I originally wrote this as a comment on a post which had negative net karma when I first saw it. I figure what I wrote is worth also posting to the top level, so that it can have more chance to be seen and thought about
When I came upon this post, it had a negative karma score. I don't think it's good form to have posts receiving negative net karma (except in extreme cases), so I upvoted to provide this with a positive net karma.
It is unpleasant for an author when they receive a negative karma score on a post which they spent time and effort to make (even when that effort was relatively small), much more so than receiving no karma beyond the starting score. This makes the author less likely to post again in the future, which prevents communication of ideas, and keeps the author from getting better at writing. In particular this creates a risk of LessWrong becoming more like a bubble chamber (which I don't think is desirable), and makes the community less likely to hear valuable ideas that go against the grain of the local culture.
A writer who is encouraged to write more will become more clear in their communication, as well as in their thoughts. And they will also get more used to the particular expectations of the culture of LessWrong- norms that have good reason to exist, but which also go against some people's intuitions or what has worked well for them in other, more "normie" contexts.
Karma serves as a valuable signal to authors about the extent to which they are doing a good job of writing clearly about interesting topics in a way that provides value to members of the community, but the range of positive integers provides enough signal. There isn't much lost in excluding the negative range (except in extreme cases).
Let's be nice to people who are still figuring writing out, I encourage you to refrain from downvoting them into negative karma.
I don't buy this argument because I think the threshold of 0 is largely arbitrary. Many years ago when LW2.0 was still young, I posted something about anthropic probabilities that I spent months (I think, I don't completely remember) of time on, and it got like +1 or -1 net karma (from where my vote put it), and I took this extremely hard. I think I avoided the site for like a year. Would I have taken it any harder if it were negative karma? I honestly don't think so. I could even imagine that it would have been less painful because I'd have preferred rejection over "this isn't worth engaging with".
So I don't see a reason why expectations should turn on +/- 0[1] (why would I be an exception?), so I don't think that works as a rule -- and in general, I don't see how you can solve this problem with a rule at all. Consequently I think "authors will get hurt by people not appreciating their work" is something we just have to accept, even if it's very harsh. In individual cases, the best thing you can probably do is write a comment explaining why the rejection happened (if in fact you know the reason), but I don't think anything can be done with norms or rules.
Relatedly, consider students who cry after seeing test results. There is no threshold below which this happens. One person may be happy with a D-, another may consider a B+ to be a crushing disappointment. And neither of those is wrong! If the first person didn't do anything (and perhaps could have gotten an A if they wanted) but the second person tried extremely hard to get an A, then the second person has much more reason to be disappointed. It simply doesn't depend on the grade itself. ↩︎
I mean, you're not addressing my example and the larger point I made. You may be right about your own example, but I'd guess it's because you're not thinking of a high effort post. I honestly estimate that I'm in the highest percentile on how much I've been hurt by reception to my posts on this site, and in no case was the net karma negative. Similarly, I'd also guess that if you spent a month on a post that ended up at +9, this would feel a lot more hurt than if this post or a similarly short one ended up at -1, or even -20.