I find all of the four-way graphical depictions in this subthread to be horribly confusing at an immediate glance; indeed I had to fight against reversing the axes on the one you showed. I already know what a karma system is, as imperfect as that is, and I already know what agreement and disagreement are—and being able to choose to only use one of the axes at any given moment is an engagement win for me, because (for instance) if I start out wanting to react “yes, I agree” but then have to think about “but also was the post good in a different sense” before I can record my answer, or vice versa, that means I have to perform the entire other thought-train with the first part in my working-memory stack. And my incentive and inclination to vote at all doesn’t start out very high. It’s like replacing two smaller stairs with one large stair of combined height.
A more specific failure mode there is lack of representation for null results on either axis, especially “I think this was a good contribution, but it makes no specific claims to agree or disagree with and instead advances the conversation some other way” and “I think this was a good contribution, but I will have to think for another week to figure out whether I agree or disagree with it on the object level, and vaguely holding onto the voting-intention in the back of my mind for a week gives a horrible feeling of cruftifying my already-strained attention systems”.
To try to expand the separate-axes system in this exact case, I have upvoted your comment here on the quality axis and also marked my disagreement (which I don’t like the term “downvote” for, as described elsewhere), because I think it’s a good thing that you went to the effort of thinking about this and posting about it, and I think the explanation is coherent and reasonable, but I also think the suggestion itself would be more complicated and difficult and overall worse than what’s been implemented, largely because of differing impressions of the actual world. I think this is much better than having the choice of downvoting the comment and thus indicating that I wish you hadn’t posted this, which is false, or upvoting it and risking a perception that I wanted the proposal to be implemented, which is also false.
I have meta-difficulty grasping why you find the at-a-glance compounding of info difficult under the separate-axes system. Do you feel inclined to try to explain it differently? In particular, I do not understand why “a lot more people” and “strong/weak votes” play so heavily into your reported thought process. I process the numbers as pre-aggregated information with a stock “congealed” (one-mental-step access) approximate correction-and-blurring model of the imperfections of the aggregation and selection most of the time. Trying to dig further is rare and mainly happens if I’m quite surprised by what I see initially.
I find all of the four-way graphical depictions in this subthread to be horribly confusing at an immediate glance; indeed I had to fight against reversing the axes on the one you showed. I already know what a karma system is, as imperfect as that is, and I already know what agreement and disagreement are—and being able to choose to only use one of the axes at any given moment is an engagement win for me, because (for instance) if I start out wanting to react “yes, I agree” but then have to think about “but also was the post good in a different sense” before I can record my answer, or vice versa, that means I have to perform the entire other thought-train with the first part in my working-memory stack. And my incentive and inclination to vote at all doesn’t start out very high. It’s like replacing two smaller stairs with one large stair of combined height.
A more specific failure mode there is lack of representation for null results on either axis, especially “I think this was a good contribution, but it makes no specific claims to agree or disagree with and instead advances the conversation some other way” and “I think this was a good contribution, but I will have to think for another week to figure out whether I agree or disagree with it on the object level, and vaguely holding onto the voting-intention in the back of my mind for a week gives a horrible feeling of cruftifying my already-strained attention systems”.
To try to expand the separate-axes system in this exact case, I have upvoted your comment here on the quality axis and also marked my disagreement (which I don’t like the term “downvote” for, as described elsewhere), because I think it’s a good thing that you went to the effort of thinking about this and posting about it, and I think the explanation is coherent and reasonable, but I also think the suggestion itself would be more complicated and difficult and overall worse than what’s been implemented, largely because of differing impressions of the actual world. I think this is much better than having the choice of downvoting the comment and thus indicating that I wish you hadn’t posted this, which is false, or upvoting it and risking a perception that I wanted the proposal to be implemented, which is also false.
I have meta-difficulty grasping why you find the at-a-glance compounding of info difficult under the separate-axes system. Do you feel inclined to try to explain it differently? In particular, I do not understand why “a lot more people” and “strong/weak votes” play so heavily into your reported thought process. I process the numbers as pre-aggregated information with a stock “congealed” (one-mental-step access) approximate correction-and-blurring model of the imperfections of the aggregation and selection most of the time. Trying to dig further is rare and mainly happens if I’m quite surprised by what I see initially.