First point is that I think graphical icons are quite distracting and loud
I don’t think they necessarily need to be: see e.g. the small “agree, respectfully disagree, helpful” icons at the bottom of posts over at Paradox forums (sample thread). They look pretty nice and unobtrusive to me.
Second point is that reactions of this type being non-anonymous seems very bad.
There seem to be both advantages and disadvantages to non-anonymity, and it’s not clear to me which one dominates. E.g. over on LW, a lot of people have mentioned that anonymous karma counts on their posts are pretty bad for motivation, and that a couple of named posters making comments such as “nice post” can feel much more rewarding than having lots of upvotes.
I agree that this can also have a negative effect, but given that one of the reasons why LW1.0 died seems to have been that people didn’t find it rewarding enough to put in the work of writing quality content, having more emotionally compelling feedback mechanisms seems worth considering.
I find it interesting that you’re worried the feedback isn’t compelling enough, and I’m worried it will be too compelling in bad ways. I strongly resonate with the idea that someone taking the time to write ‘nice post’ feels much better than getting a like or upvote. That seems good so long as doing so is rare and someone failing to do this does not feel like information, since it involves far more conscious effort.
I also like Rob’s idea of collapsing ‘minor’ comments, with my additional suggestion that the person you’re replying to defaults to seeing them in expanded form, and likely they start at sorting power −1 for other people. This could also be useful for things like “you have a typo or math error.”
I think both private non-anonymous reactions and public anonymous reactions are likely to be valuable, whereas public non-anonymous reactions could be potentially harmful and private anonymous reactions seem mostly useless.
“I’ve seen this” coming from the parent poster and “nice post” are valuable feedback for the author of the post/comment, but less useful information for other people so it would best be private and non-anonymous.
Reactions that say something about the content of a comment, like “interesting” or “confusing” are more useful if they are public and anonymous.
I don’t think they necessarily need to be: see e.g. the small “agree, respectfully disagree, helpful” icons at the bottom of posts over at Paradox forums (sample thread). They look pretty nice and unobtrusive to me.
There seem to be both advantages and disadvantages to non-anonymity, and it’s not clear to me which one dominates. E.g. over on LW, a lot of people have mentioned that anonymous karma counts on their posts are pretty bad for motivation, and that a couple of named posters making comments such as “nice post” can feel much more rewarding than having lots of upvotes.
I agree that this can also have a negative effect, but given that one of the reasons why LW1.0 died seems to have been that people didn’t find it rewarding enough to put in the work of writing quality content, having more emotionally compelling feedback mechanisms seems worth considering.
I find it interesting that you’re worried the feedback isn’t compelling enough, and I’m worried it will be too compelling in bad ways. I strongly resonate with the idea that someone taking the time to write ‘nice post’ feels much better than getting a like or upvote. That seems good so long as doing so is rare and someone failing to do this does not feel like information, since it involves far more conscious effort.
I also like Rob’s idea of collapsing ‘minor’ comments, with my additional suggestion that the person you’re replying to defaults to seeing them in expanded form, and likely they start at sorting power −1 for other people. This could also be useful for things like “you have a typo or math error.”
I think both private non-anonymous reactions and public anonymous reactions are likely to be valuable, whereas public non-anonymous reactions could be potentially harmful and private anonymous reactions seem mostly useless.
“I’ve seen this” coming from the parent poster and “nice post” are valuable feedback for the author of the post/comment, but less useful information for other people so it would best be private and non-anonymous.
Reactions that say something about the content of a comment, like “interesting” or “confusing” are more useful if they are public and anonymous.