Where bad commentary is not highly upvoted just because our monkey brains are cheering, and good commentary is not downvoted or ignored just because our monkey brains boo or are bored.
Suggestion: give our monkey brains a thing to do that lets them follow incentives while supporting (or at least not interfering with) the goal.
Some ideas:
split upvotes into “this comment has the Right effect on tribal incentives” and “after separating out its impact on what side the reader updates towards, this comment is still worth reading”
split upvotes into flair (a la basecamp), letting people indicate whether the upvote is “go team!” or “this made me think” or “good point” or ” good point but bad technique”, etc
I think the second bullet is called the “Slashdot” model where I’ve heard it after a site that implemented it famously, but I am pretty amused by the first point too. Something like a few layers of vote would be kind of fun because of how frequently I have to split them, like
This is correct / some amount incorrect
This was a good attempt at being correct / This was an imperfect attempt at being correct
This demonstrates good norms / This demonstrates unwanted norms
I’m not advocating this because I haven’t thought it out well, but I may return to this in the future.
Suggestion: give our monkey brains a thing to do that lets them follow incentives while supporting (or at least not interfering with) the goal. Some ideas:
split upvotes into “this comment has the Right effect on tribal incentives” and “after separating out its impact on what side the reader updates towards, this comment is still worth reading”
split upvotes into flair (a la basecamp), letting people indicate whether the upvote is “go team!” or “this made me think” or “good point” or ” good point but bad technique”, etc
I think the second bullet is called the “Slashdot” model where I’ve heard it after a site that implemented it famously, but I am pretty amused by the first point too. Something like a few layers of vote would be kind of fun because of how frequently I have to split them, like
This is correct / some amount incorrect
This was a good attempt at being correct / This was an imperfect attempt at being correct
This demonstrates good norms / This demonstrates unwanted norms
I’m not advocating this because I haven’t thought it out well, but I may return to this in the future.