Opt-in sounds like a lot of cognitive overhead for every single comment, and also (in-principle) allows for people to avoid having the truth value of their comments be judged when they make especially key claims in their argument.
Re “what if a single comment states multiple positions? You might agree with some and not with others” ← I expect the result is that (a) the agree/disagree button won’t be used that much for such comments, or (b) it just will be less meaningful for such comments. Neither of these seem very costly to me.
Re “what if you’re uncertain if you’ve understood the commenter’s position… The vote is biased by people who think they correctly understood the position.” ← If lots of people agree with a given comment because of a misunderstanding, making this fact known improves others’ ability to respond to the false belief. In general my current model is that while consensus views can surely be locally false, understanding what is the consensus helps to respond to it faster and with more focus and discover the error.
Re “what if the comment isn’t an opinion, it’s a quote or a collation of other people’s perspectives?” ← Seems like either the button won’t get much use or will be less meaningful than other occasions. Note that there are many comments on the site who also don’t get many upvote/downvotes, and I don’t consider this a serious reason to make up/downvoting optional on comments just because it’s often not used.
One more thing is that my guess is the agree/disagree voting axis will encourage people to split up their comments more, and state things that are more cleanly true or false. (For example, I felt this impulse to split up thesetwo comments upthread.)
A few responses:
Opt-in sounds like a lot of cognitive overhead for every single comment, and also (in-principle) allows for people to avoid having the truth value of their comments be judged when they make especially key claims in their argument.
Re “what if a single comment states multiple positions? You might agree with some and not with others” ← I expect the result is that (a) the agree/disagree button won’t be used that much for such comments, or (b) it just will be less meaningful for such comments. Neither of these seem very costly to me.
Re “what if you’re uncertain if you’ve understood the commenter’s position… The vote is biased by people who think they correctly understood the position.” ← If lots of people agree with a given comment because of a misunderstanding, making this fact known improves others’ ability to respond to the false belief. In general my current model is that while consensus views can surely be locally false, understanding what is the consensus helps to respond to it faster and with more focus and discover the error.
Re “what if the comment isn’t an opinion, it’s a quote or a collation of other people’s perspectives?” ← Seems like either the button won’t get much use or will be less meaningful than other occasions. Note that there are many comments on the site who also don’t get many upvote/downvotes, and I don’t consider this a serious reason to make up/downvoting optional on comments just because it’s often not used.
One more thing is that my guess is the agree/disagree voting axis will encourage people to split up their comments more, and state things that are more cleanly true or false. (For example, I felt this impulse to split up these two comments upthread.)