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hyporational comments on Open Thread, October 13 - 19, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Coscott 14 October 2013 01:57AM

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Comment author: hyporational 17 October 2013 10:11:11AM *  1 point [-]

It seems to me that the total voting ought to reflect the "net reward" we want to give the poster for their action of posting,

This should be implemented in the system if done at all. Downvoting "nondeservingly" upvoted posts will make obvious but true comments look controversial. I think inconsistently meta-gaming the system just makes it less informative.

If you don't think something deserves the upvotes, but isn't wrong, then simply don't vote.

ETA: I assume you didn't mean that downvoting to balance the votes is good, but you didn't mention it either.

Comment author: witzvo 17 October 2013 03:28:11PM *  0 points [-]

Downvoting "nondeservingly" upvoted posts will make obvious but true comments look controversial.

Good point. I don't actually do that, I do the "don't vote" policy you mentioned, but I hadn't thought about why, or even noticed that I do it correctly. Thanks. Your point that it would make the voting look controversial is well taken.

I would be tempted to upvote something that I thought had karma that was too low. This would tend to cause it to look "controversial" when, maybe, I agreed that it deserved a negative score. Is upvoting behavior also a bad idea in this case and I should just "not vote"?

This should be implemented in the system if done at all.

I don't see how that's possible without it having more information.

I don't want to overthink this too much as I can't help but think that these issues are artifacts of the voting system itself being a bit crude: e.g. should I be able to "vote" for a target karma score instead of just up or down? The score of the post could be the median target score.

Comment author: hyporational 17 October 2013 03:51:21PM 0 points [-]

I don't know. I'm quite green here too. I don't usually read heavily downvoted comments, as they're hidden by default. Downvoted comments are less visible anyway, so any meta-gaming on them has less meaningful impact.

I might upvote a downvoted comment, if I don't understand why it's downvoted and wanted it to be more visible so that discussion would continue. It would be a good to follow up with a comment to clarify that, but many times I'm too lazy :(

I think making the system more complicated would just make people go even more meta.

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