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hyporational comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
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.