Karma currently conflates multiple possible reations into a single datum. An upvote currently could mean “me too” or “I updated” or “I agree” or “others should read this”, or “LOL”, etc. A downvote could mean “fallacy” or “poor quality” or “disagree”, etc. It’s hard for posters and readers to discern intent.
Facebook and Github (and probably others) now have a small number of Emoji reactions, instead of just +/- or “Like”. This is a more fine-grained feedback mechanism than a simple vote, but still easy (and familiar) enough for everyone to understand and use.
These give us additional low-effort feedback mechanisms that normally wouldn’t be worth a written reply. Facebook’s selection isn’t appropriate for Less Wrong, but we could choose some better ones. They also need not be icons. Words or short phrases (i.e. “tags”) will do. We’d probably want to pull memes about good discourse and their failure modes from the Sequences, e.g. #applause-light or #updated, etc., as well as all the well-known logical fallacies and biases. (These could also be links to the wiki for the uninitiated.)
For maximum flexibility, we could also give users the option to reply with a custom tag. Popular options could be added to the default suggestions, either automatically, or curated by the Sunshine Regiment. My concern with this approach is that custom tags may not have clear meanings, but a curated set could be linked to agreed-upon definitions in the wiki.
Tags also give us a good mechanism for straw polls. I’ve seen karma used this way on the old Less wrong, with a yes/no question asking for karma votes, (and a reply by the same author to counter balance it with opposite votes). The new weighted karma kind of destroys this feature. But with tags, we could vote with #yes #no or even #A #B #C #D, etc. for multiple-choice questions.
Source.
This was from before we had tags for posts. Calling these reactions “tags” might be confusing now. I’m also not sure how I feel about using logical fallacies per se now.