I don’t think I’ve seen this point made in the discussion so far, so I’ll note it here: Anonymous downvotes (without explanation) are frustrating, and I suspect that anonymous negative reacts would be even worse. It’s one thing if someone downvotes a post I thought was great with no explanation—trolls exist, maybe they just disagreed, whatever, nothing I can do but ignore it. If they leave an “unclear” react, I can’t ignore that nearly as easily—wait, which point was unclear? What are other people potentially missing that I meant to convey? Come back, anon!
(This doesn’t overshadow the value of reacts, which I think would be positive on the whole, but I’d love to see Slashdot-style encouragement for people to share their reasoning.)
If they leave an “unclear” react, I can’t ignore that nearly as easily—wait, which point was unclear? What are other people potentially missing that I meant to convey? Come back, anon!
Maybe there should be an option that allows you to highlight a part of the comment and react to that part in particular.
Another idea, maybe harder to implement: allow users to start a private chat with the anonymous user who left a reaction. I think in general these kinds of issues are often best resolved through one-on-one chat, and even if the anon chooses not to reply, people might feel less helpless/disempowered if they can reply in some fashion and know their critic is likely to see what they think.
If LW or the EA Forum tried something like this (which might also be helpful in some form even for downvotes), you’d probably want to make the expected discourse norms of these chats extra-prominent in the UI, to reduce the risk of bad interactions (and explain why mods may need to read the private messages if there’s a worry about e.g. private verbal abuse going on).
Thanks. As I said elsethread I was leaning non-anonymous. But, I’d also had a fundamental assumption of “some feedback is better than no feedback.”
If “slight feedback” feels worse than no feedback (curious for other’s take on that?), then that might push me in an entirely different direction than reacts, since the whole point was to lower the bar to slightly-more-feedback for people who might have left it at none.
(Maybe try out giving people an optional prompt about why they upvoted or downvoted things that is quite short – more like tweet length – so that people have a place where there’s enough space to give long-enough-to-be-useful feedback without feeling obligated to write a whole comment)
My understanding is that Ray wants them to not be anonymous; the idea being voting and anything that determines the order your comment gets seen is always anonymous, and all other things are public.
Non-anonymous reacts feel less scary to me as a writer, and don’t feel scary to me as a reactor, though I’d expect most people to be more nervous about publicly sharing a negative reaction than I am.
Overall, inline anonymous reacts feel better to me than named non-inline reacts. I care much more about getting specific feedback on my writing than seeing which specific people liked or disliked it.
I don’t think I’ve seen this point made in the discussion so far, so I’ll note it here: Anonymous downvotes (without explanation) are frustrating, and I suspect that anonymous negative reacts would be even worse. It’s one thing if someone downvotes a post I thought was great with no explanation—trolls exist, maybe they just disagreed, whatever, nothing I can do but ignore it. If they leave an “unclear” react, I can’t ignore that nearly as easily—wait, which point was unclear? What are other people potentially missing that I meant to convey? Come back, anon!
(This doesn’t overshadow the value of reacts, which I think would be positive on the whole, but I’d love to see Slashdot-style encouragement for people to share their reasoning.)
Maybe there should be an option that allows you to highlight a part of the comment and react to that part in particular.
Another idea, maybe harder to implement: allow users to start a private chat with the anonymous user who left a reaction. I think in general these kinds of issues are often best resolved through one-on-one chat, and even if the anon chooses not to reply, people might feel less helpless/disempowered if they can reply in some fashion and know their critic is likely to see what they think.
If LW or the EA Forum tried something like this (which might also be helpful in some form even for downvotes), you’d probably want to make the expected discourse norms of these chats extra-prominent in the UI, to reduce the risk of bad interactions (and explain why mods may need to read the private messages if there’s a worry about e.g. private verbal abuse going on).
Thanks. As I said elsethread I was leaning non-anonymous. But, I’d also had a fundamental assumption of “some feedback is better than no feedback.”
If “slight feedback” feels worse than no feedback (curious for other’s take on that?), then that might push me in an entirely different direction than reacts, since the whole point was to lower the bar to slightly-more-feedback for people who might have left it at none.
(Maybe try out giving people an optional prompt about why they upvoted or downvoted things that is quite short – more like tweet length – so that people have a place where there’s enough space to give long-enough-to-be-useful feedback without feeling obligated to write a whole comment)
I like this idea.
My understanding is that Ray wants them to not be anonymous; the idea being voting and anything that determines the order your comment gets seen is always anonymous, and all other things are public.
That was my current leaning. But I had considered it fairly up in the air, so good to have some additional opinions about the overall landscape.
Aaron it’s me from the future wondering if
a) if non-anoynmous reacts like “unclear” feel scary in the way anonymous ones are
b) if reacts were anonymous, but we had inline reacts (i.e. it told you which specific words or sentence was ‘unclear’”, how would that feel?
Non-anonymous reacts feel less scary to me as a writer, and don’t feel scary to me as a reactor, though I’d expect most people to be more nervous about publicly sharing a negative reaction than I am.
Overall, inline anonymous reacts feel better to me than named non-inline reacts. I care much more about getting specific feedback on my writing than seeing which specific people liked or disliked it.