The idea behind this voting system is to act as a culture-shaping tool: the ballot you see when you hover over the vote buttons is meant to tell you what we think makes for good and bad comments. Ideally, this message comes across even if you aren’t voting much.
I’ve given some thought to the specific axes and reactions, but they should still be treated very much as a first draft. I’m very interested in comparing other people’s lists of axes and reactions, and in arguments about what should and shouldn’t be included. What makes for a good comment? What should people be paying attention to? What have you wanted to communicate to authors, which you wish you had a button for instead of having to write a whole comment?
A big uncertainty I have about this voting system is how much of a problem the extra complexity is. Is seeing the extra score components on comments distracting? Does having a bunch of extra axes to vote on make voting too time consuming or overwhelming? Feedback on this is appreciated.
And of course, now that we have a setup in place where we can try out alternative voting systems, we’re interested in any original ideas people have for different ways of voting on comments that we haven’t thought of.
I do find the added complexity distracting and overwhelming.
But that’s less of a problem if such a voting system would only become selectively enabled in contexts where the benefits are worth the cost of extra complexity.
And obviously that feeling of being overwhelmed is only partly due to the increased complexity, and partly because it’s an experimental unpolished feature.
That said, four axes plus extra emojis really is a lot, and I’d imagine a final system would be more like 2-3 axes (or a dropdown with some orthogonal options) than as many as here.
Regarding that point, I do think it’s important that all axes in such a system are reasonably orthogonal. General Upvote, Truth, Aim, Truthseeking, and Clarity all seem far too correlated to be on separate axes.
Also, I’m slightly wary that some of these votes maybe impute too much motive into a comment? If you vote “seeks conflict”, that implies that you think the comment author was intentionally unvirtuous. Whereas if your vote was an Angry Face à la Facebook’s system, that’s obviously at least partly about your own state of mind, and your reaction to the comment. (Not that Facebook’s system would be particularly aligned with the desired LW culture.)
Regarding my impression of this current specific implementation of the voting system, the True-False axis being abbreviated as Truth makes sense, as does the Clear-Muddled->Clarity axis. But the Hits-the-Mark-Misses-the-Point axis being abbreviated as Aim feels incredibly confusing, and same with Seeks-Truth-Seeks-Conflict becoming Seeking.
Regarding the icons, Empathy and Surprise seem reasonably clear to me, whereas I could not identify the meaning of the Skepticism and Enthusiasm icons just from their icons.
Also: The current popup has virtues on the left and vices on the right, whereas the LW voting system is downvote-upvote, not upvote-downvote. So I’d prefer these axes to be flipped in the popup. One could also do something like: <Truth>, <Clarity>, <Truthseeking>, …; and then the “<” is a downvote on the Truth value, and hovering over it gives you a tooltip that explains that this vote means the comment is False. (That said, multiple nested popups and tooltips are a no-go, of course.)
Regarding that point, I do think it’s important that all axes in such a system are reasonably orthogonal. General Upvote, Truth, Aim, Truthseeking, and Clarity all seem far too correlated to be on separate axes.
It took a while to read this, because I’d have said ‘hits the mark/misses the point’ and clear/muddled were the ones that seemed perhaps too similar. Then I noticed that you mentioned those—processing what these words mean quickly is going to take a bit to get down.
A comment, or post, could be clear, and yet, the point might not be. (And I might comment asking there.)
Also: The current popup has virtues on the left and vices on the right, whereas the LW voting system is downvote-upvote, not upvote-downvote. So I’d prefer these axes to be flipped in the popup.
Yes.
I’m fine with the complexity now, but in a big thread, with loads of comments, that are very long...that’s going to be more challenging. Hopefully the new system will make some things more clear, so that the process of understanding gets easier, but at first? It’ll be a lot.
Agree it’ll get better if limited to relevant contexts and polished up.
Agree the axes are difficult to distinguish from one another. True speech, truth-seeking speech, precisely specified speech, and accurately aimed speech are all distinctly important! buuuut they’re strongly correlated so the distinctions are usually only useful to point out on the extreme ends of the quality spectrum, or on very short comments.
There’s an axis? reaction? that is not quite muddled or conflict-seeking or missing the point or false, nor does it warrants skepticism or surprise. It’s just… an ugh field. It’s the category of too much text, too far outside my base context, too ugly, too personally triggering, too why I should even try.
My browser shows does not display the skepticism or enthusiasm icons, I too have great difficulty identifying their meaning.
There’s an axis? reaction? that is not quite muddled or conflict-seeking or missing the point or false, nor does it warrants skepticism or surprise. It’s just… an ugh field. It’s the category of too much text, too far outside my base context, too ugly, too personally triggering, too why I should even try.
Good point. I would not consider all those quite the same axis, but they’re sure orthogonal to the axes we have here.
Here are some potential word pairs to name this axis: Energizing/Inspiring<->Exhausting, Enjoyable/Joyful<->Ugh, Polished<->Mess(y)/Unfocused/Meandering.
Personally, I don’t find these 4 axes to be too much to handle. I don’t necessarily agree that the axes have to be very orthogonal. The point of this system is to promote LW’s desired culture of seeking truth, so it makes sense that the axes are going to have that all in common. The important thing is that each axis should have some significance that is not communicated by any of the other axes- which I feel at least 3 of the 4 axes accomplish (“true” is about whether something is actually true, “clarity” is about how well the thoughts are expressed, regardless of the truth, “seeking” is about demonstrating proper epistemic hygine, (Which overlaps slightly with clarity, but clarity is more about having a line of thought that can be followed, with less emphasis on the quality of the tools of reasoning, while truth-seeking emphasizes using tools that give good results, with less focus on how clear their use is, or the actual resulting thesis).
I’d say I have the hardest time distinguishing “aim” from “truth”, because ultimately something that hits the mark is true, though “misses the point” seems not quite the same as “false”. Actually, now that I think about it, “hits the mark” and “misses the point” don’t really feel complementary to me- ‘hits the mark’ is basically about agreement, while ‘misses the point’ seems to be more about how well the thoughts in a comment understand and relate to the conversation it is a part of.
I would maybe suggest trying to adjust “hits the mark” to also be on this axis- highlighting not just truth, but relating to the broader context of the conversation in a good way.
Bug: So apparently in my Android smartphone’s Firefox browser (v95.2.0), the Skepticism emoji is rendered as a grey rectangle.
The other three emojis display fine, though they look different than on my desktop Firefox. (Which means they probably look different in other browsers too, right? It seems slightly weird to let browsers decide part of the aesthetics of one’s website.)
Trying new voting systems in open threads is a fine idea, but it has the unfortunate side effect of crowding out normal Open Thread comments. That seems bad to me, since these threads have a legitimate purpose of being the place where new users can introduce themselves, ask basic questions, etc.
My biggest thought is that the bar for experimenting is a lot lower than the bar for, say, committing to this site-wide for 12 months. And with that said, it’s hard for me to imagine this not being promising enough to experiment with. Eg. by enabling it on select posts and seeing what the results and feedback are.
My first experience trying to react to your comment was feeling that none of the axes felt applicable, but then “enthusiasm” did capture how I felt; however, the icon for it felt discordant since I associate party-hat/streamers with “celebration” rather than “enthusiasm”. I don’t know what icon I’d use for enthusiasm.
I notice that I am uncertain how to interpret the “hearts” on this comment. Do they mean that people have empathy for my feeling or that they “love” this comment (a la strong upvote) with the meaning that heart reacts have in other places?
I interpreted it as “vibing with this” or “mood”. Feeling a moment of connection with another human being through their words, either because it matches your own experience or because they painted a foreign vista vivid enough to inhabit.
I think that the heart matching “empathy” makes me think it’s intended to show emotional support for someone, like if I had a post about my dog dying or something. You might not “agree” since there might not be anything factual going on, but it would still be nice to be able to somehow make me know you noticed.
I think sparkles works well, clapping hands is also okay (and I’m actually personally fine with the 🎉 icon). 100 doesn’t feel like it matches “enthusiasm” very well. Hugging face kinda works, but I prefer the others (aside from 100), and I agree that yellow faces should be minimized (though I’m probably less opposed to it than Ruby)
I also used Enthusiasm, though mostly because of the post, not the comment. I am delighted to see a voting mechanism added. I missed the old polling feature from LW 1.0.
I wrote a comment here arguing that voting systems tend to encourage conformity. I think this is a way in which the LW voting system could be improved. You might get rid of the unlabeled quality axis and force downvoters to be specific about why they dislike the comment. Maybe readers could specify which weights they want to assign to the remaining axes in order to sort comments.
I think Agree/Disagree is better than True/False, and Understandable/Confusing would be better than Clear/Muddled. Both of these axes are functions of two things (the reader and the comment) rather than just one (the comment) and the existing labels implicitly assume that the person voting on the comment has a better perspective on it than the person who wrote it. I think the opposite is more likely true—speaking personally at least, my votes tend to be less thoughtful than my comments.
Other axis ideas: Constructive/nonconstructive, important/unimportant. Could also try a “thank” react, and an “intriguing” or “interesting” react (probably replacing “surprise”—I like the idea of reinforcing novelty but the word “surprise” seems like too high of a bar?) Maybe also reacts for “this comment should’ve been longer/shorter”?
I wish the buttons for ‘truth’ said ‘agree / disagree’ instead, because while sometimes the truth is objective, other times comments are more subjective, and I desire to communicate that I disagree (‘false’ feels more icky, because I feel they are honestly communicating what they feel, I just don’t agree with their perspective)
In the case that some people say ‘true’, and an equal number say ‘false’, I would appreciate it if the ‘truth’ box (same for the other boxes) was still visible, and said ‘truth 0’, instead of disappearing. That way, one can distinguish between no box (Which means no-one has expressed an opinion), and a divided opinion.
Agree / Disagree is not a relevant axis of quality on Lesswrong. True / False is so relevant, when a comment contains explicit or implicit claims about reality to fact check.
I tentatively infer that the use case you’re thinking of is some kind of Quick Poll, where someone shares subjective anecdata and others can quickly chime in with whether their anecdata is alike or in contrast of that example. This would be an incredibly valuable tool; I really want to have that. What I don’t want is to have that tool in the place of a quality control system.
Wasn’t clear to me what “aim” was referring to. Based on seeing “seeking” too I can guess that it’s for hits the mark / misses the point, but otherwise it’s not clear.
I really like this experimentation. Some thoughts:
Regarding finding the ideal set of axes: I wonder if it would make sense to give quite a few of them (that seem plausibly good), and then collect data for a month or so, and then select a subset based on usage and orthogonality. Rather than tentatively trying new axes in a more one-by-one fashion, that is. You’d explicitly tell users that the axes are being experimented with, and to vote on the axes which seem most appropriate. This might also be a way to collect axis ideas—if the user can’t find the axis that they want, they can click a button to suggest one. Relying on the in-the-moment intuitions of users could be a great way to quickly search the “axis space”.
I really like the “seeks truth/conflict” axis. A comment has an inherent “gravity” to it which makes it inappropriate/costly for pointing out “small” things. If a comment is very slightly hostile, then there’s a kind of social cost to pointing it out, since it really isn’t worth a whole comment. This results in a threshold under which incivility/conflict-seeking can simmer—being essentially immune to criticism.
One weird experiment that probably wouldn’t work, but which I’d love to see is for the reactions to be more like a tag system, where there are potentially hundreds of different tags. They’re essentially “quick comments”, and could be quite “subtle” in their meaning. It would be a bit like platforms that allow you to react with any emoji, except that you can be much more precise with your reactions—e.g. “Unnecessary incivility” or “Interesting direction” or “Good steelman” or “Please expand” or “Well-written” or “Hand-wavy” or “Goodhart’s Law” (perhaps implying that the concept is relevant in a way that’s unacknowledged by the author). There could also be some emergent use-cases with tags. For example, tags could be used as a way for a commenter to poll the people reading the comment by asking them to tag a digit between 1 and 5, for example.
There are lots of ways this idea could end up being a net negative—in particular it may be that any level of subtlety beyond a few basic voting axes really would benefit from a comment in almost all cases, and then that comment essentially becomes the “tag” that people can vote on. Still, I’d love to see an experiment.
This isn’t about this experiment specifically, but: One problem with showing an absolute vote count is that it relies on people explicitly not voting on something if they think it has reached an appropriate level of upvotes/downvotes. E.g. if a comment that you think is kinda bad has a score of +10, you might downvote it, but if it already has a score of −3, you might leave it because to downvote further would be “too harsh”. This obviously isn’t ideal, because a couple of hours later that −3 comment could have climbed to +5 and so it turns out you should have actually downvoted it. There are a few ways to solve this—e.g. use more of a star rating system, or cap the upside and downside (but keep the real votes so that e.g. if a comment gets to −10, only −5 is displayed and reflected in the user’s karma, but it would require 6 upvotes to get to −4), display as a ratio plus total number of votes, etc. - they all have their trade-offs though, so I’m not sure there’s a clear solution here. This is another place where tags are interesting, because if everyone things a comment is just slightly conflict-seeking, then they can use the “Slightly conflict-seeking” tag, and they can all vote on that without giving the comment author the impression that everyone thinks their comment is extremely conflict seeking.
Like I said, I love this experimentation—please keep at it! I think this topic is completely underappreciated by basically every social platform.
The idea behind this voting system is to act as a culture-shaping tool: the ballot you see when you hover over the vote buttons is meant to tell you what we think makes for good and bad comments. Ideally, this message comes across even if you aren’t voting much.
I’ve given some thought to the specific axes and reactions, but they should still be treated very much as a first draft. I’m very interested in comparing other people’s lists of axes and reactions, and in arguments about what should and shouldn’t be included. What makes for a good comment? What should people be paying attention to? What have you wanted to communicate to authors, which you wish you had a button for instead of having to write a whole comment?
A big uncertainty I have about this voting system is how much of a problem the extra complexity is. Is seeing the extra score components on comments distracting? Does having a bunch of extra axes to vote on make voting too time consuming or overwhelming? Feedback on this is appreciated.
And of course, now that we have a setup in place where we can try out alternative voting systems, we’re interested in any original ideas people have for different ways of voting on comments that we haven’t thought of.
Feedback:
I do find the added complexity distracting and overwhelming.
But that’s less of a problem if such a voting system would only become selectively enabled in contexts where the benefits are worth the cost of extra complexity.
And obviously that feeling of being overwhelmed is only partly due to the increased complexity, and partly because it’s an experimental unpolished feature.
That said, four axes plus extra emojis really is a lot, and I’d imagine a final system would be more like 2-3 axes (or a dropdown with some orthogonal options) than as many as here.
Regarding that point, I do think it’s important that all axes in such a system are reasonably orthogonal. General Upvote, Truth, Aim, Truthseeking, and Clarity all seem far too correlated to be on separate axes.
Also, I’m slightly wary that some of these votes maybe impute too much motive into a comment? If you vote “seeks conflict”, that implies that you think the comment author was intentionally unvirtuous. Whereas if your vote was an Angry Face à la Facebook’s system, that’s obviously at least partly about your own state of mind, and your reaction to the comment. (Not that Facebook’s system would be particularly aligned with the desired LW culture.)
Regarding my impression of this current specific implementation of the voting system, the True-False axis being abbreviated as Truth makes sense, as does the Clear-Muddled->Clarity axis. But the Hits-the-Mark-Misses-the-Point axis being abbreviated as Aim feels incredibly confusing, and same with Seeks-Truth-Seeks-Conflict becoming Seeking.
Regarding the icons, Empathy and Surprise seem reasonably clear to me, whereas I could not identify the meaning of the Skepticism and Enthusiasm icons just from their icons.
Also: The current popup has virtues on the left and vices on the right, whereas the LW voting system is downvote-upvote, not upvote-downvote. So I’d prefer these axes to be flipped in the popup. One could also do something like: <Truth>, <Clarity>, <Truthseeking>, …; and then the “<” is a downvote on the Truth value, and hovering over it gives you a tooltip that explains that this vote means the comment is False. (That said, multiple nested popups and tooltips are a no-go, of course.)
It took a while to read this, because I’d have said ‘hits the mark/misses the point’ and clear/muddled were the ones that seemed perhaps too similar. Then I noticed that you mentioned those—processing what these words mean quickly is going to take a bit to get down.
A comment, or post, could be clear, and yet, the point might not be. (And I might comment asking there.)
Yes.
I’m fine with the complexity now, but in a big thread, with loads of comments, that are very long...that’s going to be more challenging. Hopefully the new system will make some things more clear, so that the process of understanding gets easier, but at first? It’ll be a lot.
Agree it’s overwhelming.
Agree it’ll get better if limited to relevant contexts and polished up.
Agree the axes are difficult to distinguish from one another. True speech, truth-seeking speech, precisely specified speech, and accurately aimed speech are all distinctly important! buuuut they’re strongly correlated so the distinctions are usually only useful to point out on the extreme ends of the quality spectrum, or on very short comments.
There’s an axis? reaction? that is not quite muddled or conflict-seeking or missing the point or false, nor does it warrants skepticism or surprise. It’s just… an ugh field. It’s the category of too much text, too far outside my base context, too ugly, too personally triggering, too why I should even try.
My browser shows does not display the skepticism or enthusiasm icons, I too have great difficulty identifying their meaning.
Good point. I would not consider all those quite the same axis, but they’re sure orthogonal to the axes we have here.
Here are some potential word pairs to name this axis: Energizing/Inspiring<->Exhausting, Enjoyable/Joyful<->Ugh, Polished<->Mess(y)/Unfocused/Meandering.
if i had to redesign the system right now based on these thoughts, I’d go for 3 sections of feedback.
First, reactions: Skepticism, Enthusiasm, Surprise, Empathy, Ugh, Wrath
Second, upvote/downvote.
Third, rubric breakdown. this is collapsed by default, if you voted Strong in either direction then it automatically opens.
False | True
Muddled | Clear
Irrelevant* | On the Mark
Seeds Discord | Truth Converging
*-possible alternative: out of bounds?
Personally, I don’t find these 4 axes to be too much to handle. I don’t necessarily agree that the axes have to be very orthogonal. The point of this system is to promote LW’s desired culture of seeking truth, so it makes sense that the axes are going to have that all in common. The important thing is that each axis should have some significance that is not communicated by any of the other axes- which I feel at least 3 of the 4 axes accomplish (“true” is about whether something is actually true, “clarity” is about how well the thoughts are expressed, regardless of the truth, “seeking” is about demonstrating proper epistemic hygine, (Which overlaps slightly with clarity, but clarity is more about having a line of thought that can be followed, with less emphasis on the quality of the tools of reasoning, while truth-seeking emphasizes using tools that give good results, with less focus on how clear their use is, or the actual resulting thesis).
I’d say I have the hardest time distinguishing “aim” from “truth”, because ultimately something that hits the mark is true, though “misses the point” seems not quite the same as “false”. Actually, now that I think about it, “hits the mark” and “misses the point” don’t really feel complementary to me- ‘hits the mark’ is basically about agreement, while ‘misses the point’ seems to be more about how well the thoughts in a comment understand and relate to the conversation it is a part of.
I would maybe suggest trying to adjust “hits the mark” to also be on this axis- highlighting not just truth, but relating to the broader context of the conversation in a good way.
Bug: So apparently in my Android smartphone’s Firefox browser (v95.2.0), the Skepticism emoji is rendered as a grey rectangle.
The other three emojis display fine, though they look different than on my desktop Firefox. (Which means they probably look different in other browsers too, right? It seems slightly weird to let browsers decide part of the aesthetics of one’s website.)
Trying new voting systems in open threads is a fine idea, but it has the unfortunate side effect of crowding out normal Open Thread comments. That seems bad to me, since these threads have a legitimate purpose of being the place where new users can introduce themselves, ask basic questions, etc.
My biggest thought is that the bar for experimenting is a lot lower than the bar for, say, committing to this site-wide for 12 months. And with that said, it’s hard for me to imagine this not being promising enough to experiment with. Eg. by enabling it on select posts and seeing what the results and feedback are.
My first experience trying to react to your comment was feeling that none of the axes felt applicable, but then “enthusiasm” did capture how I felt; however, the icon for it felt discordant since I associate party-hat/streamers with “celebration” rather than “enthusiasm”. I don’t know what icon I’d use for enthusiasm.
Some possibilities: Clapping hands, sparkles, smiling face with open hands, 100
I’m a bit worried about having too many yellow-circle-face icons, because they’re hard to tell apart when they’re small.
I think for any lasting system I want zero yellow-circle-face icons if for no other reason to preserve LessWrong’s aesthetic (or my sense of it).
In addition, maybe any emoji should be grayscale so as to be less distracting?
A user setting to toggle off the grayscale would be useful as well, though it makes things more complicated.
I generally think having toggles is good design, as long as things function well for everybody without needing to use toggles
I notice that I am uncertain how to interpret the “hearts” on this comment. Do they mean that people have empathy for my feeling or that they “love” this comment (a la strong upvote) with the meaning that heart reacts have in other places?
I interpreted it as “vibing with this” or “mood”. Feeling a moment of connection with another human being through their words, either because it matches your own experience or because they painted a foreign vista vivid enough to inhabit.
I agree that ❤️ and “empathy” don’t really match with eachother
I think that the heart matching “empathy” makes me think it’s intended to show emotional support for someone, like if I had a post about my dog dying or something. You might not “agree” since there might not be anything factual going on, but it would still be nice to be able to somehow make me know you noticed.
Don’t use 100 for enthusiasm. Numbers should be reserved for numeric stuff like e.g., 100% of smth.
I am getting rectangle boxes for both Enthusiasm and Skepticism.
I think sparkles works well, clapping hands is also okay (and I’m actually personally fine with the 🎉 icon). 100 doesn’t feel like it matches “enthusiasm” very well. Hugging face kinda works, but I prefer the others (aside from 100), and I agree that yellow faces should be minimized (though I’m probably less opposed to it than Ruby)
I also used Enthusiasm, though mostly because of the post, not the comment. I am delighted to see a voting mechanism added. I missed the old polling feature from LW 1.0.
I wrote a comment here arguing that voting systems tend to encourage conformity. I think this is a way in which the LW voting system could be improved. You might get rid of the unlabeled quality axis and force downvoters to be specific about why they dislike the comment. Maybe readers could specify which weights they want to assign to the remaining axes in order to sort comments.
I think Agree/Disagree is better than True/False, and Understandable/Confusing would be better than Clear/Muddled. Both of these axes are functions of two things (the reader and the comment) rather than just one (the comment) and the existing labels implicitly assume that the person voting on the comment has a better perspective on it than the person who wrote it. I think the opposite is more likely true—speaking personally at least, my votes tend to be less thoughtful than my comments.
Other axis ideas: Constructive/nonconstructive, important/unimportant. Could also try a “thank” react, and an “intriguing” or “interesting” react (probably replacing “surprise”—I like the idea of reinforcing novelty but the word “surprise” seems like too high of a bar?) Maybe also reacts for “this comment should’ve been longer/shorter”?
I wish the buttons for ‘truth’ said ‘agree / disagree’ instead, because while sometimes the truth is objective, other times comments are more subjective, and I desire to communicate that I disagree (‘false’ feels more icky, because I feel they are honestly communicating what they feel, I just don’t agree with their perspective)
In the case that some people say ‘true’, and an equal number say ‘false’, I would appreciate it if the ‘truth’ box (same for the other boxes) was still visible, and said ‘truth 0’, instead of disappearing. That way, one can distinguish between no box (Which means no-one has expressed an opinion), and a divided opinion.
Polar opposite opinion on the truth buttons.
Agree / Disagree is not a relevant axis of quality on Lesswrong.
True / False is so relevant, when a comment contains explicit or implicit claims about reality to fact check.
I tentatively infer that the use case you’re thinking of is some kind of Quick Poll, where someone shares subjective anecdata and others can quickly chime in with whether their anecdata is alike or in contrast of that example. This would be an incredibly valuable tool; I really want to have that. What I don’t want is to have that tool in the place of a quality control system.
Wasn’t clear to me what “aim” was referring to. Based on seeing “seeking” too I can guess that it’s for hits the mark / misses the point, but otherwise it’s not clear.
I believe ‘aim’ refers to “hits the mark / misses the point”
I really like this experimentation. Some thoughts:
Regarding finding the ideal set of axes: I wonder if it would make sense to give quite a few of them (that seem plausibly good), and then collect data for a month or so, and then select a subset based on usage and orthogonality. Rather than tentatively trying new axes in a more one-by-one fashion, that is. You’d explicitly tell users that the axes are being experimented with, and to vote on the axes which seem most appropriate. This might also be a way to collect axis ideas—if the user can’t find the axis that they want, they can click a button to suggest one. Relying on the in-the-moment intuitions of users could be a great way to quickly search the “axis space”.
I really like the “seeks truth/conflict” axis. A comment has an inherent “gravity” to it which makes it inappropriate/costly for pointing out “small” things. If a comment is very slightly hostile, then there’s a kind of social cost to pointing it out, since it really isn’t worth a whole comment. This results in a threshold under which incivility/conflict-seeking can simmer—being essentially immune to criticism.
One weird experiment that probably wouldn’t work, but which I’d love to see is for the reactions to be more like a tag system, where there are potentially hundreds of different tags. They’re essentially “quick comments”, and could be quite “subtle” in their meaning. It would be a bit like platforms that allow you to react with any emoji, except that you can be much more precise with your reactions—e.g. “Unnecessary incivility” or “Interesting direction” or “Good steelman” or “Please expand” or “Well-written” or “Hand-wavy” or “Goodhart’s Law” (perhaps implying that the concept is relevant in a way that’s unacknowledged by the author). There could also be some emergent use-cases with tags. For example, tags could be used as a way for a commenter to poll the people reading the comment by asking them to tag a digit between 1 and 5, for example.
There are lots of ways this idea could end up being a net negative—in particular it may be that any level of subtlety beyond a few basic voting axes really would benefit from a comment in almost all cases, and then that comment essentially becomes the “tag” that people can vote on. Still, I’d love to see an experiment.
This isn’t about this experiment specifically, but: One problem with showing an absolute vote count is that it relies on people explicitly not voting on something if they think it has reached an appropriate level of upvotes/downvotes. E.g. if a comment that you think is kinda bad has a score of +10, you might downvote it, but if it already has a score of −3, you might leave it because to downvote further would be “too harsh”. This obviously isn’t ideal, because a couple of hours later that −3 comment could have climbed to +5 and so it turns out you should have actually downvoted it. There are a few ways to solve this—e.g. use more of a star rating system, or cap the upside and downside (but keep the real votes so that e.g. if a comment gets to −10, only −5 is displayed and reflected in the user’s karma, but it would require 6 upvotes to get to −4), display as a ratio plus total number of votes, etc. - they all have their trade-offs though, so I’m not sure there’s a clear solution here. This is another place where tags are interesting, because if everyone things a comment is just slightly conflict-seeking, then they can use the “Slightly conflict-seeking” tag, and they can all vote on that without giving the comment author the impression that everyone thinks their comment is extremely conflict seeking.
Like I said, I love this experimentation—please keep at it! I think this topic is completely underappreciated by basically every social platform.
Thanks!