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I have a feature request for LessWrong. It's the same as my feature request for every site: you should be able to search within a user (i.e. visit a user page and begin a search from there). This should be easy to do technically; you just have to add the author's name as one of the words in the search index. And in terms of UI, I think you could just link to https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=@author:username.
Preferably do it in such a way that a normal post cannot do the same, e.g. if "foo authored this post" is placed in the index as @author:foo, if a normal post contains the text @author:foo then perhaps the index only ends up with @author (or author) and foo, while the full string is not in the index (or, if it is in the index, can only be found by searching with quotes a la Google: "@author:foo"
P.S. we really should be able to search by date range, too. I'm looking for something posted by Yudkowsky at some point before 2010... and surely this is not an unusual thing to want to search for.
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I wrote a long comment and someone took the "strong downvote, no disagreement, no reply" tack again. Poppy-cutters[1] seem way more common at LessWrong than I could've predicted, and I'd like to see statistics to see how common they are, and to see whether my experience here is normal or not.
- ^
Meaning users who just seem to want to make others feel bad about their opinion, especially unconstructively. Interesting statistics might include the distributions of users who strong-downvote a positive score into a negative one (as compared to their other voting behaviors), who downvote more than they disagree, who downvote more than they upvote, who strong-downvote more than they downvote, and/or strong-downvote more often than they reply. Also: is there an 80/20 rule like "20% of the people do 80% of the downvotes"? Is the distribution different for "power users" than "casual users"?
Huh, just to check, this seems like the comment of yours that you are probably referring to, and I didn't see any strong downvotes. Before I voted on it it was at -1 with 2 total votes, which very likely means someone with a weak-upvote strength of 2 small-downvoted it. My guess is that's just relatively random voting noise and people small-upvote and small-downvote lots of stuff without having strong feelings about it.
It does produce harsher experiences when the first vote is a downvote, and I've considered over the years to do a Reddit-like thing where you hide the total karma of a new comment for a few hours to reduce those effects, but I overall decided against it.
Oh, that'd be nice - hide it for maybe 6 hours or until there are 4 voters, whichever comes first. That lets solid signals come through quickly, and weak ones settle a bit before hitting.
Shoot, I forgot that high-karma users have a "small-strength" of 2, so I can't tell if it was strong-downvoted or not. I mistakenly assumed it was a newish user. Edit: P.S. I might feel better if karma was hidden on my own new comments, whether or not they are hidden on others, though it would then be harder to guess at the vote distribution, making the information even more useless than usual if it survives the hiding-period. Still seems like a net win for the emotional benefits.
1Disagree votes are meant to be a way to signal disagreement without signaling that the comment was lower quality/signal.
I don't think the disagreement of a single LW reader is something to feel sad about. I would feel sad if nobody ever disagreed with my comments.
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Yikes! Apparently I said "strong disagree" when I meant "strong downvote". Fixed. Sorry. Disagree votes generally don't bother me either, they just make me curious what the disagreer disagrees about.