I don’t participate in a very wide swath of social media, so this may vary beyond FB and the like. But from what I can tell, reacts do exactly the opposite of what you say—they’re pure mood affiliation, with far less incentive nor opportunity for subtlety or epistemically-useful feedback than comments have.
The LW reacts you’ve discussed in the past (not like/laugh/cry/etc, but updated/good-data/clear-modeling or whatnot) probably DO give some opportunity, but can never be as subtle or clear as a comment. I wonder if something like Slack’s custom-reacts (any user can upload an icon and label it for use as a react) would be a good way to get both precision and ease. Or perhaps just a flag for “meta-comment”, which lets people write arbitrary text that’s a comment on the impact or style or whatnot, leaving non-flagged comments as object-level comments about the topic of the post or parent.
This isn’t intended at all to replace comments. The idea here is giving people accordance to do lower effort ‘pseudo comments’ that are somewhere in between an upvote / downvote and a comment, so that people who find it too effortful to write a comment can express some feedback.
Hypothesis is that this gets you more total feedback.
I was mostly reacting to “I’d previously talked about how it would be neat if LW reacts specifically gave people affordance to think subtler epistemically-useful thoughts. ”, and failed my own first rule of evaluation: “compared to what?”.
As something with more variations than karma/votes, and less distracting/lower hurdle than comments, I can see reacts as filling a niche. I’d kind of lean toward more like tagging and less like 5-10 variations on a vote.
I don’t participate in a very wide swath of social media, so this may vary beyond FB and the like. But from what I can tell, reacts do exactly the opposite of what you say—they’re pure mood affiliation, with far less incentive nor opportunity for subtlety or epistemically-useful feedback than comments have.
The LW reacts you’ve discussed in the past (not like/laugh/cry/etc, but updated/good-data/clear-modeling or whatnot) probably DO give some opportunity, but can never be as subtle or clear as a comment. I wonder if something like Slack’s custom-reacts (any user can upload an icon and label it for use as a react) would be a good way to get both precision and ease. Or perhaps just a flag for “meta-comment”, which lets people write arbitrary text that’s a comment on the impact or style or whatnot, leaving non-flagged comments as object-level comments about the topic of the post or parent.
This isn’t intended at all to replace comments. The idea here is giving people accordance to do lower effort ‘pseudo comments’ that are somewhere in between an upvote / downvote and a comment, so that people who find it too effortful to write a comment can express some feedback.
Hypothesis is that this gets you more total feedback.
I was mostly reacting to “I’d previously talked about how it would be neat if LW reacts specifically gave people affordance to think subtler epistemically-useful thoughts. ”, and failed my own first rule of evaluation: “compared to what?”.
As something with more variations than karma/votes, and less distracting/lower hurdle than comments, I can see reacts as filling a niche. I’d kind of lean toward more like tagging and less like 5-10 variations on a vote.