Specifically:
By applying our methodology to four large online news communities for which we have complete article commenting and comment voting data (about 140 million votes on 42 million comments), we discover that community feedback does not appear to drive the behavior of users in a direction that is beneficial to the community, as predicted by the operant conditioning framework. Instead, we find that community feedback is likely to perpetuate undesired behavior. In particular, punished authors actually write worse in subsequent posts, while rewarded authors do not improve significantly.
In a footnote, they discuss what they meant by "write worse":
One important subtlety here is that the observed quality of a post (i.e., the proportion of up-votes) is not entirely a direct consequence of the actual textual quality of the post, but is also affected by community bias effects. We account for this through experiments specifically designed to disentangle these two factors.
They measure post quality based on textual evidence by spinning up a mechanical turk on 171 comments and using that data to train a binomial regression model. So cool!
When comparing the fraction of upvotes received by a user with the fraction of upvotes given by a user, we find a strong linear correlation. This suggests that user behavior is largely "tit-for-tat".... However, we also note an interesting deviation from the general trend. In particular, very negatively evaluated people actually respond in a positive direction: the proportion of up-votes they give is higher than the proportion of up-votes they receive. On the other hand, users receiving many up-votes appear to be more "critical", as they evaluate others more negatively.
Incredibly interesting article. Must read.
EDIT: Consider myself updated. Therefore, I believe downvotes must be destroyed.
The main function of downvotes in LW is NOT to re-educate the offender. Its main function is to make the content which has been sufficiently downvoted effectively invisible.
If you eliminate the downvotes, what will replace them to prune the bad content?
Below is a message I just got from jackk. Some specifics have been redacted 1) so that we can discuss general policy rather than the details of this specific case 2) because presumption of innocence, just in case there happens to be an innocuous explanation to this.
So... thoughts? I have mod powers, but when I was granted them I was basically just told to use them to fight spam; there was never any discussion of any other policy, and I don't feel like I have the authority to decide on the suitable course of action without consulting the rest of the community.