It’s funny how successful games almost always hand out lots of ‘inflationary’ gold stars just for turning up and playing.
The goal of successful computer games is to maximize the playerbase without regard to the quality of that playerbase (with exceptions made for people who drive other players away—cheaters, harassers, etc.). If a reasonably docile idiot shows up and clicks where he is expected to click, the game would be happy to reward him with a variety of virtual goodies. Drool—click—star! - drool—click—star! - drool...
Notably the goals of LW are different. I don’t think we should reward people for just showing up. I think we should actively filter idiots out, docile or not. I don’t want more posts—I want more high-quality posts which you shouldn’t expect if you’re rewarding quantity. A pile of mediocre posts, festooned with gold stars, will make LW just another island of mediocrity in the big ’net ocean.
But what is the incentive for people to take the considerable time and trouble to write high-quality posts if there is virtually no-one here to read them, except perhaps the most extreme anal nitpickers?
If you optimize the system for zero “idiots”, you have to be careful that your system doesn’t converge to the trivial solution of having no-one at all commenting or posting, or at least something close to that, where you have a small number of very negative people sniping at anyone who says anything, whilst simultaneously bemoaning the lack of content.
If you optimize the system for zero “idiots”, you have to be careful that your system doesn’t converge to the trivial solution of having no-one at all
Sure, that’s a failure mode that exists. Going to any end of the spectrum is rarely a good idea. But we started with discussing the inflation of incentives. If even a mediocre post gets gold stars, what’s the incentive to write an extra special better-than-the-usual post? Looks inefficient to me, you get the same gold stars but spend more effort :-/
Well it seems reasonable to reward a mediocre post with upvotes, and a great post with more upvotes and promotion to main (and if main ceases to exist, there could be similar forms of recognition for excellence).
The same is true of comments.
People who are capable of producing great posts and comments will be incentivized to do so, as long as they end up above the mediocre stuff.
For me, there are two disincentives against trying to produce great posts: firstly that I will get sniped on something noncentral to my point (and it is a lot of work to vet a post to take preventative measures against all possible snipes), secondly that LW is kind of lacking in high-quality critics who will engage/my post will be somewhat ignored even if it is good.
firstly that I will get sniped on something noncentral to my point
Why would you care? The desire to be liked by everyone is a trap. So somebody snipes your post on something noncentral—just ignore the comment.
LW is kind of lacking in high-quality critics who will engage
Part of the skill of writing a great post is tarting it up so it appeals to high-quality critics :-D If no one engages, you were not interesting enough.
If no one engages, you were not interesting enough.
Maybe, or maybe the high quality critics left the site, or maybe they are here occasionally but since there’s no easy way to sort and filter posts they missed it in a sea of poor quality posts…
So you’re a pretty princess, it’s just that all knights are away battling dragons and there are so many peasants milling around it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
I heard there is a site which talks about rationality and defines it as winning… :-/
Yes so locally one wins by leaving LW, not posting here and instead going off to walled gardens on rationalist Facebook, which seems to be what people have actually done.
Why would you care? The desire to be liked by everyone is a trap
The desire to get positive social feedback is a fundamental part of human psychology that isn’t negotiable. If people get mostly negative feedback at LW, then it shouldn’t surprise you if people just don’t come here any more.
Rationality for humans, as opposed to vulcans, requires building systems that encourage humans to take part in activities that build rationality, and that means using a realistic model of human motivation, not a wishful-thinking model.
The desire to get positive social feedback should not make you dependent on approval and it should not make you unable to ignore chunks of feedback which you think are useless.
One should be a vulcan because that way one would be more rational. But since one is actually a human, one should make plans around human responses to negative feedback; humans are very VERY sensitive to negative social feedback and tend to retreat from it. So if you make LW a site that is great for non-existent vulcans who don’t really care whether feedback is negative or positive, then that site will suck on planet earth.
humans are very VERY sensitive to negative social feedback
Some humans are very sensitive.
Being “very VERY” sensitive is basically a mild disability, similar to being always anxious or having a minor phobia. It is neither a default nor a desirable characteristic.
There are a LOT of humans who will respond to unjustified (in their opinion) and useless criticism with “fuck off” and not give it a second thought.
sure, but I think the crux of the disagreement isn’t really whether some people respond badly to criticism or not. The crux is whether it is a good idea to set up a site where the majority of contributions (say the top 75%) are met with positive reinforcement such as upvotes—perhaps with the top 10% getting some kind of extra-special positive reward, or whether one should instead give the majority of contributions (say the bottom 75%) some form of negative reinforcement.
I claim that the former will result in a site with more high-quality content, all other things being equal, on average. And I think the reason for this is to do with human psychology and community dynamics.
I haven’t seen anyone propose “mostly punish” either.
I was saying, basically, that IMHO the median post doesn’t deserve an upvote, especially from everyone.
Things that are extra-good should get upvotes, things that are extra-bad should get downvotes, thing that are meh-just-average should get neither. Of course everyone makes this evaluation differently, so the number of upvotes is essentially the count of people who thought that your post/comment was extra-good. If no one thought you were extra-good (or extra-bad), I think you deserve a zero score.
What exactly do you mean by “should” here? Is it “should” as in the empirical claim “should = these actions will maximise the quality and number of users” or is it some kind of deontological claim like “should because u/Lumifer inherently believes that a mediocre post/comment should map to 0″?
I ask because it is plausible that
the optimal choice of mapping is not mediocre → 0, where we judge optimality by the consequences for the site
you and others are inherently pissed off by people posting an average comment and getting +1 for it
Oh, here “should” means “in my arrogant opinion it wouldn’t be horrible if”.
The answers to your two plausibles are (1) maybe, I don’t know. Depends on what you are optimizing for, anyway; (2) Nope. I’m not pissed off, inherently or otherwise.
I don’t have a deontological rule which says “No rewards for the mediocre” though I do think that rewarding mediocrity is rarely a good idea (on consequentialist grounds).
The difference between our approaches is the difference in focus. In the trade-off between attracting more people and becoming more popular vs maintaining certain exclusivity and avoiding an Eternal September, you lean to the popularity side and I lean to the exclusivity side.
trade-off between attracting more people and becoming more popular vs maintaining certain exclusivity and avoiding an Eternal September,
I do not think that this is the tradeoff that we are actually facing. I think that in order for the site to be high quality, it needs to attract more people. Right now, in my opinion, the site is both empty and low quality, and these factors currently reinforce each other.
I think that at some point adding more “free gold stars”, i.e. upvotes, badges etc to people would look silly and be counterproductive, but we are nowhere near that point, so we should push the gas pedal, aim to upvote every non-terrible post at least somewhat, upvote decent posts a lot and create new levels of reward—something like lesswrong gold—for posts that are truly great.
We should limit downvotes substantially, or perhaps permanently remove the downvote and replace with separate buttons for “I disagree but this person is engaging in (broadly) rational debate” and “This is toxic/spammy/unrepentantly dumb”.
These buttons should have different semantics, for example “I disagree but this person is engaging in (broadly) rational debate” might be easy to click but not actually make the post go down the page. The “This is toxic/spammy/unrepentantly dumb” might be more costly to click, for example have a limited budget per week and cause the user to have to click an additional dialogue, perhaps with a mandatory “reason” field which is enforced, but would actually push the post down the way downvotes currently do, or perhaps even more strongly than downvotes currently work.
It may be worth noting that the way to get to “upvote every non-terrible post at least somewhat” while still leaving space to “upvote decent posts a lot” is … to have at least some of your users be much more miserly with their upvotes. Even if your goal is to have most things end up on +1 or so, you should be glad that there are users like Lumifer (and, for what it’s worth, me) who mostly only upvote things they think are unusually good. (If everyone upvotes almost everything, you have no way to distinguish better-than-average posts or comments from average ones.)
Yes, there is a point at which more upvoting starts to saturate the set of possible scores for a comment, but we are nowhere near that point IMO. And if we were, I think it would be much better to add a limited-supply super-upvote to the system.
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.
The goal of successful computer games is to maximize the playerbase without regard to the quality of that playerbase (with exceptions made for people who drive other players away—cheaters, harassers, etc.). If a reasonably docile idiot shows up and clicks where he is expected to click, the game would be happy to reward him with a variety of virtual goodies. Drool—click—star! - drool—click—star! - drool...
Notably the goals of LW are different. I don’t think we should reward people for just showing up. I think we should actively filter idiots out, docile or not. I don’t want more posts—I want more high-quality posts which you shouldn’t expect if you’re rewarding quantity. A pile of mediocre posts, festooned with gold stars, will make LW just another island of mediocrity in the big ’net ocean.
But what is the incentive for people to take the considerable time and trouble to write high-quality posts if there is virtually no-one here to read them, except perhaps the most extreme anal nitpickers?
If you optimize the system for zero “idiots”, you have to be careful that your system doesn’t converge to the trivial solution of having no-one at all commenting or posting, or at least something close to that, where you have a small number of very negative people sniping at anyone who says anything, whilst simultaneously bemoaning the lack of content.
Sure, that’s a failure mode that exists. Going to any end of the spectrum is rarely a good idea. But we started with discussing the inflation of incentives. If even a mediocre post gets gold stars, what’s the incentive to write an extra special better-than-the-usual post? Looks inefficient to me, you get the same gold stars but spend more effort :-/
Well it seems reasonable to reward a mediocre post with upvotes, and a great post with more upvotes and promotion to main (and if main ceases to exist, there could be similar forms of recognition for excellence).
The same is true of comments.
People who are capable of producing great posts and comments will be incentivized to do so, as long as they end up above the mediocre stuff.
For me, there are two disincentives against trying to produce great posts: firstly that I will get sniped on something noncentral to my point (and it is a lot of work to vet a post to take preventative measures against all possible snipes), secondly that LW is kind of lacking in high-quality critics who will engage/my post will be somewhat ignored even if it is good.
Why would you care? The desire to be liked by everyone is a trap. So somebody snipes your post on something noncentral—just ignore the comment.
Part of the skill of writing a great post is tarting it up so it appeals to high-quality critics :-D If no one engages, you were not interesting enough.
Maybe, or maybe the high quality critics left the site, or maybe they are here occasionally but since there’s no easy way to sort and filter posts they missed it in a sea of poor quality posts…
So you’re a pretty princess, it’s just that all knights are away battling dragons and there are so many peasants milling around it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
I heard there is a site which talks about rationality and defines it as winning… :-/
Yes so locally one wins by leaving LW, not posting here and instead going off to walled gardens on rationalist Facebook, which seems to be what people have actually done.
Well then.
The desire to get positive social feedback is a fundamental part of human psychology that isn’t negotiable. If people get mostly negative feedback at LW, then it shouldn’t surprise you if people just don’t come here any more.
Rationality for humans, as opposed to vulcans, requires building systems that encourage humans to take part in activities that build rationality, and that means using a realistic model of human motivation, not a wishful-thinking model.
Note the “by everyone” part.
The desire to get positive social feedback should not make you dependent on approval and it should not make you unable to ignore chunks of feedback which you think are useless.
One should be a vulcan because that way one would be more rational. But since one is actually a human, one should make plans around human responses to negative feedback; humans are very VERY sensitive to negative social feedback and tend to retreat from it. So if you make LW a site that is great for non-existent vulcans who don’t really care whether feedback is negative or positive, then that site will suck on planet earth.
Some humans are very sensitive.
Being “very VERY” sensitive is basically a mild disability, similar to being always anxious or having a minor phobia. It is neither a default nor a desirable characteristic.
There are a LOT of humans who will respond to unjustified (in their opinion) and useless criticism with “fuck off” and not give it a second thought.
sure, but I think the crux of the disagreement isn’t really whether some people respond badly to criticism or not. The crux is whether it is a good idea to set up a site where the majority of contributions (say the top 75%) are met with positive reinforcement such as upvotes—perhaps with the top 10% getting some kind of extra-special positive reward, or whether one should instead give the majority of contributions (say the bottom 75%) some form of negative reinforcement.
I claim that the former will result in a site with more high-quality content, all other things being equal, on average. And I think the reason for this is to do with human psychology and community dynamics.
I haven’t seen this proposed by anyone. Are you sure you’re not fighting a strawcreature?
It doesn’t have to be that specific number or way of doing things—the general point is “do we mostly punish or mostly reward”.
I haven’t seen anyone propose “mostly punish” either.
I was saying, basically, that IMHO the median post doesn’t deserve an upvote, especially from everyone.
Things that are extra-good should get upvotes, things that are extra-bad should get downvotes, thing that are meh-just-average should get neither. Of course everyone makes this evaluation differently, so the number of upvotes is essentially the count of people who thought that your post/comment was extra-good. If no one thought you were extra-good (or extra-bad), I think you deserve a zero score.
Zero is neutral—it’s not punishment.
What exactly do you mean by “should” here? Is it “should” as in the empirical claim “should = these actions will maximise the quality and number of users” or is it some kind of deontological claim like “should because u/Lumifer inherently believes that a mediocre post/comment should map to 0″?
I ask because it is plausible that
the optimal choice of mapping is not mediocre → 0, where we judge optimality by the consequences for the site
you and others are inherently pissed off by people posting an average comment and getting +1 for it
Oh, here “should” means “in my arrogant opinion it wouldn’t be horrible if”.
The answers to your two plausibles are (1) maybe, I don’t know. Depends on what you are optimizing for, anyway; (2) Nope. I’m not pissed off, inherently or otherwise.
OK forget the phrase pissed off—what I am trying to get at is deontology vs consequences
I don’t have a deontological rule which says “No rewards for the mediocre” though I do think that rewarding mediocrity is rarely a good idea (on consequentialist grounds).
The difference between our approaches is the difference in focus. In the trade-off between attracting more people and becoming more popular vs maintaining certain exclusivity and avoiding an Eternal September, you lean to the popularity side and I lean to the exclusivity side.
I do not think that this is the tradeoff that we are actually facing. I think that in order for the site to be high quality, it needs to attract more people. Right now, in my opinion, the site is both empty and low quality, and these factors currently reinforce each other.
So do you think we’re facing any trade-off, or the direction is clear and we just need to press on the gas pedal?
I think that at some point adding more “free gold stars”, i.e. upvotes, badges etc to people would look silly and be counterproductive, but we are nowhere near that point, so we should push the gas pedal, aim to upvote every non-terrible post at least somewhat, upvote decent posts a lot and create new levels of reward—something like lesswrong gold—for posts that are truly great.
We should limit downvotes substantially, or perhaps permanently remove the downvote and replace with separate buttons for “I disagree but this person is engaging in (broadly) rational debate” and “This is toxic/spammy/unrepentantly dumb”.
These buttons should have different semantics, for example “I disagree but this person is engaging in (broadly) rational debate” might be easy to click but not actually make the post go down the page. The “This is toxic/spammy/unrepentantly dumb” might be more costly to click, for example have a limited budget per week and cause the user to have to click an additional dialogue, perhaps with a mandatory “reason” field which is enforced, but would actually push the post down the way downvotes currently do, or perhaps even more strongly than downvotes currently work.
It may be worth noting that the way to get to “upvote every non-terrible post at least somewhat” while still leaving space to “upvote decent posts a lot” is … to have at least some of your users be much more miserly with their upvotes. Even if your goal is to have most things end up on +1 or so, you should be glad that there are users like Lumifer (and, for what it’s worth, me) who mostly only upvote things they think are unusually good. (If everyone upvotes almost everything, you have no way to distinguish better-than-average posts or comments from average ones.)
Yes, there is a point at which more upvoting starts to saturate the set of possible scores for a comment, but we are nowhere near that point IMO. And if we were, I think it would be much better to add a limited-supply super-upvote to the system.
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.