Users on Less Wrong could downvote less. I personally use both upvoting and downvoting sparingly on LessWrong, unless a comment or post really stands out as great or awful. This seems like a thing we can’t get a whole community to do.
Users on Less Wrong could downvote less. I personally use both upvoting and downvoting sparingly on LessWrong, unless a comment or post really stands out as great or awful. This seems like a thing we can’t get a whole community to do.
LessWrong doesn’t have to have a uniform standard for upvoting and downvoting. For example, upvoting doesn’t differentiate between “interesting” and “correct”. As I have said before, someone might even feel compelled to downvote an interesting speculative idea for the fear that other readers might mistake the lack of downvotes for the speculative idea being thought of as mostly correct by other LWers.
To solve it, we could encourage people to use tags or informal tags, such as putting a tag inside square brackets in the title of the post, to clearly indicate, for example, how certain a poster is about their idea. For example, a post could have a title like this: “A statement [Epistemic state:possible][Topic: something]” or “A statement [Epistemic state: a speculation] [Topic: something]”. I think that it is likely that readers would treat different tags differently, for example, something might still be a curious idea, even if it is unpolished and has flaws, thus, if it was tagged properly (e.g. “unlikely” or “speculation”, “a spherical cow style model”), it would not merit a downvote, because it would be clear that that post is not going to be mistaken by other readers for a one that purports to be accurate and certain. On the other hand, tags “certain” or “highly likely” would be useful for readers who prefer not having to wade through various speculations and want to read more reliable posts. Of course, if someone tried to pass off their pet idea as a certain fact, they could be downvoted.
Tags work pretty well on reddit, and folks already use the Link: tag here. However I think that having too many tags or too complex of a tag system could also just contribute to the low volume problem.
In particular I like the idea of tags for “fiction” and possibly for “speculative”. Although if we are to be completely honest with ourselves, the sequences contains many posts that should be tagged fiction or speculative. The fiction ones are obvious, but its not always obvious which ones are speculative.
Well, a tag system doesn’t have to be strict or predetermined in advance. I think that if posters were allowed to create new tags to express their intent and their certainty about their posts, suitable and expressive tags would likely prevail and become common whereas unexpressive tags would be used only a few times and then fall out of use. People would pick up usage of various tags from observation.
A similar thing happened on Imgur when tags were introduced there; it seems to have worked fine on their end, though obviously it’s a much larger community. I am not certain how the differences there, much less the differences in culture, would affect the adoption of tags as a means of identifying the nature in which a post is intended.
Additionally, it’s worth considering the use of the same system for commenting on posts; there are comment threads out there that I could see having used such a tagging system. The question, then, is whether that would create too much clutter.
LessWrong doesn’t have to have a uniform standard for upvoting and downvoting. For example, upvoting doesn’t differentiate between “interesting” and “correct”. As I have said before, someone might even feel compelled to downvote an interesting speculative idea for the fear that other readers might mistake the lack of downvotes for the speculative idea being thought of as mostly correct by other LWers.
To solve it, we could encourage people to use tags or informal tags, such as putting a tag inside square brackets in the title of the post, to clearly indicate, for example, how certain a poster is about their idea. For example, a post could have a title like this: “A statement [Epistemic state:possible][Topic: something]” or “A statement [Epistemic state: a speculation] [Topic: something]”. I think that it is likely that readers would treat different tags differently, for example, something might still be a curious idea, even if it is unpolished and has flaws, thus, if it was tagged properly (e.g. “unlikely” or “speculation”, “a spherical cow style model”), it would not merit a downvote, because it would be clear that that post is not going to be mistaken by other readers for a one that purports to be accurate and certain. On the other hand, tags “certain” or “highly likely” would be useful for readers who prefer not having to wade through various speculations and want to read more reliable posts. Of course, if someone tried to pass off their pet idea as a certain fact, they could be downvoted.
Tags work pretty well on reddit, and folks already use the Link: tag here. However I think that having too many tags or too complex of a tag system could also just contribute to the low volume problem.
In particular I like the idea of tags for “fiction” and possibly for “speculative”. Although if we are to be completely honest with ourselves, the sequences contains many posts that should be tagged fiction or speculative. The fiction ones are obvious, but its not always obvious which ones are speculative.
Well, a tag system doesn’t have to be strict or predetermined in advance. I think that if posters were allowed to create new tags to express their intent and their certainty about their posts, suitable and expressive tags would likely prevail and become common whereas unexpressive tags would be used only a few times and then fall out of use. People would pick up usage of various tags from observation.
A similar thing happened on Imgur when tags were introduced there; it seems to have worked fine on their end, though obviously it’s a much larger community. I am not certain how the differences there, much less the differences in culture, would affect the adoption of tags as a means of identifying the nature in which a post is intended.
Additionally, it’s worth considering the use of the same system for commenting on posts; there are comment threads out there that I could see having used such a tagging system. The question, then, is whether that would create too much clutter.
Good point—agreed. I will try to remember to come up with an appropriate tag for my next post.