I like this idea. Ultimately the primary constraint on almost any feature on LessWrong is UI complexity, and so there is a very strong prior against any specific passing the very high bar to make it into the final UI, but this is a pretty good contender.
I am particularly interested in more ideas for communicating this to the user in a way that makes intuitive sense, and that they can understand with existing systems and analogies they are already familiar with.
The other big constraint on UI design are hedonic-gradients. While often a system can be economically optimal, because of hyperbolic discounting and naive reinforcement learning, you often end up with really bad equilibria if one of the core interactions on your site is not fun to use. This in particular limits the degree to which you can force the user to spend a limited number of resources, since it both strongly increases mental overhead (instead of just asking themselves “yay or nay?” after reading a comment, they now need to reason about their limited budget and compare it to alternative options), and because people hate spending limited resources (which results in me having played through 4 final fantasy games, and only using two health potions in over 200 hours of gameplay, because I really hate giving up limited resources, and I might really need them in the next fight, even though I never, ever will).
Ultimately the primary constraint on almost any feature on LessWrong is UI complexity, and so there is a very strong prior against any specific passing the very high bar to make it into the final UI
On the low end, you can fit the idea entirely inside of the existing UI, as a new fancy way of calculating voting weights under the hood (and allowing multiple clicks on the voting buttons).
Then, in a rough order of less to more shocking to users:
showing the user some indication of how many points their one click is currently worth
showing how many unused “voting points” they still have (privately)
showing a breakdown of recevied feedback into positive and negative votes
some simple configuration that allows to change the default allocation of budget to one click (e.g. how many percent, or pick a fixed value)
And that’s probably all you ever need?
This in particular limits the degree to which you can force the user to spend a limited number of resources, since it both strongly increases mental overhead (instead of just asking themselves “yay or nay?” after reading a comment, they now need to reason about their limited budget and compare it to alternative options)
This should be much less of an issue if the configuration of this is global and has reasonable defaults. Then it’s pretty much reduced to “new fancy way of calculating voting weights”, and the users should be fine with just being roughly aware that if they vote lots lots or don’t post anything on their own, their individual votes will have less weight.
I like this idea. Ultimately the primary constraint on almost any feature on LessWrong is UI complexity, and so there is a very strong prior against any specific passing the very high bar to make it into the final UI, but this is a pretty good contender.
I am particularly interested in more ideas for communicating this to the user in a way that makes intuitive sense, and that they can understand with existing systems and analogies they are already familiar with.
The other big constraint on UI design are hedonic-gradients. While often a system can be economically optimal, because of hyperbolic discounting and naive reinforcement learning, you often end up with really bad equilibria if one of the core interactions on your site is not fun to use. This in particular limits the degree to which you can force the user to spend a limited number of resources, since it both strongly increases mental overhead (instead of just asking themselves “yay or nay?” after reading a comment, they now need to reason about their limited budget and compare it to alternative options), and because people hate spending limited resources (which results in me having played through 4 final fantasy games, and only using two health potions in over 200 hours of gameplay, because I really hate giving up limited resources, and I might really need them in the next fight, even though I never, ever will).
On the low end, you can fit the idea entirely inside of the existing UI, as a new fancy way of calculating voting weights under the hood (and allowing multiple clicks on the voting buttons).
Then, in a rough order of less to more shocking to users:
showing the user some indication of how many points their one click is currently worth
showing how many unused “voting points” they still have (privately)
showing a breakdown of recevied feedback into positive and negative votes
some simple configuration that allows to change the default allocation of budget to one click (e.g. how many percent, or pick a fixed value)
And that’s probably all you ever need?
This should be much less of an issue if the configuration of this is global and has reasonable defaults. Then it’s pretty much reduced to “new fancy way of calculating voting weights”, and the users should be fine with just being roughly aware that if they vote lots lots or don’t post anything on their own, their individual votes will have less weight.