I've only recently joined the LessWrong community, and I've been having a blast reading through posts and making the occasional comment. So far, I've received a few karma points, and I’m pretty sure I’m more proud of them than of all the work I did in high school put together.
My question is simple, and aimed a little more towards the veterans of LessWrong:
What are the guidelines for upvoting and downvoting? What makes a comment good, and what makes one bad? Is there somewhere I can go to find this out (I've looked, but there doesn't seem to be a guide on LessWrong already up. On the other hand, I lose my glasses while wearing them, so…)
Additionally, why do I sometimes see discussion posts with many comments but few upvotes, and others with many upvotes but few comments? If a post is worth commenting on, isn't it worth upvoting? I feel as though my map is missing a few pages here.
Not only would having a clear discussion of this help me review the comments of others better, it would also help me understand what I’m being reinforced for on each of my comments, so I can alter my behaviors accordingly.
I want to help keep this a well-kept garden, but I’m struggling to figure out how to trim the hedges.
I'd prefer unedited mind dumps not to be downvoted, mainly for the reason my articles tend to be ones. I believe if a forum title says Discussion, we can have more equality of effort. I.e. in normal articles the authors should put a lot of effort in making it easy to read and the reader should not need to put in much effort. But in something called Discussion just dumping loosely related ideas, insight-beginnings, and asking the readers to put in some effort into processing it, fishing out useful sounding bits, and engaging with them, should not be too much IMHO. If you don't feel like doing so, fine, just ignore it altogether, but hitting a downvote sounds like sending everybody the message that they should not either, and sending the author the message to not do this at all. Which is IMHO wrong, these things have positive utility, in the sense of a chance of having some bits that could be developed into something insightful.
It might be worthwhile for you to edit your mind dumps given that the payoff will be multiplicative across your readership. Let's say you spend 20 minutes editing your mind dump and compress it to 50% of its original size. Maybe originally it took 10 minutes to read and now it takes 5. If your post has 100 readers over its lifetime (quite plausible to me given the number of lurkers on Less Wrong, the way people will stop voting once a post reaches its "just" score, and the high number of comments many posts get), then we are 480 minutes ahead of where we were. (Incentivizing people to do things like this seems like a positive side effect of voting.)