One of the most interesting things about this site is the karma scoring, and that it reflects (to a greater degree than you see elsewhere) an objective assessment of the merits of an argument.
[Edit^6: the proposal in this post is related to the Kibitzer system, but this post discusses adding information, while that system concentrates on taking information away. Special thanks for matt's comment and to Vincentyu for being the first to point to prior discussion. A related issue is discussed here (2009) with reference to a wikipedia, and on which Eliezer said "I may end up linking this from the About page when it comes time to explain suggested voting policies"). Data: It took me ~2 days of effort to obtain get linked to this information (09 June 2012 11:29PM -> 11 June 2012 10:28:26PM).]
Suppose a controversial post/comment has six up votes and three down votes. Right now we only see the net result: 3 points, but when the voting is mixed we're losing important information. If it's reasonably easy to implement, could we please show up and down tallies separately? E.g show "3 points (+6,-3)", at least when the voting is mixed? I think the negative votes are the single most important thing. In particular, I want to know about negative votes I receive and where I receive them, because those are the posts where I need to think carefully.
Example: here's a welcome post by syzygy, which relates to Eliezer's post about Politics as the Mind Killer. I know that it's controversial, because I can sort by controversial and it shows up high on the welcome post thread (neat feature!), but I can't tell how many down votes it has. Does syzygy commit a fallacy? (I don't mean to pick on you, sorry about that; I liked your post.)
Of course this change wouldn't fix everything. If a post has "-1 points (+0,-1)", that doesn't mean only one person read it and disapproved; maybe 100s read it and thought it was bad, but saw that it already had -1 net and considered that sufficiently punitive. This is pretty good; we don't want to spend all our time fiddling with scores.
I mean if we wanted to get fancy and use Bayesian inspired scoring, we could let everyone who wishes assign a score (say from -5 to 5) and report posterior summaries of the scores. Or, more importantly if we value objective scoring, we could identify posts that are controversial and we could have the system randomly select users with respectable karma, and assign them to give their score on the post. Such a score would be valid in a way that the current "convenience" scores are not. Additionally, posts could be scored on multiple axes: soundness of argument, potential impact, innovation, whether we agree with the normative basis of a judgement, etc....
But I'm not arguing for a complicated change, just a simple less wrong one.
Other than feasibility concerns, or maybe aesthetics, the strongest argument I can see against this proposal is that we might embarrass or shame users. Can any one give an example where that might be a concern? I figure that since we already show negative scores, users have gotten over most of that inhibition, but I'm new here.
Another possible criticism is that it's a non-issue: almost all posts are all plus or all minus, so it's not worth the effort. I disagree with this one because I think the posts where we have mixed judgements are the most important ones to get right.
EDIT: Wouldn't it be nice to know how many down votes this post has?
What decisions would having more precise information impact and how would it change your decision?
Questioning net downvotes can to self-improvement. But individual votes are really noisy by themselves. People vote for all kinds of reasons, few of which need to impact what kind of comments. And unless you get a lot and they are unexpected it's unlikely that learning why someone downvoted you is worth the time, page space and distracting everyone else.
<Actually, don't you see how ironic it is that you're using this argument at this particular point in the thread? This post is subordinate to a comment I made that said:
Wedrifid can correct me if I'm wrong, but I really doubt he cared that much about the -2 (or if he did care he didn't want to care). It's hard to when you have 20,000 in total karma. Policing of any kind requires effort. Karma, like anything else, can be over-policed. And like other things that are not of great significance any policing is often more trouble than it is worth. The point of karma is a) a collective moderation tool (mainly this involves downvoting spammers and trolls), b) a loose indicator of status to encourage effortful and intelligent contributions.
Yeah, this is a good point. The problem is, it isn't just that. And that's part of why individual upvotes and downvotes in many cases don't signal much-- people want different things from the site and vote accordingly. If enough people see a comment that noise will get lost and you'll get a pretty good estimate of the quality of the comment. An individual comment that is net downvoted can be noise as well. I have plenty of negative comments, as does wedrifid. Much of the time I deserve them but sometimes it's just a matter of my having information community doesn't have and not communicating it well, different priors or talking about something others don't care about. Overtime that noise gets washed away (think of all the comments that are voted up way more than they are worth, i.e. this)
I'm not at all against discussing changes to the site structure to make it better. I think there are a lot of things that people have agreed would improve the site but are slow to come about for coding reasons. You might try looking through some of the older meta threads and see what was discussed then.
I have an undeveloped intuition that building the site that way hurts the content of the site, not just me. But I'm not sure about that.