First: curious how much these concerns go away if we straight-up added a hoverover tooltip that said “this post has W upvotes, X Strong upvotes, Y downvotes, Z strong downvotes?” (this is something we’ve considered and don’t have any obvious objections to)
Habyrka and I have chatted a bunch about some of this. I’ve personally leaned towards “it may be psychologically better for small-upvote to always be ‘1’ and big-upvote is the only thing that ranges”, but this was more of an intuition/guess on my part. Habryka’s take was that it was pretty important to have people who’ve been using the site awhile and understand the culture to have a bigger small-upvote signal.
curious how much these concerns go away if we straight-up added a hoverover tooltip that said “this post has W upvotes, X Strong upvotes, Y downvotes, Z strong downvotes?”
I want to have this feature, because right now if I want this information the only way to get it is to constantly refresh my profile page to see how the karma on my posts and comments have changed, which over time lets me infer something about how many normal/strong upvotes/downvotes I got.
Personally, I like not being able to tell how many downvotes things have gotten. On the old LW, I frequently checked the percent up/down that comments and posts got, and it primed me a lot more to feel defensive or like I was in an adversarial environment. The triggered emotion is something like ‘Oh, this awesome thing inexplicably got 20% downvotes; I need to be on the lookout for bad people to push/strike back against.’
Hmm. This is an interesting point, which I think I agree with (having recently been testing out this feature and getting to see some of my comments get downvoted, and having a bit of the reaction you described).
I _also_ agree with Wei_Dai’s point, which is that right now we’re incentivizing people to learn the system but in a delayed, confusing way. Doing something to help people learn what the system means may be good.
Unreal’s suggestion of “just once, publish a list of posts and comments with their associated vote-types, so you can get a feel for what it means” is also plausible, although I note that this doesn’t really make it discoverable for new users.
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
So possible ideas:
1. Listing _total_ votes is helpful for at least inferring roughly what a post’s overall engagement is, which I think is valuable user feedback, and might get you 60%-80& of the way there. I notice that I feel way less “raised hackles” if I see my karma go down than if I see an explicit “you have been downvoted” remark.
2. Crazy idea: list total number of votes, and then list _strong upvotes_ and _strong downvotes_, based on the theory that… social management of the micro is bad and that it’s fine to roll regular upvotes/downvotes in a vague “total karma / vote count”, but that strong upvotes/downvotes should communicate something more.
3. Crazier idea: what’s most important to me, I think, is knowing if _people I respect_ have downvoted a thing. Theoretically, ideally, karma correlates with respect. In practice, some people have domain expertise and/or worldviews that lead me to weight their opinion on a post more highly. This gets into all sorts of complications and we wouldn’t get around to for months even if we thought it was a good idea, but you might have a thing where people can opt into seeing each other’s votes (if they are something like “mutual friends”)
Yeah, I was just objecting to Ray saying keep small-upvote at 1. I think I like the current set-up.
On reflection, I also *think* I like small-upvotes only going up to 3 more than even 5. It means that the expertise of trusted users comes out more at the tails than the average.
That is too many numbers to parse! I only care about the # of ppl who’ve interacted with the post. Can I just have THAT number as a tooltip? That would mostly resolve my concern here.
Also, it’s kind of weird to me that I have 5 vote power given I’ve only really interacted with this site for… a few months? And you guys have, like, 6? 7? Are you sure your scaling is right here? :/
It seems good to me that the people who’ve contributed the most to the intellectual culture and ideas on the site have 10-15 karma, relative to 5-8 like yours and mine. I’m only working on building the site, I didn’t invent a new decision theory.
It also seems good to me that a newer user like you, whose written some great posts and were curated, has more influence on discussion than others who’ve been around a similar length of time.
An important thing here is that we’re _not_ wanting “number of people who’ve interact with a post” to be the dominant thing people find themselves optimizing for. That incentivizes content that is some combination of clickbaity, tribal, viral, or minimally-and-unobjectionably-good. i.e. the rest of the internet.
We want to incentivize content that thoughtful people consider and think is real good, and the central thesis here is that the natural impulse to ask “how many people liked a thing” isn’t actually the best guiding star for incentivizing good content (either from a site design standpoint, or from a personal-motivation of individuals standpoint)
Also, it’s kind of weird to me that I have 5 vote power given I’ve only really interacted with this site for… a few months? And you guys have, like, 6? 7? Are you sure your scaling is right here? :/
Well, that’s part of the reason why we’re increasing the scaling somewhat – if Strong Votes capped out around 5, there’s even less gradation between experienced users and new/medium users.
We do want want thoughtful, good writers to have a fairly easy time getting to a voting power that feels midrange, but then room/incentivization to continue to grow. In the 1-5 strong upvote scale, that’d mean getting “3” fairly quickly, and then little gradation between people with 2000 karma and 200,000.
But it’s really confusing for my models of the post.
Cause there is a real difference between (lots of 2-users voted on this vs. a few 5-users voted on this). Those feel very different to me, and I’d adjust my views accordingly as to whether the post was, in fact, successful.
I get that you’re trying to make “lots of 2-users” and “a few 5-users” basically amount to the same value, which is why you’re scaling it this way.
But if a post ACTUALLY only has 2-users upvoting it and almost no 5-users, and other posts have 5-users voting on it but very few 2-users, that seems … worth noting.
Although, you could prob achieve the same by publishing an analysis of upvote/downvote patterns.
You could, for instance, release a list of posts, ranked by various such metrics. (Ratio of low:high user votes. Ratio of high:low user votes. Etc. Etc.)
Although, you could prob achieve the same by publishing an analysis of upvote/downvote patterns.
You could, for instance, release a list of posts, ranked by various such metrics. (Ratio of low:high user votes. Ratio of high:low user votes. Etc. Etc.)
This seems neat and probably worth doing, although this seems like even more interpretive effort than “mouseover to see how many votes of each type you got.”
Not sure how it’s a one-time cost? I was assuming the list of posts only comes out every so often, so every time you want to know the results for a new post you have to wait for such a list and then check it, and then you’d have to check it again for each new post you’ve written.
(If you were imagining the list-of-posts getting continuously updated, that doesn’t seem much different than simply providing the “number of votes (upvotes?) metadata on hoverover, in addition to or instead of the number of strong upvotes”. And while we could do either of those things, the main thing I was getting at is “we’re hesitant to make the goodhartable number the most easily accessible one.”)
I was assuming the list comes out once → I learn enough to understand what types of posts get what voting patterns (or, I learn that the data doesn’t actually tell me very much, which might be more likely), but after that I don’t need any more lists of posts.
I don’t care if it has my own posts on it, really. I care more about ‘the general pattern’ or something, and I imagine I can either get that from one such list, or I’ll figure out I just won’t get it (because the data doesn’t have discernible patterns / it’s too noisy).
First: curious how much these concerns go away if we straight-up added a hoverover tooltip that said “this post has W upvotes, X Strong upvotes, Y downvotes, Z strong downvotes?” (this is something we’ve considered and don’t have any obvious objections to)
Habyrka and I have chatted a bunch about some of this. I’ve personally leaned towards “it may be psychologically better for small-upvote to always be ‘1’ and big-upvote is the only thing that ranges”, but this was more of an intuition/guess on my part. Habryka’s take was that it was pretty important to have people who’ve been using the site awhile and understand the culture to have a bigger small-upvote signal.
I want to have this feature, because right now if I want this information the only way to get it is to constantly refresh my profile page to see how the karma on my posts and comments have changed, which over time lets me infer something about how many normal/strong upvotes/downvotes I got.
Personally, I like not being able to tell how many downvotes things have gotten. On the old LW, I frequently checked the percent up/down that comments and posts got, and it primed me a lot more to feel defensive or like I was in an adversarial environment. The triggered emotion is something like ‘Oh, this awesome thing inexplicably got 20% downvotes; I need to be on the lookout for bad people to push/strike back against.’
Hmm. This is an interesting point, which I think I agree with (having recently been testing out this feature and getting to see some of my comments get downvoted, and having a bit of the reaction you described).
I _also_ agree with Wei_Dai’s point, which is that right now we’re incentivizing people to learn the system but in a delayed, confusing way. Doing something to help people learn what the system means may be good.
Unreal’s suggestion of “just once, publish a list of posts and comments with their associated vote-types, so you can get a feel for what it means” is also plausible, although I note that this doesn’t really make it discoverable for new users.
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
So possible ideas:
1. Listing _total_ votes is helpful for at least inferring roughly what a post’s overall engagement is, which I think is valuable user feedback, and might get you 60%-80& of the way there. I notice that I feel way less “raised hackles” if I see my karma go down than if I see an explicit “you have been downvoted” remark.
2. Crazy idea: list total number of votes, and then list _strong upvotes_ and _strong downvotes_, based on the theory that… social management of the micro is bad and that it’s fine to roll regular upvotes/downvotes in a vague “total karma / vote count”, but that strong upvotes/downvotes should communicate something more.
3. Crazier idea: what’s most important to me, I think, is knowing if _people I respect_ have downvoted a thing. Theoretically, ideally, karma correlates with respect. In practice, some people have domain expertise and/or worldviews that lead me to weight their opinion on a post more highly. This gets into all sorts of complications and we wouldn’t get around to for months even if we thought it was a good idea, but you might have a thing where people can opt into seeing each other’s votes (if they are something like “mutual friends”)
I would be sad if my small upvote was basically zero relative to my strong upvote.
Would you still be sad if your strong vote was maxed at 5?
1:15 is a big difference! But 1:5 is a lot less. And 1:3 is even lot lot less!
Yeah, I was just objecting to Ray saying keep small-upvote at 1. I think I like the current set-up.
On reflection, I also *think* I like small-upvotes only going up to 3 more than even 5. It means that the expertise of trusted users comes out more at the tails than the average.
That is too many numbers to parse! I only care about the # of ppl who’ve interacted with the post. Can I just have THAT number as a tooltip? That would mostly resolve my concern here.
Also, it’s kind of weird to me that I have 5 vote power given I’ve only really interacted with this site for… a few months? And you guys have, like, 6? 7? Are you sure your scaling is right here? :/
It seems good to me that the people who’ve contributed the most to the intellectual culture and ideas on the site have 10-15 karma, relative to 5-8 like yours and mine. I’m only working on building the site, I didn’t invent a new decision theory.
It also seems good to me that a newer user like you, whose written some great posts and were curated, has more influence on discussion than others who’ve been around a similar length of time.
Sure :P
An important thing here is that we’re _not_ wanting “number of people who’ve interact with a post” to be the dominant thing people find themselves optimizing for. That incentivizes content that is some combination of clickbaity, tribal, viral, or minimally-and-unobjectionably-good. i.e. the rest of the internet.
We want to incentivize content that thoughtful people consider and think is real good, and the central thesis here is that the natural impulse to ask “how many people liked a thing” isn’t actually the best guiding star for incentivizing good content (either from a site design standpoint, or from a personal-motivation of individuals standpoint)
Well, that’s part of the reason why we’re increasing the scaling somewhat – if Strong Votes capped out around 5, there’s even less gradation between experienced users and new/medium users.
We do want want thoughtful, good writers to have a fairly easy time getting to a voting power that feels midrange, but then room/incentivization to continue to grow. In the 1-5 strong upvote scale, that’d mean getting “3” fairly quickly, and then little gradation between people with 2000 karma and 200,000.
That makes sense.
But it’s really confusing for my models of the post.
Cause there is a real difference between (lots of 2-users voted on this vs. a few 5-users voted on this). Those feel very different to me, and I’d adjust my views accordingly as to whether the post was, in fact, successful.
I get that you’re trying to make “lots of 2-users” and “a few 5-users” basically amount to the same value, which is why you’re scaling it this way.
But if a post ACTUALLY only has 2-users upvoting it and almost no 5-users, and other posts have 5-users voting on it but very few 2-users, that seems … worth noting.
Although, you could prob achieve the same by publishing an analysis of upvote/downvote patterns.
You could, for instance, release a list of posts, ranked by various such metrics. (Ratio of low:high user votes. Ratio of high:low user votes. Etc. Etc.)
That would be interesting!
This seems neat and probably worth doing, although this seems like even more interpretive effort than “mouseover to see how many votes of each type you got.”
I prefer the one-time cost vs the many-time cost.
Not sure how it’s a one-time cost? I was assuming the list of posts only comes out every so often, so every time you want to know the results for a new post you have to wait for such a list and then check it, and then you’d have to check it again for each new post you’ve written.
(If you were imagining the list-of-posts getting continuously updated, that doesn’t seem much different than simply providing the “number of votes (upvotes?) metadata on hoverover, in addition to or instead of the number of strong upvotes”. And while we could do either of those things, the main thing I was getting at is “we’re hesitant to make the goodhartable number the most easily accessible one.”)
I was assuming the list comes out once → I learn enough to understand what types of posts get what voting patterns (or, I learn that the data doesn’t actually tell me very much, which might be more likely), but after that I don’t need any more lists of posts.
I don’t care if it has my own posts on it, really. I care more about ‘the general pattern’ or something, and I imagine I can either get that from one such list, or I’ll figure out I just won’t get it (because the data doesn’t have discernible patterns / it’s too noisy).
Oooohh gotcha that makes total sense.