Reactions will raise the toxicity and blight levels of LessWrong. Non-anonymous ones would raise it more.
I have large uncertainty about the magnitude of these effects.
But I do know that I try very, very hard to never use reacts on social media to (among other reasons) avoid there being information in my failure to react to things or any pressure to see things in order to react to them.
There’s a fairly weird idea that’s possible here (I have a similar sense for Shortform Feed).
LessWrong has a fundamental problem where I want the top contributors to easily be able to write short, off the cuff stuff that fleshes out their thoughts in realtime without having to stress about getting nit-picked. I want top contributors to lower their standards for engagement. I don’t necessarily want newcomers to lower their standards of engagement.
A possibility for both reactions, and shortform feed, is for them to only be available to people with N karma. A lot of the blight I associate with social media has to do with large numbers of people smashing into each other without sharing context. If the number of people who receive nudges towards low-effort interactions is fairly small and high quality, it might be better than giving those nudges to everyone, or to no one.
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).
I have never used them in team slack or discord, and also haven’t been tempted to do so. I mean, I can just type stuff, that’s what I’m there for, and we already had emoticons, so I don’t really see the point?
My experience in other circles with Slack and Discord is that the niche of emoji reactions is primarily non-interrupting room-sensing (there are also sillier uses in casual social contexts, but they don’t seem relevant here). I don’t feel any pressure to specifically have read something, and I haven’t observed people reading anything into failure to provide a reaction. The rare exception to the latter is when there’s clearly an active conversation going on that someone’s already clearly been active in, which can be handled by explicitly signaling departure, which was a norm in those circumstances anyway.
Non-interrupting room-sensing in a fast-flowing channel environment has generally struck me as beneficial. Being able to quickly find the topic-flow of the current conversation is important, and reactions do not have to be scanned for topic introductions. Reactions encode leafness: you can’t reply to a reaction easily, which also means giving a reaction cannot induce social pressure to reply to it. They encode weaker ties to the individual: people with the same reaction are stacked together, and it takes an extra effort to look at the list of reacting users. Differentially, reactions can also signal level of involvement: someone “conversing” in only reactions may not be up for thinking about the conversation hard enough to produce text responses, but is able to listen and give base emotional feedback (which seems to be the most relevant to the proposed uses here). It serves a similar function to scanning people’s facial expressions in a physical meeting room.
I’m very unclear on how these patterns would play out in a longer-form, more delay-tolerant environment like a comment tree. Some of the room-sensing interpretation makes less sense the less the timescale of the reactions corresponds to unconscious-emotion synchronization; there’s a lot of lost flow context.
My experience from seeing emoticons used on Slack/Discord is that they help combat the muted signal problem of online communication, and thus actually reduce the toxicity of discussion.
People want to feel respected, loved, appreciated, etc. When we interact physically, you can easily experience subtle forms of these feelings. For instance, even if you just hang out in the same physical space with a bunch of other people and don’t really interact with them, you often get some positive feelings regardless. Just the fact that other people are comfortable having you around, is a subtle signal that you belong and are accepted.
Similarly, if you’re physically in the same space with someone, there are a lot of subtle nonverbal things that people can do to signal interest and respect. Meeting each other’s gaze, nodding or making small encouraging noises when somebody is talking, generally giving people your attention. This kind of thing tends to happen automatically when we are in each other’s physical presence.
Online, most of these messages are gone: a thousand people might read your message, but if nobody reacts to it, then you don’t get any signal indicating that you were seen. Even getting a hundred likes and a bunch of comments on a status, can feel more abstract and less emotionally salient than just a single person nodding at you and giving you an approving look when you’re talking.
My hypothesis is that the lack of such subtle “body language” signals is often the cause of toxicity, because generic likes feel more abstract and then people ramp up their outrage in order to elicit reactions and feel like they have been noticed. Whereas, in my own experience at least, the kind of somewhat personalized (in the sense of having been selected from a vast set) reacts on Slack/Discord do have some of the “body language felt sense” that makes me feel genuinely noticed in a way that a mere upvote doesn’t. (And the point of the signals being subtle is that they’re not major enough that you would normally bother expressing them in a comment.)
Reading a message takes more cognitive resources then seeing a single emoticon. It’s easy for people to click +1 to get an opinion of what multiple people think then when every person lays out “I agree with you”, “I think we should adopt your proposal” etc.
Team slack is the domain that most clearly motivated me to consider reacts for LW. They also especially made me long for them in google docs.
Emoticons etc still take up a full line of text, and easily get mixed in with other discussions that are happening. Reacts allow for much higher information density, which allows the overall conversation to be more complex.
Other than both being pictographic, I’m not sure emoticons and reactions are that related. Emoticons are either objects (neither here nor there for our purposes) or facial/bodily expressions. Reactions are emotional or high-level responses to information.
You can’t really express the thumbs-up reaction with a facial expression emoticon. You can use a smiley face or something similar, but thumbs-up means approval, not happiness. If someone says “I’ll be five minutes late—start without me” I don’t want to express happiness at this, but I do want to acknowledge it and (if this is the case) say it’s OK. A thumbs-up does this wonderfully: by definition, it means I have acknowledged the message, and it signals approval rather than disapproval, but nothing else. You can’t really do that with emoticons.
I think there are lots of situations in which reactions can do things emoticons can’t, and I’ve found that I notice nice opportunities for reactions more when I’m in an environment in which they’re readily available.
Reactions will raise the toxicity and blight levels of LessWrong. Non-anonymous ones would raise it more.
I have large uncertainty about the magnitude of these effects.
But I do know that I try very, very hard to never use reacts on social media to (among other reasons) avoid there being information in my failure to react to things or any pressure to see things in order to react to them.
There’s a fairly weird idea that’s possible here (I have a similar sense for Shortform Feed).
LessWrong has a fundamental problem where I want the top contributors to easily be able to write short, off the cuff stuff that fleshes out their thoughts in realtime without having to stress about getting nit-picked. I want top contributors to lower their standards for engagement. I don’t necessarily want newcomers to lower their standards of engagement.
A possibility for both reactions, and shortform feed, is for them to only be available to people with N karma. A lot of the blight I associate with social media has to do with large numbers of people smashing into each other without sharing context. If the number of people who receive nudges towards low-effort interactions is fairly small and high quality, it might be better than giving those nudges to everyone, or to no one.
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).
When you say social media—do you avoid using them in team slack/discord?
I have never used them in team slack or discord, and also haven’t been tempted to do so. I mean, I can just type stuff, that’s what I’m there for, and we already had emoticons, so I don’t really see the point?
My experience in other circles with Slack and Discord is that the niche of emoji reactions is primarily non-interrupting room-sensing (there are also sillier uses in casual social contexts, but they don’t seem relevant here). I don’t feel any pressure to specifically have read something, and I haven’t observed people reading anything into failure to provide a reaction. The rare exception to the latter is when there’s clearly an active conversation going on that someone’s already clearly been active in, which can be handled by explicitly signaling departure, which was a norm in those circumstances anyway.
Non-interrupting room-sensing in a fast-flowing channel environment has generally struck me as beneficial. Being able to quickly find the topic-flow of the current conversation is important, and reactions do not have to be scanned for topic introductions. Reactions encode leafness: you can’t reply to a reaction easily, which also means giving a reaction cannot induce social pressure to reply to it. They encode weaker ties to the individual: people with the same reaction are stacked together, and it takes an extra effort to look at the list of reacting users. Differentially, reactions can also signal level of involvement: someone “conversing” in only reactions may not be up for thinking about the conversation hard enough to produce text responses, but is able to listen and give base emotional feedback (which seems to be the most relevant to the proposed uses here). It serves a similar function to scanning people’s facial expressions in a physical meeting room.
I’m very unclear on how these patterns would play out in a longer-form, more delay-tolerant environment like a comment tree. Some of the room-sensing interpretation makes less sense the less the timescale of the reactions corresponds to unconscious-emotion synchronization; there’s a lot of lost flow context.
My experience from seeing emoticons used on Slack/Discord is that they help combat the muted signal problem of online communication, and thus actually reduce the toxicity of discussion.
My hypothesis is that the lack of such subtle “body language” signals is often the cause of toxicity, because generic likes feel more abstract and then people ramp up their outrage in order to elicit reactions and feel like they have been noticed. Whereas, in my own experience at least, the kind of somewhat personalized (in the sense of having been selected from a vast set) reacts on Slack/Discord do have some of the “body language felt sense” that makes me feel genuinely noticed in a way that a mere upvote doesn’t. (And the point of the signals being subtle is that they’re not major enough that you would normally bother expressing them in a comment.)
Reading a message takes more cognitive resources then seeing a single emoticon. It’s easy for people to click +1 to get an opinion of what multiple people think then when every person lays out “I agree with you”, “I think we should adopt your proposal” etc.
Team slack is the domain that most clearly motivated me to consider reacts for LW. They also especially made me long for them in google docs.
Emoticons etc still take up a full line of text, and easily get mixed in with other discussions that are happening. Reacts allow for much higher information density, which allows the overall conversation to be more complex.
Other than both being pictographic, I’m not sure emoticons and reactions are that related. Emoticons are either objects (neither here nor there for our purposes) or facial/bodily expressions. Reactions are emotional or high-level responses to information.
You can’t really express the thumbs-up reaction with a facial expression emoticon. You can use a smiley face or something similar, but thumbs-up means approval, not happiness. If someone says “I’ll be five minutes late—start without me” I don’t want to express happiness at this, but I do want to acknowledge it and (if this is the case) say it’s OK. A thumbs-up does this wonderfully: by definition, it means I have acknowledged the message, and it signals approval rather than disapproval, but nothing else. You can’t really do that with emoticons.
I think there are lots of situations in which reactions can do things emoticons can’t, and I’ve found that I notice nice opportunities for reactions more when I’m in an environment in which they’re readily available.