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Nornagest comments on [meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, here I am again, this time providing a paper backing up my claim that having a downvote mechanism at all is just pure poison.
It doesn't make any sense for this type of community. This isn't Digg. We're not trying to rate content so an algorithm can rank it as a news aggregation service.
Look at Slate Star Codex, where everybody is spending their time now - no aversive downvote mechanism, relaxed, cordial atmosphere, extremely minimal moderation. Proof of concept.
Just turn off the downvote button for one week and if LessWrong somehow implodes catastrophically ... I'll update.
I'd rather kill karma entirely than refactor it into an upvote-only system. If you're trying to do anything more controversial than deciding which cat picture is the best, upvote-only systems encourage nasty factional behavior that I don't want to see here: it doesn't matter how many people you piss off as long as you're getting strong positive reactions, so it's in your interests to post divisive content. That in turn leads to cliques and one-upmanship and other unpleasantness. It's a common pattern on social media, for example.
The other failure mode you get from it is lots of content-free feel-good nonsense, but we have strong enough norms against that that I don't think it'd be a problem in the short term.
I'd be fine with that. I feel a bit silly repeating the same arguments, but we're supposed to be striving to be, like, the most rational humans as a community, yet the social feedback system we are using was chosen ... because it came packaged with Reddit and Reddit is what was chosen as the LessWrong platform because it was the hot thing of its day. There was no clever Quirrell-esque design behind our karma system designed to bring out the best in us or protect us from the worst in us. It's a relic. Let's be rid of it.
No Karma 2014