We’re thinking a lot about this! Probably what’s going to happen next is that we’re going to implement more than one variation on voting, and pick a few posts where comments will use alternate voting systems. This will be separated out by post, not by user, since having users using a mix of voting systems on the same comments introduces a bunch of problems.
Ideally we can both improve sorting/evaluation, and also use aspects of the voting system itself as a culture-shaping tool to remind people of what sort of comments we’re hoping for. Here’s a mockup I posted in the LW development slack last week (one idea among multiple, and definitely not the final form):
(In this mockup, which currently is just a fake screenshot and not any real wired-up code, the way it works is you have an overall vote which works like existing karma, but can also pick any subset of the 12 things on the form that appears on hover-over. If you pick one of the postive or negative adjectives, it sets your overall vote to match the valence, but you can then override the overall vote if you want to say things like False/Upvote or True/Downvote.)
I think we’re unlikely to settle on anything involving ratings-out-of-five-stars, mainly because a significant subset of users have preexisting associations with five-star scales which would make them overuse the top rating (and misinterpret non-5 ratings from others).
We’re also considering making users able to (optionally) make their votes public.
A fixed set of tags turns this into multiple-choice questions where all answers are inaccurate, and most answers are irrelevant. Write-in tags could be similar to voting on replies to a comment that evaluate it in some respect. Different people pay attention to different aspects, so the flexibility to vote on multiple aspects at once or differently from overall vote is unnecessary.
Different people pay attention to different aspects, so the flexibility to vote on multiple aspects at once or differently from overall vote is unnecessary.
There’s a limited sense in which this is true—the adjective voting on Slashdot wouldn’t benefit from allowing people to pick multiple adjectives, for example. But being able to express a mismatch between overall upvote/downvote and true/false or agree/disagree may be important; part of the goal is to nudge people’s votes away from being based on agreement, and towards being based on argument quality.
For what it’s worth—I see value in votes being public by default. It can be very useful to see who upvoted or downvoted your comment. Of course then people will use the upvote feature just to indicate they read a post, but that’s OK (we are familiar with that system from Facebook, Twitter, etc).
I’m pretty apathetic about all the other proposals here. Reactions seem to me to be unnecessary distractions. [side note—emojiis are very ambiguous so it’s good you put words next to each one to explain what they are supposed to mean]. The way I would interpret reactions would be as a poll of people’s system 1 snap judgements. That is arguably useful/interesting information in many contexts but also distracting in other contexts.
I might suggest starting with an “other” list that can be pretty long. With Slack, different subcommunities focus heavily on different emojis for different functional things. Users sometimes figure out neat innovations and those proliferate. So if it’s all designed by the LW team, you might be missing out.
That said, I’d imagine 80% of the benefit is just having anything like this, so I’m happy to see that happen.
We’re thinking a lot about this! Probably what’s going to happen next is that we’re going to implement more than one variation on voting, and pick a few posts where comments will use alternate voting systems. This will be separated out by post, not by user, since having users using a mix of voting systems on the same comments introduces a bunch of problems.
Ideally we can both improve sorting/evaluation, and also use aspects of the voting system itself as a culture-shaping tool to remind people of what sort of comments we’re hoping for. Here’s a mockup I posted in the LW development slack last week (one idea among multiple, and definitely not the final form):
(In this mockup, which currently is just a fake screenshot and not any real wired-up code, the way it works is you have an overall vote which works like existing karma, but can also pick any subset of the 12 things on the form that appears on hover-over. If you pick one of the postive or negative adjectives, it sets your overall vote to match the valence, but you can then override the overall vote if you want to say things like False/Upvote or True/Downvote.)
I think we’re unlikely to settle on anything involving ratings-out-of-five-stars, mainly because a significant subset of users have preexisting associations with five-star scales which would make them overuse the top rating (and misinterpret non-5 ratings from others).
We’re also considering making users able to (optionally) make their votes public.
A fixed set of tags turns this into multiple-choice questions where all answers are inaccurate, and most answers are irrelevant. Write-in tags could be similar to voting on replies to a comment that evaluate it in some respect. Different people pay attention to different aspects, so the flexibility to vote on multiple aspects at once or differently from overall vote is unnecessary.
There’s a limited sense in which this is true—the adjective voting on Slashdot wouldn’t benefit from allowing people to pick multiple adjectives, for example. But being able to express a mismatch between overall upvote/downvote and true/false or agree/disagree may be important; part of the goal is to nudge people’s votes away from being based on agreement, and towards being based on argument quality.
For what it’s worth—I see value in votes being public by default. It can be very useful to see who upvoted or downvoted your comment. Of course then people will use the upvote feature just to indicate they read a post, but that’s OK (we are familiar with that system from Facebook, Twitter, etc).
I’m pretty apathetic about all the other proposals here. Reactions seem to me to be unnecessary distractions. [side note—emojiis are very ambiguous so it’s good you put words next to each one to explain what they are supposed to mean]. The way I would interpret reactions would be as a poll of people’s system 1 snap judgements. That is arguably useful/interesting information in many contexts but also distracting in other contexts.
Just want to say; I’m really excited to see this.
I might suggest starting with an “other” list that can be pretty long. With Slack, different subcommunities focus heavily on different emojis for different functional things. Users sometimes figure out neat innovations and those proliferate. So if it’s all designed by the LW team, you might be missing out.
That said, I’d imagine 80% of the benefit is just having anything like this, so I’m happy to see that happen.
Whoa I like the labeled upvotes and downvotes. It’s like the emoji reactions feature but for rational discourse.
Ah! This looks good! I’m excited to try it out.