Starting this weekend, LessWrong will be displaying karma notifications in the top-right corner, telling you about when you've been upvoted or downvoted. You can click the star icon to see which of your posts and comments have been voted on, and how much their score has changed.
This works a little differently from how most web sites do it. I've noticed a tendency, in myself and others, to sometimes obsessively refresh pages hoping to have gotten Likes. The rest of the LessWrong team has noticed this too. That's why on LessWrong, by default, this won't work; karma-change notifications are grouped into daily batches, so after you've checked it, you won't be notified of any additional votes until the next day.
While I hope that this prevents people from using LessWrong in ways that they don't endorse, daily batching might not be a strong enough safeguard for everyone. If you find yourself tempted to check LessWrong more often than you think is ideal, you can change the karma-notifier batches to weekly, or disable them entirely. On the other hand, if checking and posting on LessWrong is something you'd rather do more of (because you'd otherwise do something less valuable), you can set it to real-time.
As a nonprofit with no advertising, LessWrong is under a different set of incentives than most websites. We worry a lot about the trade-off between engagement and addictiveness. I want people to use the site in ways they reflectively endorse, even if that means using it less. I think LessWrong should leave that under user control, as much as feasible.
(As a reminder: Voting on LessWrong is a way of saying "I want to see more/less things like this". Upvotes are a way to tell people that their post or comment was worth their time to write, and worth your time to read. It does not necessarily indicate agreement; sometimes a good write-up of an ultimately incorrect idea is what a conversation needs. Conversely, downvotes do not necessarily indicate disagreement; sometimes a correct points is written in a way that's confusing, inflammatory or otherwise detracts from the conversation.)
As always, bug reports are welcome here, via the Intercom widget, or on the GitHub issue tracker.
If I'm having lunch with a friend, then my usual expectation is that I'll get strong compliments if they adore my clothing style, but I won't get strong criticisms if they strongly dislike it, unless I explicitly opt in to receiving the latter feedback. Most people seem to treat high-salience personal compliments as opt-out, while treating high-salience personal criticisms as opt-in. This can be outweighed if the criticism is important enough, but otherwise, criticism tends to be relatively mild and cloaked in humor or indirection.
Thinking about it in those terms, it makes sense to me to treat upvotes as similar to "person says they love my haircut" and downvotes as similar to "person says they hate my haircut." I probably want to be able to view both kinds of feedback in a time and place of my choosing, but I don't want to have the latter feedback tossed my way literally every time I open Chrome or check my email.
It might be that those norms are fine for personal style, but that we want to promote better, more pro-criticism norms in areas that matter more. We might want to push in the direction of making critical feedback opt-out, so people can (a) update faster on things that do matter a lot, and (b) perhaps get some useful exposure therapy that will make us better at receiving tips, pushback, and contrary views in the future. Mostly I'm just making this comment so folks feel comfortable talking about their preferences openly, without feeling like they're Bad Rationalists if they're not already convinced that it's useful for them personally to receive a regular stream of downvote notifications (in the world where they get a lot of downvotes).