I agree that having more choices than just up/downvote would be useful.
I am not sure how will you persuade the locals to upvote everything non-terrible. That’s a rather radical change in the culture. Instead in the spirit of this can I suggest automation? A small script can randomly upvote all posts which didn’t have one of your downvote-equivalent buttons pressed. The rate of upvoting is adjustable and declines with time.
If you want to make it even better, let users pick a waifu and make it so that at certain thresholds she pops up, breathlessly exclaims “Oh, that was so great! I’m so glad you’re here!”, flashes you, smiles, and disappears. We can call her Clipp… um, probably that’s a bad idea :-/
On a bit more serious note, the problem of attracting and incentivizing users is… well explored. There was that thing called Farmville and you can look at any decent freemium game for contemporary examples. How to addict users to little squirts of dopamine is big business. The problem, of course, is the kind of crowd you end up attracting. If you offer gold stars, you end up with people who like gold stars.
How to addict users to little squirts of dopamine is big business. The problem, of course, is the kind of crowd you end up attracting. If you offer gold stars, you end up with people who like gold stars.
Everyone likes gold stars, but not everyone likes decision theory, rationality, philosphy, AI, etc. Even if we were as good as farmville at dopamine, the farmville people wouldn’t come here instead of farmville, because they’d never have anything non-terrible to say.
Now we might start attracting more 13 year-old nerds… but do we want to be so elite that 13 year old nerds can’t come here to learn rationality? The ultimate eliteness is just an empty page that no-one ever sullies with a potentially imperfect speck of pixels. I think we are waaaay too close to that form of eliteness.
I agree that having more choices than just up/downvote would be useful.
I am not sure how will you persuade the locals to upvote everything non-terrible. That’s a rather radical change in the culture. Instead in the spirit of this can I suggest automation? A small script can randomly upvote all posts which didn’t have one of your downvote-equivalent buttons pressed. The rate of upvoting is adjustable and declines with time.
If you want to make it even better, let users pick a waifu and make it so that at certain thresholds she pops up, breathlessly exclaims “Oh, that was so great! I’m so glad you’re here!”, flashes you, smiles, and disappears. We can call her Clipp… um, probably that’s a bad idea :-/
On a bit more serious note, the problem of attracting and incentivizing users is… well explored. There was that thing called Farmville and you can look at any decent freemium game for contemporary examples. How to addict users to little squirts of dopamine is big business. The problem, of course, is the kind of crowd you end up attracting. If you offer gold stars, you end up with people who like gold stars.
Everyone likes gold stars, but not everyone likes decision theory, rationality, philosphy, AI, etc. Even if we were as good as farmville at dopamine, the farmville people wouldn’t come here instead of farmville, because they’d never have anything non-terrible to say.
Now we might start attracting more 13 year-old nerds… but do we want to be so elite that 13 year old nerds can’t come here to learn rationality? The ultimate eliteness is just an empty page that no-one ever sullies with a potentially imperfect speck of pixels. I think we are waaaay too close to that form of eliteness.