all else equal, I do want to recommend comments more insofar as I agree with them more
It’s a fair point. Sometimes the point of a thread is to discuss and explore a topic, and sometimes the point of a thread is to locallyanswer a question. In the former I want to reward the most surprising and new marginal information over the most obvious info. In the latter I just want to see the answer.
I’ll definitely keep my eye out for whether this system breaks some threads, though it seems likely to me that “producing the right answer in a thread about answering a question” will be correctly upvoted in that context.
I almost wonder if there should be a slider bar for post authors to set how much they want to incentivize truth-as-evaluated-by-LWers vs. incentivizing debate / spitballing / brainstorming / devil’s advocacy / diversity of opinion / uncommon or nonstandard views / etc. in their post’s comment section.
Setting the slider all the way toward Non-Truth would result in users getting 0 karma for agree-votes. Setting the slider all the way toward Truth would result in users getting lots of karma (and would reduce the amount of karma users get from normal Upvotes a bit, so people are less inclined to just pick the ‘Truth’ option in order to maximize karma). Nice consequences of this:
It gives users more control over what they want to see in their comment section. (Similar to how users get to decide their posts’ moderation policies.)
Over time, we’d get empirical evidence about which system is better overall, or better for certain use cases. If the results are sufficiently clear and consistent, admins could then get rid of the slider and lock in the whole site at the known-to-be-best level.
I agree that having such a slider could be good, but I think it should only impact visibility of comments in that post’s comments section, and shouldn’t impact karma (only quality-axis votes should impact karma even if the slider is set to give maximum visibility to high-‘agree’ comments).
It’s a fair point. Sometimes the point of a thread is to discuss and explore a topic, and sometimes the point of a thread is to locally answer a question. In the former I want to reward the most surprising and new marginal information over the most obvious info. In the latter I just want to see the answer.
I’ll definitely keep my eye out for whether this system breaks some threads, though it seems likely to me that “producing the right answer in a thread about answering a question” will be correctly upvoted in that context.
I almost wonder if there should be a slider bar for post authors to set how much they want to incentivize truth-as-evaluated-by-LWers vs. incentivizing debate / spitballing / brainstorming / devil’s advocacy / diversity of opinion / uncommon or nonstandard views / etc. in their post’s comment section.
Setting the slider all the way toward Non-Truth would result in users getting 0 karma for agree-votes. Setting the slider all the way toward Truth would result in users getting lots of karma (and would reduce the amount of karma users get from normal Upvotes a bit, so people are less inclined to just pick the ‘Truth’ option in order to maximize karma). Nice consequences of this:
It gives users more control over what they want to see in their comment section. (Similar to how users get to decide their posts’ moderation policies.)
Over time, we’d get empirical evidence about which system is better overall, or better for certain use cases. If the results are sufficiently clear and consistent, admins could then get rid of the slider and lock in the whole site at the known-to-be-best level.
I agree that having such a slider could be good, but I think it should only impact visibility of comments in that post’s comments section, and shouldn’t impact karma (only quality-axis votes should impact karma even if the slider is set to give maximum visibility to high-‘agree’ comments).
Hm, I’d have guessed the opposite was better.