5 karma it would disappear from view and be forgotten. But it just keeps going down and it's now at -12. This must mean that someone saw the title of it at -11 karma and thought "Sounds promising! Reading this now will be a good use of my time." And then they read it and went: "Arrgh! This turned out to be a disappointing post. Less like this, please. I'd better downvote it to warn others."
What does etiquette suggest I do here? Am I supposed to delete the post to keep people from falling into the trap of reading it? But I like the discussion it spawned and I'd like to preserve it. I'm at a loss and I can't find relevant advice at the wiki.
if we don't have downvoted topics some of the time it means we are being too conservative about what we judge will be useful to others. Only worry if too large a fraction of your stuff gets downvoted.
That is a good example of a true Umeshism.
Not necessarily. Seeing a heavily downvoted post seems to trigger some kind of group-norm-reinforcement instinct in me: I often end up wanting to read it in the hopes of it being just as bad as the downvotes imply, so that I could join in the others in downvoting it. And I actually get pleasure out of being able to downvote it.
I'm not very proud of acting on that impulse, especially since I'm not going to be able to objectively evaluate a post's merit if I start reading it while hoping it to be bad. But sometimes I do act on it regardless. (I didn't do that with your post, though.)
I hadn't thought of this either! It does sound like fun to hunt with the group.
Don't forget to bring your own torch and pitchfork.
I've noticed myself doing the same thing and I'd like to turn on anti-kibitzing to avoid it, but when I tried it the whole "hiding post authors" thing was so irritating that I stopped.
Giving that the post does contain upvoted comments that belong to it deleting it would prevent people from seeing those comments and be bad.
Grin and say "Fuck 'em!"
Well, I didn't bother to look this time, but if every bad post got just -5 votes max, the noise would probably unbearable. The extra sting is there for you, not to warn other readers.
Thank you, I hadn't considered that viewpoint.
I actually suspect we have too much sting rather than too little. Compare with this discussion. Furthermore, most of Eliezer's Facebook posts would make good discussion posts or open-thread comments but he posts them there rather than here. I don't know why but maybe he finds it less stressful to post in a system where there are only upvotes and no downvotes.
Also compare with this Oatmeal comic: "How I feel after reading 1,000 insightful, positive comments about my work and one negative one: The whole internet hates me :(" Obviously an exaggeration for effect but I do think most people need a very high ratio of positive to negative feedback to feel good about what they're doing. I admit I do. Many of you, of course, are made of sterner stuff, I don't dispute that.
I don't instinctively like downvotes either, and I suspect it's mostly my personality that magnifies everything negative out of proportion i.e. there's depressive bias. However, if I get downvoted for something really stupid, I find the punishment a very useful deterrent that also works for my personal life. It's the inexplicable votes that bug me the most, but hey, you can't please everyone.
I subscribed to Eliezer's fb feed about a month ago and I'm glad he doesn't post such unpolished ideas here. I think he also posts there because the commenters are better selected and not anonymous. I might be in favor of an upvote only system, if it weren't for the really terrible outlier posters who need to be hidden quickly. For upvotes only , we would need a completely different visibility system.
One way this is often addressed is replacing downvote with flag, and with enough flags it gets hidden (flags and upvotes aren't inverses of each other).
That doesn't seem to scale well with the number of readers. Some discussions attract more people than others; so in the less popular discussions almost nothing would be flagged, but in the more popular ones, any slightly controversial comment would be flagged.
You are assuming a fixed cutoff which I was not.
Just leave it. It can serve as lesson to you in the future but in a month no one but you will remember it as it falls off the scroll.
-12 points in the discussion section is a pretty trivial karma hit out o.f the 1132 I see you have at this moment. I'd try to do better next time.
Clearly, the karma as such is no problem. I just don't want to annoy people by having them read a text which they are likely to find annoying and I don't want to violate rules of etiquette I might not know about. But if it is normal procedure just to leave this as is, then, sure, let's do it that way.
It is, of course, somewhat unpleasant to discover that something you wrote is disliked but it also affords an opportunity for learning. Next time I try to get LessWrongers to change diapers, I'll approach it differently.
Eh, if someone clicks on an article at -11, then feels reading it was a waste of time, he should blame himself, not you.
I don't recommend optimizing for what other people on the 'net like.
Don't optimize for it. On the other hand it's still good to understand what other people like if you want to convince them.
I do write post that I expect to be voted down, when I think they have merit. On the other hand if I can write a post in a way that will be voted down or in a way that will find acceptance I go for the way that will find acceptance.
One possible solution would be to edit the article, add "[Deleted]" to the title, remove all text and replace it by an explanation like: "The article was deleted because it received a lot of downvotes, but the discussion seems worth keeping; please don't vote on the article anymore."
Do that without removing the actual text.
I don't think it worth saying that you remove something because downvotes as the only reason. Either you think that people who disagree have a point or you stand by what you wrote in the past.