Regarding DOWNVOTES 👎 - I don't think they're good or bad or even...
Anatoly Karlin 🧲💯@akarlin
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May 08, 2025
~1 min read
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Regarding DOWNVOTES 👎 - I don't think they're good or bad or even cringe by default; it all depends on the audience.
They work great on high Openness, high IQ forums to filter out the riff-raff. The classic example would be LessWrong, which also has strong basal commitments to rationality and imprecations against downvoting based on "feelings".
On Reddit downvotes reinforce the midwit conformism that makes any "serious" political subreddits unbearable.
YouTube while not high IQ is surprisingly open and tolerant to different perspectives. Commenters there are just nice and easygoing, the opposite of high-strung Redditors. Downvotes there simply identified low quality slop to avoid and shouldn't have been removed.
I think downvotes would have probably been good on Old Twitter because it was politically balanced and there was genuine repression of smart viewpoints that didn't conform to liberal-left Establishment orthodoxies.
On today's X overrun by rightoid slop and rapidly evolving AI bots I expect them to be a disaster. It makes me even more bearish on its long-term viability.
They work great on high Openness, high IQ forums to filter out the riff-raff. The classic example would be LessWrong, which also has strong basal commitments to rationality and imprecations against downvoting based on "feelings".
On Reddit downvotes reinforce the midwit conformism that makes any "serious" political subreddits unbearable.
YouTube while not high IQ is surprisingly open and tolerant to different perspectives. Commenters there are just nice and easygoing, the opposite of high-strung Redditors. Downvotes there simply identified low quality slop to avoid and shouldn't have been removed.
I think downvotes would have probably been good on Old Twitter because it was politically balanced and there was genuine repression of smart viewpoints that didn't conform to liberal-left Establishment orthodoxies.
On today's X overrun by rightoid slop and rapidly evolving AI bots I expect them to be a disaster. It makes me even more bearish on its long-term viability.
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Again there's a place where I post longreads and videos.
Don't know how much longer I'll stay around here.
karlin.blog
Don't know how much longer I'll stay around here.
karlin.blog
