NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, September 8-14, 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 08 September 2014 12:31PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 September 2014 08:35:52PM 3 points [-]

Research about online communities with upvotes and downvotes

We find that negative feedback leads to significant changes in the author’s behavior, which are much more salient than the effects of positive feedback. These effects are detrimental to the community: authors of negatively evaluated content are encouraged to post more, and their future posts are also of lower quality. Moreover, these punished authors are more likely to later evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these undesired effects through the community.

I don't think things are quite that bad here.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 18 September 2014 08:07:36PM 0 points [-]

Didn't read the PDF, but I suspect the main problem is that not all "communities with downvotes" are the same. Some websites have downvotes where the downvoted comments are just as visible as the upvoted ones; so there is no punishment.

Not sure if the causality can't go the other way round: crazy people having more time to post comments. Or even that members are more tolerant to new crazy people and annoyed by them later (which causes the decrease of comment karma), while the crazy people gradually write more and more comments because they become more comfortable or have more open battles to fight.

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