For what it’s worth, I quite dislike this change. Partly because I find it cluttered and confusing, but also because I think audience agreement/disagreement should in fact be a key factor influencing comment rankings.
In the previous system, my voting strategy roughly reflected the product of (how glad I was some comment was written) and (how much I agreed with it). I think this product better approximates my overall sense of how much I want to recommend people read the comment—since all else equal, I do want to recommend comments more insofar as I agree with them more.
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).
Partly because I find it cluttered and confusing, but also because I think audience agreement/disagreement should in fact be a key factor influencing comment rankings.
I have a different ontology here. I’d say that “truth-tracking” is pretty different from “true”. A comment section with just the audience’s main beliefs highly upvoted is different from one where the conversational moves that seem truth-tracking are highly upvoted. The former leans more easily into an echo-chamber than the latter, which better rewards side-ways moves and thoughtful arguments for positions most people disagree with.
I mostly agree with Ben here, though I think Adam’s preference could be served by having a few optional sorting options available to the user on a given page, like “Sort by most agreement” or “sort by most controversial”. Without changing the semantics of what you have now, you could even allow the user to enter a custom sorting function (air-table style), like “2*karma + 3*(agreement + disagreement)” and sort by that. These could all be hidden under a three-dots menu dropdown to avoid clutter.
I could imagine this sort of fix mostly solving the problem for readers, but so far at least I’ve been most pained by this while voting. The categories “truth-tracking” and “true” don’t seem cleanly distinguishable to me—nor do e.g. “this is the sort of thing I want to see on LW” and “I agree”—so now I experience type error-ish aversion and confusion each time I vote.
I would be extremely surprised if karma does not track with agreement votes in the majority of cases. I only expect them to diverge in a narrow range of cases like excellently stated arguments people disagree with, extremely banal comments that are true but don’t really add anything, actual voting, and high social conflict posts. If we can operationalize this prediction I’m interested in a bet.
I agree or disagree based on content, & UpVote or Downvote based on vibes.
Historically socially toxic nerds have been excused for being assholes if they were smart, knowledgeable, and always right. With this system, I can agree with what they say, but downvote how they say it.
In my opinion LW ironically is the community that needs this the least but YMMV. I am not surprised it is the community that has implemented it.
Even a completely wrong claim occasionally contributes relevant ideas to the discussion. A comment can contain many claims and ideas, and salient wrongness of some of the claims (or subjective opinions not shared by the voter) can easily coexist with correctness/relevance of other statements in the same comment. So upvote/disagree is a natural situation. Downvote/correct corresponds to something true that’s trivial/irrelevant/inappropriate/unkind. Being forced to collapse such cases into a single scale is painful, and the resulting ranking is ambiguous to the point of uselessness.
Bug report: At the moment, the parent comment says that it has 2 votes on the karma box for the total score of +2 (the karma self-vote is the default +2), and 1 vote on the agreement box for the total score of +2 (there is no agreement self-vote). When I remove the default self-upvote, it still says that there are 2 votes on the karma box (for the total score of 0). For the old karma-only comments removing the self-vote results in decrementing the number of votes displayed, and a comment with removed self-upvote that nobody else voted on says that it has 0 votes.
I believe here one other user agreement-upvoted the comment with strength +2, and nobody karma-voted except for the default +2 self-karma-upvote. So in this example I expect to see that the number of karma votes displayed after removal of the default self-upvote is 0, not 2. And I expect to see that the number of karma votes when self-upvote remains is 1, not 2. (I did reload the page in both voting states in a logged-off context to check that it’s not just a local javascript or same-user-observation issue.)
For what it’s worth, I quite dislike this change. Partly because I find it cluttered and confusing, but also because I think audience agreement/disagreement should in fact be a key factor influencing comment rankings.
In the previous system, my voting strategy roughly reflected the product of (how glad I was some comment was written) and (how much I agreed with it). I think this product better approximates my overall sense of how much I want to recommend people read the comment—since 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 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.
I have a different ontology here. I’d say that “truth-tracking” is pretty different from “true”. A comment section with just the audience’s main beliefs highly upvoted is different from one where the conversational moves that seem truth-tracking are highly upvoted. The former leans more easily into an echo-chamber than the latter, which better rewards side-ways moves and thoughtful arguments for positions most people disagree with.
I mostly agree with Ben here, though I think Adam’s preference could be served by having a few optional sorting options available to the user on a given page, like “Sort by most agreement” or “sort by most controversial”. Without changing the semantics of what you have now, you could even allow the user to enter a custom sorting function (air-table style), like “2*karma + 3*(agreement + disagreement)” and sort by that. These could all be hidden under a three-dots menu dropdown to avoid clutter.
I could imagine this sort of fix mostly solving the problem for readers, but so far at least I’ve been most pained by this while voting. The categories “truth-tracking” and “true” don’t seem cleanly distinguishable to me—nor do e.g. “this is the sort of thing I want to see on LW” and “I agree”—so now I experience type error-ish aversion and confusion each time I vote.
I see. I’d be interested in chatting about your experience with you offline, sometime this week.
I would be extremely surprised if karma does not track with agreement votes in the majority of cases. I only expect them to diverge in a narrow range of cases like excellently stated arguments people disagree with, extremely banal comments that are true but don’t really add anything, actual voting, and high social conflict posts. If we can operationalize this prediction I’m interested in a bet.
I used to think this and now disagree! (See e.g. the karma vs. agree/disagree on this post)
Would be open to operationalizing this (just to be clear, I of course still expect them to be correlated).
I agree or disagree based on content, & UpVote or Downvote based on vibes.
Historically socially toxic nerds have been excused for being assholes if they were smart, knowledgeable, and always right. With this system, I can agree with what they say, but downvote how they say it.
In my opinion LW ironically is the community that needs this the least but YMMV. I am not surprised it is the community that has implemented it.
Even a completely wrong claim occasionally contributes relevant ideas to the discussion. A comment can contain many claims and ideas, and salient wrongness of some of the claims (or subjective opinions not shared by the voter) can easily coexist with correctness/relevance of other statements in the same comment. So upvote/disagree is a natural situation. Downvote/correct corresponds to something true that’s trivial/irrelevant/inappropriate/unkind. Being forced to collapse such cases into a single scale is painful, and the resulting ranking is ambiguous to the point of uselessness.
Bug report: At the moment, the parent comment says that it has 2 votes on the karma box for the total score of +2 (the karma self-vote is the default +2), and 1 vote on the agreement box for the total score of +2 (there is no agreement self-vote). When I remove the default self-upvote, it still says that there are 2 votes on the karma box (for the total score of 0). For the old karma-only comments removing the self-vote results in decrementing the number of votes displayed, and a comment with removed self-upvote that nobody else voted on says that it has 0 votes.
I believe here one other user agreement-upvoted the comment with strength +2, and nobody karma-voted except for the default +2 self-karma-upvote. So in this example I expect to see that the number of karma votes displayed after removal of the default self-upvote is 0, not 2. And I expect to see that the number of karma votes when self-upvote remains is 1, not 2. (I did reload the page in both voting states in a logged-off context to check that it’s not just a local javascript or same-user-observation issue.)
Yeah, I noticed this myself. We should fix this.