After reading this thread and going back and forth, I think maybe this is my proposal for how to handle this sort of situation:
The whole point of the agree/disagree vote dimension is to separate out social stuff e.g. ‘I like this guy and like his comment and want him to feel appreciated’ from epistemic stuff ‘I think the central claim in this comment is false.’ So, I think we should try our best to not discourage people from disagree-voting because they feel bad about someone getting so many disagree-votes for example.
An alternative is to leave a comment, as you did, explaining the situation and your feelings. I think this is great.
Another cheaper alternative is to compensate for disagree-voting with a strong-upvote instead of just an upvote.
Finally, I wonder if there might be some experimentation to do with the statistics you can view on your personal page—e.g. maybe there should be a way to view highly upvoted but disagreed-with comments, either for yourself or across the whole site, with the framing being ‘this is one metric that helps us understand whether healthy dialogue is happening & groupthink is being avoided’
I’d find the agree/disagree dimension much more useful if we split out “x people agree, y disagree”—as the EA Forum does—rather than showing the sum of weighted votes (and total number on hover).
I’d also encourage people to use the other reactions more heavily, including on substrings of a comment, but there’s value in the anonymous dis/agree counts too.
After reading this thread and going back and forth, I think maybe this is my proposal for how to handle this sort of situation:
The whole point of the agree/disagree vote dimension is to separate out social stuff e.g. ‘I like this guy and like his comment and want him to feel appreciated’ from epistemic stuff ‘I think the central claim in this comment is false.’ So, I think we should try our best to not discourage people from disagree-voting because they feel bad about someone getting so many disagree-votes for example.
An alternative is to leave a comment, as you did, explaining the situation and your feelings. I think this is great.
Another cheaper alternative is to compensate for disagree-voting with a strong-upvote instead of just an upvote.
Finally, I wonder if there might be some experimentation to do with the statistics you can view on your personal page—e.g. maybe there should be a way to view highly upvoted but disagreed-with comments, either for yourself or across the whole site, with the framing being ‘this is one metric that helps us understand whether healthy dialogue is happening & groupthink is being avoided’
I’d find the agree/disagree dimension much more useful if we split out “x people agree, y disagree”—as the EA Forum does—rather than showing the sum of weighted votes (and total number on hover).
I’d also encourage people to use the other reactions more heavily, including on substrings of a comment, but there’s value in the anonymous dis/agree counts too.