(Note: still disenfranchises users who don’t notice that this feature exists, but maybe that’s ok.)
It is not difficult to make people notice the feature exists; cf. the GreaterWrong implementation. (Some people will, of course, still fail to notice it, somehow. There are limits to how much obliviousness can be countered via reasonable UX design decisions.)
This is also a UX issue. Forcing users to navigate an unclear ethical question and prisoner’s dilemma—how much strong voting is “too much”—in order to use the site is unpleasant and a bad user experience. There should not be a “wrong” action available in the user interface.
[emphasis mine]
This is a good point, but a subtle and easily-mistakable one.
There is a misinterpretation of the bolded claim, which goes like this:
The UI should not permit an action which the user would not want to take.
The response to this, of course, is that the designers of the UI do not necessarily know in advance what actions the user does or does not want to take. Therefore let the UI permit all manner of actions; let the user decide what he wishes to do.
But that is not what (I am fairly sure) nshepperd meant. Rather, the right interpretation is:
The UI should not permit an action which the user, having taken, will (predictably) be informed was a wrong action.
In other words, if it’s known, by the system, that a certain action should not be taken by the user, then make it so that action cannot be taken! If you know the action is wrong, don’t wait until after the user does it to inform him of this! Say, in advance: “No, you may not do this.”
And with this view I entirely agree.
Voting is for expressing preferences, and preferences are unlimited.
It is my understanding that some or all of the LW team (as well as, possibly, others?) do not take this view. As I understand it, the contrary view is that the purpose of voting is to adjust the karma that a post/comment ends up with to some perceived “proper” value, rather than to express an independent opinion of it. The former may involve voting up, or down, strongly or weakly… I confess that I find this view perplexing, myself, so I will let its proponents defend it further, if they wish.
I don’t think it’s super productive to go into this with a ton of debt, but I do also think that voting is for expressing preferences, just that it’s better to model the preference as “on a scale from 1 to 1000, how good is this post?”, instead of “is this post good or bad?”. And you implement the former by upvoting if it is below your threshold, and downvoting if it is above, with the strong version being used when it’s particularly far away from where your assessment is. This gives you access to a bunch more data than if everyone just votes independently (i.e. voting independently results in posts just above the threshold for “good enough to strong-upvote” for a lot of users but to get the same karma as a post that is in the top 5 of all-time favorite posts for everyone who upvoted it).
In either case I am interested in an independent assessment, just that the assessment moves from “binary good/bad” to “numerical ordering of preferences”.
The problem with this view is that there does not seem to be any way to calibrate the scale. What should be the karma of a good post? A bad post? A mediocre one? What does 20 mean? What does 5 mean? Don’t the answers to these questions depend on how many users are voting on the post, and what their voting behavior is? Suppose you and I both hold the view you describe, but I think a good post should have 100 karma and you think a good post should have 300 karma—how should our voting behavior be interpreted? What does it mean, when a post ends up with, say, 75 karma? Do people think it’s good? Bad? Do we know?
This gets very complicated. It seems like the signal is degraded, not improved, by this.
i.e. voting independently results in posts just above the threshold for “good enough to strong-upvote” for a lot of users but to get the same karma as a post that is in the top 5 of all-time favorite posts for everyone who upvoted it
It seems to me like your perspective results in an improved signal only if everyone who votes has the same opinions on everything.
If people do not have the same opinions, then there will be a distribution across people’s “good enough to strong-upvote” thresholds; a post’s karma will then reflect its position along that distribution. A “top 5 all-time favorite for many people” will be “good enough to strong-upvote” for most people, and will have a high score. A “just good enough to upvote” post for many people, will cross that threshold for fewer, i.e. will be lower along that distribution, and will end up with a lower score. (In other words, you’re getting strong upvote × probability of strong upvote, summed across all voters.)
If everyone has the same opinion, then this will simply result in either everyone strong-upvoting it or no one strong-upvoting it—and in that case, my earlier concern about differently calibrated scales also does not apply.
So, your interpretation seems optimal if adopted by a user population with extremely homogeneous opinions. It is strongly sub-optimal, however, if adopted by a user population with a diverse range of opinions; in that scenario, the “votes independently indicate one’s own evaluation” interpretation is optimal.
It is not difficult to make people notice the feature exists; cf. the GreaterWrong implementation. (Some people will, of course, still fail to notice it, somehow. There are limits to how much obliviousness can be countered via reasonable UX design decisions.)
[emphasis mine]
This is a good point, but a subtle and easily-mistakable one.
There is a misinterpretation of the bolded claim, which goes like this:
The UI should not permit an action which the user would not want to take.
The response to this, of course, is that the designers of the UI do not necessarily know in advance what actions the user does or does not want to take. Therefore let the UI permit all manner of actions; let the user decide what he wishes to do.
But that is not what (I am fairly sure) nshepperd meant. Rather, the right interpretation is:
The UI should not permit an action which the user, having taken, will (predictably) be informed was a wrong action.
In other words, if it’s known, by the system, that a certain action should not be taken by the user, then make it so that action cannot be taken! If you know the action is wrong, don’t wait until after the user does it to inform him of this! Say, in advance: “No, you may not do this.”
And with this view I entirely agree.
It is my understanding that some or all of the LW team (as well as, possibly, others?) do not take this view. As I understand it, the contrary view is that the purpose of voting is to adjust the karma that a post/comment ends up with to some perceived “proper” value, rather than to express an independent opinion of it. The former may involve voting up, or down, strongly or weakly… I confess that I find this view perplexing, myself, so I will let its proponents defend it further, if they wish.
I don’t think it’s super productive to go into this with a ton of debt, but I do also think that voting is for expressing preferences, just that it’s better to model the preference as “on a scale from 1 to 1000, how good is this post?”, instead of “is this post good or bad?”. And you implement the former by upvoting if it is below your threshold, and downvoting if it is above, with the strong version being used when it’s particularly far away from where your assessment is. This gives you access to a bunch more data than if everyone just votes independently (i.e. voting independently results in posts just above the threshold for “good enough to strong-upvote” for a lot of users but to get the same karma as a post that is in the top 5 of all-time favorite posts for everyone who upvoted it).
In either case I am interested in an independent assessment, just that the assessment moves from “binary good/bad” to “numerical ordering of preferences”.
The problem with this view is that there does not seem to be any way to calibrate the scale. What should be the karma of a good post? A bad post? A mediocre one? What does 20 mean? What does 5 mean? Don’t the answers to these questions depend on how many users are voting on the post, and what their voting behavior is? Suppose you and I both hold the view you describe, but I think a good post should have 100 karma and you think a good post should have 300 karma—how should our voting behavior be interpreted? What does it mean, when a post ends up with, say, 75 karma? Do people think it’s good? Bad? Do we know?
This gets very complicated. It seems like the signal is degraded, not improved, by this.
It seems to me like your perspective results in an improved signal only if everyone who votes has the same opinions on everything.
If people do not have the same opinions, then there will be a distribution across people’s “good enough to strong-upvote” thresholds; a post’s karma will then reflect its position along that distribution. A “top 5 all-time favorite for many people” will be “good enough to strong-upvote” for most people, and will have a high score. A “just good enough to upvote” post for many people, will cross that threshold for fewer, i.e. will be lower along that distribution, and will end up with a lower score. (In other words, you’re getting strong upvote × probability of strong upvote, summed across all voters.)
If everyone has the same opinion, then this will simply result in either everyone strong-upvoting it or no one strong-upvoting it—and in that case, my earlier concern about differently calibrated scales also does not apply.
So, your interpretation seems optimal if adopted by a user population with extremely homogeneous opinions. It is strongly sub-optimal, however, if adopted by a user population with a diverse range of opinions; in that scenario, the “votes independently indicate one’s own evaluation” interpretation is optimal.
Your interpretation of the bolded part is correct.