default-LW-world – tribal alliances and overton fights and other things I associate with toxicity are channeled into upvotes/downvotes, and comment storms.
Reaction-World – seems like it’d spend that energy differently. I think naively implementing it would increase it’s visibility, but also channel a lot of the energy into activities that don’t gain you karma. I also think implementing it carefully can force people to notice and pay more attention to what they’re doing.
A thing that I actually like about Facebook “Love” reacts is that… they come with my name attached, and it says something about me how freely I’m willing to use it. It’s use doesn’t need to be limited by explicit rules, it’s limited by vague self-regulating social norms.
I don’t clearly see why Reacts should be dramatically different from commenting – if you’d have been willing to write a comment (except that it was too much effort), why not use a React? I do get that the there’s a high level change in the culture when some actions being easier. But this seems like it moves the world closer to in-person communication. In-person communication has microexpressions of gratitude and camaraderie and confusion and annoyance and this is all real valuable. Yes, somewhat stressful, but mostly good.
How much Reacts contribute to toxicity seems like it has a lot to do with a whole lot of other factors, including the high level design of the site, the degree of gatekeeping and moderation, the incentives (i.e. twitter and FB want billions of users so they don’t really want any particular standards, and angry discourse plays right into their hands).
The equation I see is something like:
default-LW-world – tribal alliances and overton fights and other things I associate with toxicity are channeled into upvotes/downvotes, and comment storms.
Reaction-World – seems like it’d spend that energy differently. I think naively implementing it would increase it’s visibility, but also channel a lot of the energy into activities that don’t gain you karma. I also think implementing it carefully can force people to notice and pay more attention to what they’re doing.
A thing that I actually like about Facebook “Love” reacts is that… they come with my name attached, and it says something about me how freely I’m willing to use it. It’s use doesn’t need to be limited by explicit rules, it’s limited by vague self-regulating social norms.
I don’t clearly see why Reacts should be dramatically different from commenting – if you’d have been willing to write a comment (except that it was too much effort), why not use a React? I do get that the there’s a high level change in the culture when some actions being easier. But this seems like it moves the world closer to in-person communication. In-person communication has microexpressions of gratitude and camaraderie and confusion and annoyance and this is all real valuable. Yes, somewhat stressful, but mostly good.
How much Reacts contribute to toxicity seems like it has a lot to do with a whole lot of other factors, including the high level design of the site, the degree of gatekeeping and moderation, the incentives (i.e. twitter and FB want billions of users so they don’t really want any particular standards, and angry discourse plays right into their hands).