Meta: this is the sort of thing I’d have wanted to give a simple like or thumbs-up to to indicate to you that I’d seen it without having to respond with a comment.
(This is part of an mostly-unrelated issue of “should upvotes be public, or should there be some way to do something upvote-like that is public?” that’s been discussed a bit in a few places)
Meta: this is the sort of thing I’d have wanted to give a simple like or thumbs-up to to indicate to you that I’d seen it without having to respond with a comment.
I really like the system on Slack, Discord etc. where you can react to comments with various graphical icons and it shows who posted which reaction. Would be fantastic to have something similar here.
I want to push back on that, on two fronts. Such a system would be very bad and potentially rises to the dealbreaker level for me.
First point is that I think graphical icons are quite distracting and loud, and take us away from the kind of atmosphere of real discourse that we want. Icons and emoji and such are strongly associated for good reason with casual slash ephemeral conversation. They send the message that we’re texting, not debating.
Second point is that reactions of this type being non-anonymous seems very bad. I have come to the conclusion that social networks are toxic and should be considered harmful. If LW becomes a de facto social network rather than a place for discussion we’ve failed. Thinking about which people had which reaction to which things, and who is going to see you have which reaction to which thing, is central to that toxicity, and is again part of a very different type of thinking (and one I want to avoid, not embrace).
There are certainly times when it is valuable to tell someone “I have seen this” so there is an argument for a button that sends that message to the original poster (and only the original poster) but the counter-argument to that is that this puts subtle (or non-subtle) pressure on people to indicate whether they have seen things, and thus to check the site frequently. I very much do not want LW to be another site that people feel the need to keep current and constantly check for small updates. This is another big reason why I consider social networks toxic, as they reward constant refreshes. Email has this problem too and solving it while still being reachable quickly is an unsolved problem; some people such as Paul Christiano accept one-day turnaround times to avoid this issue. So overall, I prefer the equilibrium where there is no button, and if it is important that someone know you’ve seen something, you can comment/message to that effect and edit later.
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.
Proposal: instead of buttons, have a feature to mark a comment you’re making as “minor”, which causes it to be collapsed by default. A stack of 10 little collapsed comments saying “I agree” or “+1” or “SGTM” or “I’ve seen this” might be manageable in a way that uncollapsed comments wouldn’t be. (A feature like this might also encourage shy or uncertain people to comment more?)
Something like this might also encourage people to think of collapsed comments as boring, and not do the “oooh, this comment is collapsed, it must be super interesting and salacious” thing. (If comments at a sufficient depth get collapsed, then you might want them to display differently from comments that are minor or downvoted.)
This could also be useful if we have buttons, but only for a very limited set of reactions, and/or if all or most buttons are anonymous.
Ah, good to know.
Meta: this is the sort of thing I’d have wanted to give a simple like or thumbs-up to to indicate to you that I’d seen it without having to respond with a comment.
(This is part of an mostly-unrelated issue of “should upvotes be public, or should there be some way to do something upvote-like that is public?” that’s been discussed a bit in a few places)
I really like the system on Slack, Discord etc. where you can react to comments with various graphical icons and it shows who posted which reaction. Would be fantastic to have something similar here.
I want to push back on that, on two fronts. Such a system would be very bad and potentially rises to the dealbreaker level for me.
First point is that I think graphical icons are quite distracting and loud, and take us away from the kind of atmosphere of real discourse that we want. Icons and emoji and such are strongly associated for good reason with casual slash ephemeral conversation. They send the message that we’re texting, not debating.
Second point is that reactions of this type being non-anonymous seems very bad. I have come to the conclusion that social networks are toxic and should be considered harmful. If LW becomes a de facto social network rather than a place for discussion we’ve failed. Thinking about which people had which reaction to which things, and who is going to see you have which reaction to which thing, is central to that toxicity, and is again part of a very different type of thinking (and one I want to avoid, not embrace).
There are certainly times when it is valuable to tell someone “I have seen this” so there is an argument for a button that sends that message to the original poster (and only the original poster) but the counter-argument to that is that this puts subtle (or non-subtle) pressure on people to indicate whether they have seen things, and thus to check the site frequently. I very much do not want LW to be another site that people feel the need to keep current and constantly check for small updates. This is another big reason why I consider social networks toxic, as they reward constant refreshes. Email has this problem too and solving it while still being reachable quickly is an unsolved problem; some people such as Paul Christiano accept one-day turnaround times to avoid this issue. So overall, I prefer the equilibrium where there is no button, and if it is important that someone know you’ve seen something, you can comment/message to that effect and edit later.
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.
Proposal: instead of buttons, have a feature to mark a comment you’re making as “minor”, which causes it to be collapsed by default. A stack of 10 little collapsed comments saying “I agree” or “+1” or “SGTM” or “I’ve seen this” might be manageable in a way that uncollapsed comments wouldn’t be. (A feature like this might also encourage shy or uncertain people to comment more?)
Something like this might also encourage people to think of collapsed comments as boring, and not do the “oooh, this comment is collapsed, it must be super interesting and salacious” thing. (If comments at a sufficient depth get collapsed, then you might want them to display differently from comments that are minor or downvoted.)
This could also be useful if we have buttons, but only for a very limited set of reactions, and/or if all or most buttons are anonymous.