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kgalias comments on Open Thread for January 17 - 23 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (191)
Is it OK for me to downvote meetup threads if I don't want to see them?
I don't know how other meetups go, but my local meetup is based on the fact that members of the group volunteer to lead the meetup. (on a week by week basis) The person who volunteers puts in some extra amount of their time to ensure that there is a good topic. These people keep the meetups going, and are doing a service for the rationality community.
These people should not be punished with negative karma. If anything, we should be awarding karma for those people who make meetup posts.
Your complaint is about the fact that there is no separate list of meetups and non-meetup posts, and by down voting meetup posts, you are punishing innocent volunteers.
Karma shouldn't be about punishing or rewarding writers, it should be about telling potential readers how helpful you think a post/comment is.
Karma is currently very visible to the writers. If you give little positive and negative points to human beings, they will interpret it as reward/punishment, no matter what the intent was. As a meetup organiser, I know I do feel more motivated when my meetup organisation posts get positive karma.
but is for some people, unfortunately
(I advocate more nuanced voting categories to solve this)
I think not, unless there are only very specific meetup threads that you don't want to see. E.g. ones with no location in the title.
Any individual meetup thread is very valuable for a small number of people, and indifferent-to-mildly-costly to a large number of people. Votes allow you to express a preference direction but not magnitude, which doesn't actually capture preferences in this case.
A core long-term goal of LessWrong is to build a rationalist community so a necessary condition for a downvote should be that a post doesn't advance this goal.
Downvoting, by itself, isn't going to stop anyone from posting meetup threads. That said, there has been discussion/complaints about meetup spam before, so you're not alone.
edit: clarify wording
I understand. Nevertheless, discussion so far hasn't gotten anywhere. Perhaps downvoting meetup threads would put some pressure on people involved in meetups to resolve the matter.
As of now, I haven't downvoted any meetup-related thread.
I'm the guy who posts the DC meetups. While I'm sympathetic to the problem, I'm not sure what I can do to help, aside from not posting meetups at all (not really an option). Pressuring me won't help you if I can't do anything.
I understand that once some dissatisfaction with some minor nuisance (and a minor nuisance the meetups notices are given that you can scroll them away with the flick of a finger) can cause your brain to get into a negative feedback loop where the dissatisfaction gets moved around and increased as long it is not solved (see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/).
But see thru this. It is a minor nuisance. You are above this. Dont let your dissatisfaction fool you. Yedi mind trick: There is no prblem with meetups. Scroll on.
Are minor nuisances never worth solving?
Not it the cost exceeds the benefits.
The cost here might be someone implementing a technical solution.