Please don’t make this place worse again by caring about points for reasons other than making comments occur in the right order on the page.
I wish this statement explaining what goal your advice is designed to optimize had appeared at the top of the advice, rather than the bottom.
My current world-model predicts that this is not what most people believe points are for, and that getting people to treat points in this way would require a high-effort coordinated push, probably involving radical changes to the UI to create cognitive distance from how points are used on other sites.
Specifically, I think the way most people actually use points is as a prosthetic for nonverbal politics; they are the digital equivalent of shooting someone a smile or a glower. Smiles/glowers, in turn, are a way of informing the speaker that they are gaining/losing social capital, and informing bystanders that they could potentially gain/lose social capital depending on which side of the issue they support.
My model says this is a low-level human instinctive social behavior, with the result that it is very easy to make people behave this way, but simultaneously very hard for most people to explain exactly what they are doing or why.
This self-opacity, combined with a common slightly-negative valence attached to the idea of using social disapproval as a way to sculpt the behavior of others, results in many people leaving out the “social capital” part of this explanation and describing upvotes/downvotes as meaning “I want to see more/fewer posts like this”. Which I think is still importantly different from “I want this exact comment to appear higher/lower on this page,” in that it implies the primary purpose is about sculpting future content rather than organizing existing content.
(Note that all of the above is an attempt at description, not prescription.)
You’ve framed this issue as one of educating people about points. I think a better framing would be that the Internet already has an established norm, and that norm is a natural attractor due to deep human instincts, and you are proposing a new, incompatible, and significantly less-stable norm to replace it. I would be willing to entertain arguments that this is somehow a worthwhile switch, but my prior is against it.
Also, I find it mildly alarming that your personal strategy for reinforcing this norm involves explicitly refusing the benefits that it could have provided to you (by starting at the bottom of the page, reading comments in the inverse of the order you want the point system to recommend). Norms that do not benefit their own defenders are less stable, and the fact that you are discarding at least some of the potential value makes it harder to argue that the whole thing is net-positive.
I wish this statement explaining what goal your advice is designed to optimize had appeared at the top of the advice, rather than the bottom.
My current world-model predicts that this is not what most people believe points are for, and that getting people to treat points in this way would require a high-effort coordinated push, probably involving radical changes to the UI to create cognitive distance from how points are used on other sites.
Specifically, I think the way most people actually use points is as a prosthetic for nonverbal politics; they are the digital equivalent of shooting someone a smile or a glower. Smiles/glowers, in turn, are a way of informing the speaker that they are gaining/losing social capital, and informing bystanders that they could potentially gain/lose social capital depending on which side of the issue they support.
My model says this is a low-level human instinctive social behavior, with the result that it is very easy to make people behave this way, but simultaneously very hard for most people to explain exactly what they are doing or why.
This self-opacity, combined with a common slightly-negative valence attached to the idea of using social disapproval as a way to sculpt the behavior of others, results in many people leaving out the “social capital” part of this explanation and describing upvotes/downvotes as meaning “I want to see more/fewer posts like this”. Which I think is still importantly different from “I want this exact comment to appear higher/lower on this page,” in that it implies the primary purpose is about sculpting future content rather than organizing existing content.
(Note that all of the above is an attempt at description, not prescription.)
You’ve framed this issue as one of educating people about points. I think a better framing would be that the Internet already has an established norm, and that norm is a natural attractor due to deep human instincts, and you are proposing a new, incompatible, and significantly less-stable norm to replace it. I would be willing to entertain arguments that this is somehow a worthwhile switch, but my prior is against it.
Also, I find it mildly alarming that your personal strategy for reinforcing this norm involves explicitly refusing the benefits that it could have provided to you (by starting at the bottom of the page, reading comments in the inverse of the order you want the point system to recommend). Norms that do not benefit their own defenders are less stable, and the fact that you are discarding at least some of the potential value makes it harder to argue that the whole thing is net-positive.