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pianoforte611 comments on Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction - Less Wrong Discussion
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Proposals for making LW upvote-only emerge every few months, most recently during the retributive downvoting fiasco. I said then, and I continue to believe now, that it's a terrible idea.
JMIV is right to say in the ancestor that subtle features of moderation mechanics have outsized effects on community culture; I even agree with him that Eliezer voiced an unrealistically rosy view of the downvote in "Well-Kept Gardens". But upvote-only systems have their own pitfalls, and quite severe ones. The reasons behind them are somewhat complex, but boil down to bad incentives.
Imagine posting as a game scored in utility. Upvotes gain you utility; downvotes lose you it; and for most people being downvoted costs you more than being upvoted gains you, though the exact ratio varies from person to person. You want to maximize your utility, and you have a finite amount of time to spend on it. If you spend that time researching new content to post, your output is low but it's very rarely downvoted. Debate takes a moderate amount of time; votes on debate are less reliable, especially if you're arguing for something like neoreaction or radical feminism or your own crackpot views on time and dimension, but you're all but guaranteed upvotes from people that agree with you. Plus telling people they're wrong is fun, so you get some bonus utility. Finally, you can post cat pictures, which takes almost no time, will score a few upvotes from people that like looking at their little jellybean toes, but violates content norms.
Which one of these is optimal changes, depending on how tolerant you are of downvoting and how good you are at dodging it. But while removing the downvote option incentivizes all three (which is why social media likes it), it should be clear that it incentivizes the last two much more. You can see the fruits of this on Facebook groups, that site's closest analogy to what's being proposed here. (Tumblr, and Facebook user pages, are also upvote-only in practice, but their sharing and friending mechanisms make them harder to analyze in these terms.)
He isn't suggesting making LW upvote only. Just a creating a new section of it that is upvote only. And why not? If you're right the evidence will bear out that it is a terrible system. But we won't know until we test the idea.
An earlier version of my comment read "LW or parts of it". Edited it out for stylistic reasons and because I assumed the application to smaller domains would be clear enough in context. Guess I was wrong.
Granted, not everything I said would apply to the first proposal, the one where top-level posts are upvote-only but comments aren't. That's a little more interesting; I'm still leery of it but I haven't fully worked out the incentives.
As to empirics, one thing we're not short on is empirical data from other forums. We're not so exceptional that the lessons learned from them can't be expected to apply.
Apologies if that seemed like nitpick (which I try to avoid). I thought it was relevant because even if you are right, trying out the new system wouldn't mean making LessWrong terrible, it would just mean making a small part of LessWrong terrible (which we could then get rid of). The cost is so small so that I don't see why its shouldn't be tried.
I think the cost is higher than you're giving it credit for. Securing dev time to implement changes around here is incredibly hard, at least if you aren't named Eliezer, and changes anywhere are usually harder to back out than they are to put in; we can safely assume that any change we manage to push through will last for months, and forever is probably more likely.