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witzvo 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: 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.