Comments
Great job getting something up for this guys. If we wanted to improve it for next year, I'd suggest interspersing some footage of the work being done and putting key points like the cost to deworm a kid, the amount that've been helped and the benefits of deworming right at the start of the video (literally in the first 20 seconds if possible) and in text overlay so everyone sees them (a lot of people I've talked to who have watched P4A vids only watch the very start of them). Since it's a yearly thing the time investment now could pay off, and starting with those big facts to grab attention then winding into an introduction of where the research comes from and more description could work well.
Also, does anyone know how many of the top voted charities the money gets split between? Is it the top three, or top ten, or...? And how it's split (proportional to votes or equally)?
I don't know who downvoted this, but it would be great for this forum to have a norm of people explaining why they downvote something when they do (especially a top-level post). Otherwise the forum can seem unfriendly, and also it's hard to learn from downvotes unless there's an accompanying explanation.
I think this would be a great norm!
Also if explanations were usually framed as: "I can see what good thing you were trying to do here, I like X, but I think Y was very problematic." The same way people give constructive feedback in the rest of their life!
This norm significantly raises the cost of leaving negative feedback. Many EAs are very friendly people who shy away from conflict; anonymous downvoting allows them to express themselves without inviting conflict or criticism. At the current low-negative-feedback margin, negative feedback is rarer and more useful than positive feedback, so I don't think we should penalise it.
On the object level issue, I don't see any problem with this post.
I find the culture of effective altruism-themed places on the internet currently rather negative and off-putting, and specifically have been demotivated from commenting on the forum because my comments got down-voted without explanation. That's not to say the down-voting wasn't warranted (although I'm obv a biased judge of whether my contributions were valuable ;) ), and I'm working on being more resilient. But since I know many people on the forum personally, I imagine other people would likely be even more offput than me.
Downvoting with explanation is of course more helpful than downvoting without explanation. Presumably everyone would agree that if you're going to downvote, it's great if you can explain why; the question is whether it's okay to downvote without explanation.
I think there's something to both sides here. If someone dislikes my posts or comments, I'd prefer they downvote without comment than not, because it will help me to learn what's controversial or what some people find unhelpful. Naturally, I won't prefer it at an emotional level at the time! But it may help me feel more emotionally good about comments that don't get downvoted :)
What we have to weigh up is that advantage compared to the cost of putting people off. Thanks for being clear about this, Michelle: your comment updated me a long way towards thinking downvoting without comment is net negative. I wonder if there's a tweak we could make to the system to get the best of both sides?
I think we definitely could, though it might not be easy. If the general tone of the conversation was very friendly, I imagine the atmosphere would be such that down-votes felt more like useful information and less like attacks. I guess I've so far felt that I've tried to contribute information when it's been asked for, and found that all my comments had a uniform amount of up-voting and down-voting, such that I didn't get much information from the down-voting at all, and it felt more as if at least one person just disliked that I was having the conversation / me (although I guess it could equally have been that different people each disagreed with different things I was saying). One way to fix this would be if people were very selective in their down-voting, targetting individual things said. I should add - I'm not used to forums. I imagine down-voting is crucial when volume is high. But from my outsider perspective, it feels like a way to anonymously attack other people.
Are you talking mainly about your comments about changing the GWWC pledge? I think I have a good enough mental model of people's reactions there that I could explain why you were downvoted if you like. However, I'm not sure this would really help! If a downvote feels nasty and aggressive, I think a list of purported flaws/mistakes would be even worse.
I can understand if some people think it is a bit spammy/promotional - especially as we have been trying promote it in some other EA venues as well. But, it is only a one off that at most we will do again next year
I'm with Tom here - I think this is a perfectly fine use of the forum for now. Perhaps if we get overrun with links like this, we would have to reconsider.
I don't think being spammy in this way would be a good reason to downvote - there's excellent grounds for wanting as many people as possible to vote for this, so 'spamming' in this way is worth it!
I didn't find it spammy, but I don't think this argument lines up. The opportunity cost of driving people away from the forum could be pretty high, so wanting as many people as possible to vote isn't enough to conclude it's worth posting.
Yep, the question is whether it would drive many people away, which I don't think that it would, though it's quite hard to tell.