I agree with this worry, though I have a vague feeling that LW is capturing and retaining less of the rationalist core than is ideal — (EDIT: for example,) I feel like I see LW posts linked/discussed on social media less than is ideal. Not for the purpose of bringing in new readers, but just for the purpose of serving as a common-knowledge hub for rationalists. That’s just a feeling, though, and might reflect the bubbles I’m in. E.g., maybe LW is more of a thing on various Discords, since I don’t use Discord much.
If we’re getting fewer comments than we’d expect and desire given the number of posts or page visits, then that might also suggest that something’s wrong with the incentives for commenting.
An opt-in way to give non-anonymous upvotes (either publicly visible, or visible to the upvoted poster, or both) feels to me like it would help with issues in this space, since it’s a very low-effort way to give much more contentful/meaningful feedback than an anonymous upvote (“ah, Wei Dai liked my post” is way more information and reinforcement than “ah, my post has 4 more karma”, while being a lot less effort than Wei Dai writing more comments). Also separating out “I like this / I want to see more stuff like this” votes from “I agree with this” votes (where I think “I agree with this” votes should only publicly display when they’re non-anonymous). I feel like this helps with making posting more rewarding, and also just makes the site as a whole feel more hedonic and less impersonal.
you made me think of a feature i think can be great, that when someone gives a down-vote to a post the site automatically prompts him to comment. another idea is that you’ll only be able to make a strong down-vote if you comment, but I’m not to sure about that.
I like this idea. I can’t find it now but I remember a recent comment suggesting that any post/comment which ends up with negative karma should have someone commenting on as to why they downvoted it, so that the feedback is practical.
To encourage commentors (and posters) without cluttering up the comments thread:
Non-substantive comments, collapsed by default, where voters can leave a couple of words as to why they voted the way they did.
Yeah, I do think having a simple non-anonymous upvoting option is promising. I wonder whether we can make it a simple extension of the strong-upvoting system (maybe have some kind of additional button show up when you strong-upvoted something, that allows you to add your name to it, though I can imagine that getting too complicated UI-wise).
Idea: if someone hovers over the karma number, a tooltip shows number of voters plus who non-anonymously upvoted; and if you click the karma number, it gives you an option to make your vote non-anonymous (which results in a private notification, plus a public notification if it’s an upvote).
This seems better to me than giving the “<” or “>” more functionality, since those are already pretty interactive and complex; whereas the number itself isn’t really doing much.
It seems to me that there are straightforward interventions:
(1) Provide share buttons. Most websites use share buttons to encourage readers to share content and there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work for us.
Share buttons also provide a way to to recognize which users share articles.
To build on your existing example, having the information “25 people come to this article because Wei Dai shared it on facebook” would be motivating information. It would also provide a way for people to follow the backlink to facebook and witness comments that happened there.
For spam fighting reasons you might set a minimum amount of karma for people to be share in such a fashion.
(2) Automatically, push newly curated posts to Twitter and a Facebook page.
I personally would prefer everything to do with Facebook, Twitter, etc., to stay as far away from LW as possible. Also, adding social-media sharing buttons seems to be asking to have more of the discussion take place away from LW, which is the exact opposite of what I thought was being discussed here.
Sure: the author of a particular article may just want it to be read and shared as widely as possible. But what’s locally best for them is not necessarily the same as what’s globally best for the LW community.
Put yourself in a different role: you’re reading something of the sort that might be on LW. Would you prefer to read and discuss it here or on Facebook? For me, the answer is “definitely here”. If your answer is generally “Facebook” then it seems to me that you want your writings discussed on Facebook, you want to discuss things on Facebook, and what would suit you best is for Less Wrong to go away and for people to just post things on Facebook. Which is certainly a preference you’re entitled to have, but I don’t think Less Wrong should be optimizing for people who feel that way.
I do prefer to read and discuss on LW over discussing on Facebook. As a reader of a post on LW I don’t think it harms me much when a post gets linked on Facebook.
I don’t think this will result on average in fewer comments on LW.com. If people click on the link to LW within Facebook they can both comment on LW and on Facebook. Many of the people who see the post on Facebook would have never read the post otherwise or engaged with it.
External links also increase page-rank which means that posts show up more prominently on Google and additional people will discover LessWrong.
As far as optimization goes, I would prefer LW to optimize to motivate people to write great posts over organizing it in a way that optimizes the reading experience.
I do like the idea of karma-limited share buttons.
I think most of the incentives for commenting are due to network effects, i.e. not everyone is here, or I don’t have evidence that they’re here, so still feel like more people will see discussion on FB.
I think social proof is going to turn out to be pretty important. I’m slightly wary of it because it pushes against the “LW is a place you can talk about ideas, as much as possible without having social status play into it”, but like it or not “High Profile User liked my comment”, or “My Friend liked my comment” is way more motivating.
I’m currently thinking about how to balance those concerns.
I’m slightly wary of it because it pushes against the “LW is a place you can talk about ideas, as much as possible without having social status play into it”, but like it or not “High Profile User liked my comment”, or “My Friend liked my comment” is way more motivating.
As a contrary data point, I prefer LW to Facebook because the identified voting makes the social part of my brain nervous. I’m much more hesitant both to “like” things (for fear of signaling the wrong thing) and also to post/comment (if a post/comment lacks identified likes, that seems to hurt more than lack of anonymous upvotes, while the presence of identified likes don’t seem to be much more rewarding than anonymous upvotes for me).
ETA: If LW implemented optional identified voting (which I’ll call “like”), I’d probably use it very sparingly, because 1) I’m afraid I might “like” something that turns out to be wrong and 2) I feel like if I did use it regularly, then when I don’t “like” something that people can reasonably predict me to endorse they would wonder why I didn’t “like” it. So I’ll probably end up “liking” something only when it seems really important to put my name behind something, but at that point I might as well just write a comment.
The above updates me toward being more uncertain about whether it’s a good idea to add an ‘optional non-anonymized upvoting’ feature. I’ll note that separating out ‘I agree with this’ from ‘I want to see more comments like this’ is potentially extra valuable (maybe even necessary) for a healthy non-anonymized upvoting system, because it’s more important to distinguish those things if your name’s on the line. Also, non-anonymized ‘I factually disagree with this’ is a lot more useful than non-anonymized ‘I want to see fewer comments/posts like this’.
Can you expand on what exactly you mean with “without having social status come into play”?
Social status is a prime way human beings are motivated to do things. The prospect that I might get social status by writing a great article that people find valuable sets good incentives for me to provide quality content.
I agree with this worry, though I have a vague feeling that LW is capturing and retaining less of the rationalist core than is ideal — (EDIT: for example,) I feel like I see LW posts linked/discussed on social media less than is ideal. Not for the purpose of bringing in new readers, but just for the purpose of serving as a common-knowledge hub for rationalists. That’s just a feeling, though, and might reflect the bubbles I’m in. E.g., maybe LW is more of a thing on various Discords, since I don’t use Discord much.
If we’re getting fewer comments than we’d expect and desire given the number of posts or page visits, then that might also suggest that something’s wrong with the incentives for commenting.
An opt-in way to give non-anonymous upvotes (either publicly visible, or visible to the upvoted poster, or both) feels to me like it would help with issues in this space, since it’s a very low-effort way to give much more contentful/meaningful feedback than an anonymous upvote (“ah, Wei Dai liked my post” is way more information and reinforcement than “ah, my post has 4 more karma”, while being a lot less effort than Wei Dai writing more comments). Also separating out “I like this / I want to see more stuff like this” votes from “I agree with this” votes (where I think “I agree with this” votes should only publicly display when they’re non-anonymous). I feel like this helps with making posting more rewarding, and also just makes the site as a whole feel more hedonic and less impersonal.
you made me think of a feature i think can be great, that when someone gives a down-vote to a post the site automatically prompts him to comment. another idea is that you’ll only be able to make a strong down-vote if you comment, but I’m not to sure about that.
I like this idea. I can’t find it now but I remember a recent comment suggesting that any post/comment which ends up with negative karma should have someone commenting on as to why they downvoted it, so that the feedback is practical.
To encourage commentors (and posters) without cluttering up the comments thread:
Non-substantive comments, collapsed by default, where voters can leave a couple of words as to why they voted the way they did.
Yeah, I do think having a simple non-anonymous upvoting option is promising. I wonder whether we can make it a simple extension of the strong-upvoting system (maybe have some kind of additional button show up when you strong-upvoted something, that allows you to add your name to it, though I can imagine that getting too complicated UI-wise).
Idea: if someone hovers over the karma number, a tooltip shows number of voters plus who non-anonymously upvoted; and if you click the karma number, it gives you an option to make your vote non-anonymous (which results in a private notification, plus a public notification if it’s an upvote).
This seems better to me than giving the “<” or “>” more functionality, since those are already pretty interactive and complex; whereas the number itself isn’t really doing much.
It seems to me that there are straightforward interventions:
(1) Provide share buttons. Most websites use share buttons to encourage readers to share content and there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work for us.
Share buttons also provide a way to to recognize which users share articles.
To build on your existing example, having the information “25 people come to this article because Wei Dai shared it on facebook” would be motivating information. It would also provide a way for people to follow the backlink to facebook and witness comments that happened there.
For spam fighting reasons you might set a minimum amount of karma for people to be share in such a fashion.
(2) Automatically, push newly curated posts to Twitter and a Facebook page.
I personally would prefer everything to do with Facebook, Twitter, etc., to stay as far away from LW as possible. Also, adding social-media sharing buttons seems to be asking to have more of the discussion take place away from LW, which is the exact opposite of what I thought was being discussed here.
If I write an article I care about it getting read as widely as possible. I care about engagement happening.
If an article I write on LessWrong gets shared on Facebook or Twitter I would enjoy knowing that it’s shared.
I give less weight to linkposts, because the discussion/comments are split in an annoying way. It would be worse with facebook.
Sure: the author of a particular article may just want it to be read and shared as widely as possible. But what’s locally best for them is not necessarily the same as what’s globally best for the LW community.
Put yourself in a different role: you’re reading something of the sort that might be on LW. Would you prefer to read and discuss it here or on Facebook? For me, the answer is “definitely here”. If your answer is generally “Facebook” then it seems to me that you want your writings discussed on Facebook, you want to discuss things on Facebook, and what would suit you best is for Less Wrong to go away and for people to just post things on Facebook. Which is certainly a preference you’re entitled to have, but I don’t think Less Wrong should be optimizing for people who feel that way.
I do prefer to read and discuss on LW over discussing on Facebook. As a reader of a post on LW I don’t think it harms me much when a post gets linked on Facebook.
I don’t think this will result on average in fewer comments on LW.com. If people click on the link to LW within Facebook they can both comment on LW and on Facebook. Many of the people who see the post on Facebook would have never read the post otherwise or engaged with it.
External links also increase page-rank which means that posts show up more prominently on Google and additional people will discover LessWrong.
As far as optimization goes, I would prefer LW to optimize to motivate people to write great posts over organizing it in a way that optimizes the reading experience.
I do like the idea of karma-limited share buttons.
I think most of the incentives for commenting are due to network effects, i.e. not everyone is here, or I don’t have evidence that they’re here, so still feel like more people will see discussion on FB.
I think social proof is going to turn out to be pretty important. I’m slightly wary of it because it pushes against the “LW is a place you can talk about ideas, as much as possible without having social status play into it”, but like it or not “High Profile User liked my comment”, or “My Friend liked my comment” is way more motivating.
I’m currently thinking about how to balance those concerns.
As a contrary data point, I prefer LW to Facebook because the identified voting makes the social part of my brain nervous. I’m much more hesitant both to “like” things (for fear of signaling the wrong thing) and also to post/comment (if a post/comment lacks identified likes, that seems to hurt more than lack of anonymous upvotes, while the presence of identified likes don’t seem to be much more rewarding than anonymous upvotes for me).
ETA: If LW implemented optional identified voting (which I’ll call “like”), I’d probably use it very sparingly, because 1) I’m afraid I might “like” something that turns out to be wrong and 2) I feel like if I did use it regularly, then when I don’t “like” something that people can reasonably predict me to endorse they would wonder why I didn’t “like” it. So I’ll probably end up “liking” something only when it seems really important to put my name behind something, but at that point I might as well just write a comment.
The above updates me toward being more uncertain about whether it’s a good idea to add an ‘optional non-anonymized upvoting’ feature. I’ll note that separating out ‘I agree with this’ from ‘I want to see more comments like this’ is potentially extra valuable (maybe even necessary) for a healthy non-anonymized upvoting system, because it’s more important to distinguish those things if your name’s on the line. Also, non-anonymized ‘I factually disagree with this’ is a lot more useful than non-anonymized ‘I want to see fewer comments/posts like this’.
Can you expand on what exactly you mean with “without having social status come into play”?
Social status is a prime way human beings are motivated to do things. The prospect that I might get social status by writing a great article that people find valuable sets good incentives for me to provide quality content.
I meant in the other direction, where people judge ideas as better because higher status people said them.
This seems like the thing that happens by default and we can’t really stop it, but I’m wary of UX paradigms that might reinforce it even harder.