On being downvoted
10Brendan Long
2Adam Zerner
8Gordon Seidoh Worley
6Richard_Kennaway
4Adam Zerner
4bohaska
3[anonymous]
2FCCC
3[anonymous]
5Adam Zerner
3Anon User
-1Adam Zerner
1FCCC
1Anon User
1Caerulea-Lawrence
New Comment
One thing that seems to help a fair bit is receiving an explanation. Or, similarly, a negative/constructive reaction. I strongly suspect this to be the case for others as well.
I'm not sure why this is though. How much information does the explanation provide? I could usually guess at the reason pretty accurately, I think, so hearing the explanation doesn't actually cause me to update my beliefs much.
When I get a negative reaction from people (in general, not just downvotes on posts), I start thinking of every possible thing that could have caused it. Knowing which thing caused the bad reaction out of the infinite space of things I could have done is helpful for me because it shuts down the "generate more reasons I might be bad" loop.
Ah yes! That's really helpful. I just realized that that's a big part of what's happening with me as well. Thanks!
I share your frustration with voting at times. I know and endorse the stated voting norms. I'm also reasonably confident that plenty of people engage in yay/boo voting at times, especially around particularly touchy subjects. In the same way I'd expect to get heavily downvoted on the fictional Blessed Wrong (Less Wrong for Christians) if I posted about how there's no God unless I was extremely careful about how I did it, I expect to get downvoted on Less Wrong if I say something that goes against commonly held beliefs of readers unless I'm really careful about how I do it.
As a result, I have a hard time knowing what feedback to take from upvotes and downvotes. Sometimes I get upvoted because I pressed an applause button. Sometimes I get upvoted because I wrote an actually good post. Sometimes I get downvoted because I pressed a boo button. And sometimes I get downvoted because my post wasn't very good for some specific reasons I should fix. There's generally not enough bandwidth in the voting signal to figure out what case I'm in unless someone takes the time to write a comment explaining why they voted how they did.
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1I also remember, early in my career, an engineering manager telling me this. I was a junior web developer and when asked how capable I feel at doing a particular task, or how quickly I think I could get it done, I'd just be honest. The manager told me it makes me look bad and, even if I don't believe it, for political reasons, I should appear confident.
Have you assessed how accurate your unconfidence is? That is, when you feel unconfident about a project but go ahead anyway, how does it generally turn out?
I've never done so explicitly. Well, one time I did for a few weeks. I was doing great with most of my predictions being pretty accurate, and then a handful of them turned out to wildly undershoot (ie. the task took way longer than I expected), I lost motivation, and stopped.
Overall though, if I think back to my assessments over the years and how accurate they turned out to be, I think I lean slightly towards being too overconfident.
I wonder, what percentage of users vote based on post quality, and what percentage vote based on the viewpoint of the post?
Maybe I shouldn't vote this way, but whether I agree plays a role in whether I upvote a post. I don't downvote things I disagree with, though.
Would you downvote a new post that's thoughtful and interesting, but it's one that you strongly disagree with? If so, and if that user is new, basically no one else will see that post. Maybe you don't do this, but others do. I don't think this is a fair response, to essentially negate all of someone's work in writing a good essay. If downvotes didn't affect viewing priority, this would be much less of an issue.
Just thought about this post again, and wanted to add. I disabled karma notifications after being downvoted a few times. Maybe it would help you too.
FWIW, most of my downvotes on LW are for poorly reasoned jumping to conclusions posts and/or where the poster does not seem to fully know what they are talking about and should have done more homework first. Would never downvote a well written post even if I 100% disagree.
where the poster does not seem to fully know what they are talking about and should have done more homework first
To me it seems appropriate to post about things that you don't know too much about, as long as you make a reasonable effort to communicate where your confidence is. Ie. if you say "here are some thoughts about X; I am just spitballing and don't know too much about X", that seems fine.
What do you think? I suspect you also think it's fine and are moreso trying to point at confident assertions about things the author doesn't actually know much about.
Spitballing is fine, but I feel like in most of those cases, the user should make it a New Question, not a New Post.
Yes, of course, what I meant is more of a case of somebody confidently presenting as an self-evident truth something with a ton of well-known counterarguments. Or more generally, somebody that is not only clueless, but showing no awareness of how clueless they are, and no evidence that they at least tried to look for relevant information. [IMHO] Somebody who demonstrates willingness to learn deserves a comment pointing them to relevant information (and may still warrant a downvote, depending on how off the post it). Somebody who does not deserves to be downvoted, and usually would not deserve the time I would need to spend to explain my downvote in a comment. [/IMHO]
1Hello Adam Zerner,
I believe it is very useful to look at voting through both frameworks, and agree that this is an important aspect to look at. Thanks for deciding to write your concerns in this post.
Downvoting through the lens of stictly 'wanting to see more/less of something', to me, makes it hard to differentiate a response between the functional aspect of writing, and the emotional. Many a post would be much more fulfilling for the posters with differing levels of emotional concerns, if they were accurately and feeling-y addressed - preferably maybe even before posting.
I have tried to write things earlier, that got heavily down-voted, and I left LW for a good while. Mostly because what I wrote was on the Feeling-channel. As such, I primarily wanted an emotional understanding response, and in my naivety I believed that it was obvious. There were vulnerable emotions there, which were never addressed. Of course, I could have been more explicit about my values/needs - but the natural prerequisite for that would be 'trust'. And from my limited experience, asking for feelingy-things is more risky here, because it, weirdly enough, seems to indicate that what you have written is less than what it could be if you would simply answer 'neutrally'. Which is true, in a way. If someone were to give me the sought after feeling-y channel feedback, I would be less reactive about the votes.
Your frustration could point to many things, but since the feelings are important - responses to the content alone might totally miss the high value to you when getting a fulfilling response there. And maybe it would allow to to write some things in your posts that is not clear.
I imagine that the format on the recent dialogue-post by habryka and kave, serves to me as a much better example as to how useful it can be to get feedback on the more value-based, personal side of things. In my experience it greatly increase any odds of me being more creative, engaged, content and collected about something.
I mean, I would feel more content and happy about a site that encouraged and help facillitate interactions like those. A simple - I need 'emotional feedback' button you could press, to see if maybe there was something very important you were missing. Still, emotional feedback is also a bit more personal - and so you would have to have trust that your respondent was adequately skilled and trustworthy, to be able to handle it.
If you could improve a post, or maybe find the courage and willingness to write something through the support and help of peers - wouldn't it be kind of nice? Especially if it was easy to do. I have some ideas here, but not sure if I should elaborate here.
Kindly, Caerulea-Lawrence
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