I think both agree/disagree and approve/disapprove are toxic dimensions for evaluating quality discussions.
Hmm, but are they more toxic than whatever “upvote/downvote” currently means? The big constraining factor on things like this seems to me to be complexity and inferential distance of what the voting means. I would be worried that it would be much harder to get people to understand “lucid/confused” and “relevant/misleading” though I am not confident.
Within the hypothetical where the dimensions I suggest are better, fuzziness of upvote/downvote is better in the same way as uncertainty about facts is better than incorrect knowledge, even when the latter is easier to embrace than correct knowledge. In that hypothetical, moving from upvote/downvote to agree/disagree is a step in the wrong direction, even if the step in the right direction is too unwieldy to be worth making.
Hmm, but are they more toxic than whatever “upvote/downvote” currently means? The big constraining factor on things like this seems to me to be complexity and inferential distance of what the voting means. I would be worried that it would be much harder to get people to understand “lucid/confused” and “relevant/misleading” though I am not confident.
Within the hypothetical where the dimensions I suggest are better, fuzziness of upvote/downvote is better in the same way as uncertainty about facts is better than incorrect knowledge, even when the latter is easier to embrace than correct knowledge. In that hypothetical, moving from upvote/downvote to agree/disagree is a step in the wrong direction, even if the step in the right direction is too unwieldy to be worth making.