Thoughts on voting as approve/disapprove and agree/disagree:
One of the things that I am most uncomfortable with in the current LessWrong voting system is how often I feel conflicted between upvoting something because I want to encourage the author to write more comments like it, and downvoting something because I think the argument that the author makes is importantly flawed and I don’t want other readers to walk away with a misunderstanding about the world.
I think this effect quite strongly limits certain forms of intellectual diversity on LessWrong, because many people will only upvote your comment if they agree with it, and downvote comments they disagree with, and this means that arguments supporting people’s existing conclusions have a strong advantage in the current karma system. Whereas the most valuable comments are likely ones that challenge existing beliefs and that are rigorously arguing for unpopular positions.
A feature that has been suggested many times over the years is to split voting into two dimensions. One dimension being “agree/disagree” and the other being “approve/disapprove”. Only the “approve/disapprove” dimension matters for karma and sorting, but both are displayed relatively prominently on the comment (the agree/disagree dimension on the the bottom, the approve/disapprove dimension at the top). I think this has some valuable things going for it, and in particular would make me likely to upvote more comments because I could simultaneously signal that while I think a comment was good, I don’t agree with it.
An alternative way of doing this that Ray has talked about is the introduction of short reactions that users can click at the bottom of a comment, two of the most prominently displayed ones would be “agree/disagree”. Reactions would be by default non-anonymous and so would serve more as a form of shorthand comment instead of an alternative voting system. Here is an example of how that kind of UI might look:
I don’t know precisely what the selection menu for choosing reactions should look like. My guess is we want to have a relatively broad selection, maybe even with the ability to type something custom into it (obviously limiting the character count significantly).
I am most worried that this will drastically increase the clutter of comment threads and make things a lot harder to parse. In particular if the order of the reacts is different on each comment, since then there is no reliable way of scanning for the different kinds of information.
A way to improve on this might be by having small icons for the most frequent reacts, but that then introduces a pretty sharp learning curve into the site, and it’s always a pain to find icons for really abstract concepts like “agree/disagree”.
I think I am currently coming around to the idea of reactions being a good way to handle approve/disapprove, but also think it might make more sense to introduce more as a new kind of vote that has more top-level support than simple reacts would have. Though in the most likely case this whole dimension will turn out to be too complicated and not worth the complexity costs (as 90% of feature ideas do).
Features like custom reactions gives me this feeling that.. language will emerge from allowing people to create reactions that will be hard to anticipate but, in retrospect, crucial. Playing a similar role that body language plays during conversation, but designed, defined, explicit.
If someone did want to introduce the delta through this system, it might be necessary to give the coiner of a reaction some way of linking an extended description. In casual exchanges.. I’ve found myself reaching for an expression that means “shifted my views in some significant lasting way” that’s kind of hard to explain in precise terms, and probably impossible to reduce to one or two words, but it feels like a crucial thing to measure. In my description, I would explain that a lot of dialogue has no lasting impact on its participants, it is just two people trying to better understand where they already are. When something really impactful is said, I think we need to establish a habit of noticing and recognising that.
But I don’t know. Maybe that’s not the reaction type that what will justify the feature. Maybe it will be something we can’t think of now.
Generally, it seems useful to be able to take reduced measurements of the mental states of the readers.
I am most worried that this will drastically increase the clutter of comment threads and make things a lot harder to parse. In particular if the order of the reacts is different on each comment, since then there is no reliable way of scanning for the different kinds of information.
I like the reactions UI above, partly because separating it from karma makes it clearer that it’s not changing how comments get sorted, and partly because I do want ‘agree’/‘disagree’ to be non-anonymous by default (unlike normal karma).
I agree that the order of reacts should always be the same. I also think every comment/post should display all the reacts (even just to say ‘0 Agree, 0 Disagree...‘) to keep things uniform. That means I think there should only be a few permitted reacts—maybe start with just ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’, then wait 6+ months and see if users are especially clambering for something extra.
I think the obvious other reacts I’d want to use sometimes are ‘agree and downvote’ + ‘disagree and upvote’ (maybe shorten to Agree+Down, Disagree+Up), since otherwise someone might not realize that one and the same person is doing both, which loses a fair amount of this thing I want to be fluidly able to signal. (I don’t think there’s much value to clearly signaling that the same person agreed and upvoted or disagree and downvoted a thing.)
I would also sometimes click both the ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ buttons, which I think is fine to allow under this UI. :)
Slashdot has tags, but each tag still comes with a vote. In the above, the goal would be explicitly to allow for the combination of “upvoted though I still disagree” which I don’t think would work straightforwardly with the slashdot system.
I also find it it quite hard to skim for anything on Slashdot, including the tags (and the vast majority of users at any given time can’t add reactions on slashdot at any given time, so there isn’t much UI for it).
Thoughts on voting as approve/disapprove and agree/disagree:
One of the things that I am most uncomfortable with in the current LessWrong voting system is how often I feel conflicted between upvoting something because I want to encourage the author to write more comments like it, and downvoting something because I think the argument that the author makes is importantly flawed and I don’t want other readers to walk away with a misunderstanding about the world.
I think this effect quite strongly limits certain forms of intellectual diversity on LessWrong, because many people will only upvote your comment if they agree with it, and downvote comments they disagree with, and this means that arguments supporting people’s existing conclusions have a strong advantage in the current karma system. Whereas the most valuable comments are likely ones that challenge existing beliefs and that are rigorously arguing for unpopular positions.
A feature that has been suggested many times over the years is to split voting into two dimensions. One dimension being “agree/disagree” and the other being “approve/disapprove”. Only the “approve/disapprove” dimension matters for karma and sorting, but both are displayed relatively prominently on the comment (the agree/disagree dimension on the the bottom, the approve/disapprove dimension at the top). I think this has some valuable things going for it, and in particular would make me likely to upvote more comments because I could simultaneously signal that while I think a comment was good, I don’t agree with it.
An alternative way of doing this that Ray has talked about is the introduction of short reactions that users can click at the bottom of a comment, two of the most prominently displayed ones would be “agree/disagree”. Reactions would be by default non-anonymous and so would serve more as a form of shorthand comment instead of an alternative voting system. Here is an example of how that kind of UI might look:
I don’t know precisely what the selection menu for choosing reactions should look like. My guess is we want to have a relatively broad selection, maybe even with the ability to type something custom into it (obviously limiting the character count significantly).
I am most worried that this will drastically increase the clutter of comment threads and make things a lot harder to parse. In particular if the order of the reacts is different on each comment, since then there is no reliable way of scanning for the different kinds of information.
A way to improve on this might be by having small icons for the most frequent reacts, but that then introduces a pretty sharp learning curve into the site, and it’s always a pain to find icons for really abstract concepts like “agree/disagree”.
I think I am currently coming around to the idea of reactions being a good way to handle approve/disapprove, but also think it might make more sense to introduce more as a new kind of vote that has more top-level support than simple reacts would have. Though in the most likely case this whole dimension will turn out to be too complicated and not worth the complexity costs (as 90% of feature ideas do).
Having a reaction for “changed my view” would be very nice.
Features like custom reactions gives me this feeling that.. language will emerge from allowing people to create reactions that will be hard to anticipate but, in retrospect, crucial. Playing a similar role that body language plays during conversation, but designed, defined, explicit.
If someone did want to introduce the delta through this system, it might be necessary to give the coiner of a reaction some way of linking an extended description. In casual exchanges.. I’ve found myself reaching for an expression that means “shifted my views in some significant lasting way” that’s kind of hard to explain in precise terms, and probably impossible to reduce to one or two words, but it feels like a crucial thing to measure. In my description, I would explain that a lot of dialogue has no lasting impact on its participants, it is just two people trying to better understand where they already are. When something really impactful is said, I think we need to establish a habit of noticing and recognising that.
But I don’t know. Maybe that’s not the reaction type that what will justify the feature. Maybe it will be something we can’t think of now.
Generally, it seems useful to be able to take reduced measurements of the mental states of the readers.
This is essentially the concept of a folksonomy, and I agree that it is potentially both applicable here and quite important.
I like the reactions UI above, partly because separating it from karma makes it clearer that it’s not changing how comments get sorted, and partly because I do want ‘agree’/‘disagree’ to be non-anonymous by default (unlike normal karma).
I agree that the order of reacts should always be the same. I also think every comment/post should display all the reacts (even just to say ‘0 Agree, 0 Disagree...‘) to keep things uniform. That means I think there should only be a few permitted reacts—maybe start with just ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’, then wait 6+ months and see if users are especially clambering for something extra.
I think the obvious other reacts I’d want to use sometimes are ‘agree and downvote’ + ‘disagree and upvote’ (maybe shorten to Agree+Down, Disagree+Up), since otherwise someone might not realize that one and the same person is doing both, which loses a fair amount of this thing I want to be fluidly able to signal. (I don’t think there’s much value to clearly signaling that the same person agreed and upvoted or disagree and downvoted a thing.)
I would also sometimes click both the ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ buttons, which I think is fine to allow under this UI. :)
Why not Slashdot-style?
Slashdot has tags, but each tag still comes with a vote. In the above, the goal would be explicitly to allow for the combination of “upvoted though I still disagree” which I don’t think would work straightforwardly with the slashdot system.
I also find it it quite hard to skim for anything on Slashdot, including the tags (and the vast majority of users at any given time can’t add reactions on slashdot at any given time, so there isn’t much UI for it).