This was a pretty interesting read. Here are some notes, as a developer:
Shortform.
The actual deal with shortform, from my perspective, is that I wanted users throughout the site to feel more comfortable writing up their off-the-cuff ideas. But they often reported not feeling comfortable doing so. Shortform was an attempt to say “look, here at least you should feel comfortable doing so.” It does make sense that this creates a vague sense that other places aren’t supposed to be for off-the-cuff thinking.
(I think shortform hasn’t quite worked the way I hoped, although it seems like EA Forum’s Quick Takes feature that highlights shortform on the frontpage a bit more has helped a bunch and I think we might want to copy it or do something similar. The main problem with Shortform is that it’s just a bit too buried and I don’t end up getting discussion from the people I’m most excited to get discussion from)
Agree voting
In practice I don’t think agree-voting successfully silo’s the groupthink, although I do think it helps at least distinguish it a bit.
A long while ago I had an idea that we could design a voting system where the biggest, most satisfying-to-click button didn’t count for your longterm karma, and people had to click a smaller, less exciting button for “actually this post demonstrates good virtues and/or is worth reading”, so that tribal/groupthink-y voting didn’t contribute as disproportionately to site power. I think we basically haven’t built this. The most natural thing to do is still to strong upvote things that you feel a strong tribal/groupthinky pull towards.
One natural idea is to put agree-voting first and approval-voting separate, but that feels like it’d still have not-the-right-effect, where I think people’s actual natural first inclination is to do their all-things-considered-take, which includes agreement, approval, “I got value”, etc.
Two other options that feel kinda-reasonable: When you strong-upvote, you have to actually check “why should this comment be strong-upvoted?”, with things like:
“This says something important for people to read”
“This was undervalued by other people”,
“I agree with this”
“I personally learned/got-value from this
Maybe also the React Palette pops open and you’re encouraged to give at least one react if you strong upvote?
Reacts.
It was definitely one of my hopes for reacts to signal norms, and give you a sense of what sort of site LW is trying to be. (Note that EA forum has different reacts and Progress forum has none). We’ve had reacts for a couple months now and I’m curious to here, both from old-timers and new-timers, what people’s experience of them was, and how much they shape their expectations/culture/etc.
We’ve had reacts for a couple months now and I’m curious to here, both from old-timers and new-timers, what people’s experience of them was, and how much they shape their expectations/culture/etc.
I received (or at least, noticed receiving) a react for the first time recently, and honestly I found it pretty annoying. It was the ‘I checked, it’s False’ one, which basically feels like a quasi-authoritative, quasi-objective, low effort frowny-face stamp where an actual reply would be much more useful.
Edit: If it was possible to reply directly to the react, and have that response be visible to readers who mouse over the react, that would help on the emotional side. On the practical side, I guess it’s a question of whether, in the absence of reacts, I would have got a real reply or just an unexplained downvote.
Another reason we created reacts is that people would often complain about anonymous downvotes, and reacts were somewhat aiming to be a level-of-effort in between downvote and comment.
It’s hard to tell exactly how this effect has played out—reacts and comments are voting are all super noisy and depend on lots of factors. But I have a general sense that people are comparing both votes and reacts to an idealized ‘people wrote out a substantive comment engaging with me’, when alas people are just pretty busy and that’s not realistic to expect a lot of the time.
I do generally prefer people do in-line reacts rather than whole-comment reacts, since that at least tells you what part of the comment they were reacting to. (Ie select part of the comment and react just to that)
Shortform: ah, so it isn’t intended as zoning. More that short-form and long-form are both valuable, but each needs a separate space to exist. (This seems to be a law of online media: short-form and long-form can’t naturally share the same space. Same for sync and async. See e.g. Google Wave failure. I don’t entirely understand the reasons, though.)
Agree-voting: I too end up incorporating “agreement” into the “overall” vote, despite the separate axis. I think “overall” almost implies I should do that! (Perhaps if “overall” were renamed to e.g. “important”? “How important is this comment?”)
Possible future changes: I like your suggestions! Though (in line with the CoI research) I’d like to think about: can we measure (e.g. with split testing) whether those changes affect behavior in the right direction? Or can we draw on empirical CoI research instead of testing it ourselves?
Oh, wow, so I’d misunderstood that one as well! Apparently, my expectation so strong that the main axis was supposed to exclude “agreement”, that I actively misinterpreted the word “overall”. I just discovered this announcement of “Agree/Disagree Voting” which mostly confirms that yes, overall is supposed to be overall.
This was a pretty interesting read. Here are some notes, as a developer:
Shortform.
The actual deal with shortform, from my perspective, is that I wanted users throughout the site to feel more comfortable writing up their off-the-cuff ideas. But they often reported not feeling comfortable doing so. Shortform was an attempt to say “look, here at least you should feel comfortable doing so.” It does make sense that this creates a vague sense that other places aren’t supposed to be for off-the-cuff thinking.
(I think shortform hasn’t quite worked the way I hoped, although it seems like EA Forum’s Quick Takes feature that highlights shortform on the frontpage a bit more has helped a bunch and I think we might want to copy it or do something similar. The main problem with Shortform is that it’s just a bit too buried and I don’t end up getting discussion from the people I’m most excited to get discussion from)
Agree voting
In practice I don’t think agree-voting successfully silo’s the groupthink, although I do think it helps at least distinguish it a bit.
A long while ago I had an idea that we could design a voting system where the biggest, most satisfying-to-click button didn’t count for your longterm karma, and people had to click a smaller, less exciting button for “actually this post demonstrates good virtues and/or is worth reading”, so that tribal/groupthink-y voting didn’t contribute as disproportionately to site power. I think we basically haven’t built this. The most natural thing to do is still to strong upvote things that you feel a strong tribal/groupthinky pull towards.
One natural idea is to put agree-voting first and approval-voting separate, but that feels like it’d still have not-the-right-effect, where I think people’s actual natural first inclination is to do their all-things-considered-take, which includes agreement, approval, “I got value”, etc.
Two other options that feel kinda-reasonable: When you strong-upvote, you have to actually check “why should this comment be strong-upvoted?”, with things like:
“This says something important for people to read”
“This was undervalued by other people”,
“I agree with this”
“I personally learned/got-value from this
Maybe also the React Palette pops open and you’re encouraged to give at least one react if you strong upvote?
Reacts.
It was definitely one of my hopes for reacts to signal norms, and give you a sense of what sort of site LW is trying to be. (Note that EA forum has different reacts and Progress forum has none). We’ve had reacts for a couple months now and I’m curious to here, both from old-timers and new-timers, what people’s experience of them was, and how much they shape their expectations/culture/etc.
I received (or at least, noticed receiving) a react for the first time recently, and honestly I found it pretty annoying. It was the ‘I checked, it’s False’ one, which basically feels like a quasi-authoritative, quasi-objective, low effort frowny-face stamp where an actual reply would be much more useful.
Edit: If it was possible to reply directly to the react, and have that response be visible to readers who mouse over the react, that would help on the emotional side. On the practical side, I guess it’s a question of whether, in the absence of reacts, I would have got a real reply or just an unexplained downvote.
Another reason we created reacts is that people would often complain about anonymous downvotes, and reacts were somewhat aiming to be a level-of-effort in between downvote and comment.
It’s hard to tell exactly how this effect has played out—reacts and comments are voting are all super noisy and depend on lots of factors. But I have a general sense that people are comparing both votes and reacts to an idealized ‘people wrote out a substantive comment engaging with me’, when alas people are just pretty busy and that’s not realistic to expect a lot of the time.
I do generally prefer people do in-line reacts rather than whole-comment reacts, since that at least tells you what part of the comment they were reacting to. (Ie select part of the comment and react just to that)
Note: you can reply to your own comment and @mention the user who reacted to you to send them a notification.
Shortform: ah, so it isn’t intended as zoning. More that short-form and long-form are both valuable, but each needs a separate space to exist. (This seems to be a law of online media: short-form and long-form can’t naturally share the same space. Same for sync and async. See e.g. Google Wave failure. I don’t entirely understand the reasons, though.)
Agree-voting: I too end up incorporating “agreement” into the “overall” vote, despite the separate axis. I think “overall” almost implies I should do that! (Perhaps if “overall” were renamed to e.g. “important”? “How important is this comment?”)
Possible future changes: I like your suggestions! Though (in line with the CoI research) I’d like to think about: can we measure (e.g. with split testing) whether those changes affect behavior in the right direction? Or can we draw on empirical CoI research instead of testing it ourselves?
Overall is explicitly supposed to be overall.
Oh, wow, so I’d misunderstood that one as well! Apparently, my expectation so strong that the main axis was supposed to exclude “agreement”, that I actively misinterpreted the word “overall”. I just discovered this announcement of “Agree/Disagree Voting” which mostly confirms that yes, overall is supposed to be overall.