This is bad. The point of voting is to give an easy way of aggregating information about the quality and reception of content. When voting ends up dominated by a small interest[10] group without broader site buy-in, and with no one being able to tell that is what’s going on, it fails at that goal. And in this case, it’s distorting people’s perception about the site consensus in particularly high-stakes contexts where authors are trying to assess what people on the site think about their content, and about the norms of posting on LessWrong.
I’d like you to consider removing votes entirely, to be subsumed entirely by reacts. These allow more nuance and are importantly not anonymous. I believe this is importantly more similar to how humans in the ancestral environment would think about and judge community contributions, in ways that are conducive to good epistemics and incentives. (There are also failure modes that would be important to think about, such as a ‘seal of approval’ dynamic.)
Aggregating this well for the purposes of sorting and raising to attention would be tricky, but seems plausibly doable and worth it to me.
However, I expect that this is already something you have thought about a lot more than I have and have apparently not decided to do, so I am also curious to hear why not.
I’d like you to consider removing votes entirely, to be subsumed entirely by reacts. These allow more nuance and are importantly not anonymous. I believe this is importantly more similar to how humans in the ancestral environment would think about and judge community contributions, in ways that are conducive to good epistemics and incentives. (There are also failure modes that would be important to think about, such as a ‘seal of approval’ dynamic.)
Aggregating this well for the purposes of sorting and raising to attention would be tricky, but seems plausibly doable and worth it to me.
However, I expect that this is already something you have thought about a lot more than I have and have apparently not decided to do, so I am also curious to hear why not.
Many people would be much less inclined to vote if it was fully public, so you would lose a lot of signal.
would the signal to (noise + adversarial signal) improve?
edit: thinking about it more, I’m unsure, seems plausible the answer is no. (react was added before edit)