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 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.