The fix might be to modify proposal (2) to keep “karma” at the top of the comment but keep “username” and “agreement” at the bottom. I’m open to other ideas which do an even better job of minimizing costs and maximizing gains!
I think username is maybe the most important quality signal and also relational signal (I read a comment very differently if I know it’s by the post author on their own post, or is by someone who has left another comment in the same thread), so I don’t think it makes sense to move that to the bottom.
I think moving the karma + agree-voting to the bottom is often the right choice. For example, it’s what we do in the feed!
On the feed we make sure we collapse comments to a height where you can always see the bottom of the comment if you are looking for it. Doing this in other contexts it’s pretty tricky, but maybe worth figuring out.
There are two big reasons why I don’t want to just move the agreement-karma to the bottom:
It just adds visual clutter by needing to have substantially taller spacing for comments at the bottom. This alone seems overcomeable.
Making it clear to users that on LessWrong, we factor out agreement from approval is a really important cultural touchstone, and if you separate them visually then that factorization is much less clear
Making it clear to users that on LessWrong, we factor out agreement from approval is a really important cultural touchstone, and if you separate them visually then that factorization is much less clear
Maybe you could repeat the karma at the bottom of the comment, next to the recently moved agreement?
When I tried this it felt pretty disorienting, especially to new users, but I am not confident it couldn’t be made to work.
The way I would probably structure it is to have just the karma at the top, without any vote buttons, and then to have the full interactive version of the karma and agreement at the bottom. I probably have some mockups where I try this somewhere, but it never really quite came together.
I think username is maybe the most important quality signal and also relational signal (I read a comment very differently if I know it’s by the post author on their own post, or is by someone who has left another comment in the same thread), so I don’t think it makes sense to move that to the bottom.
I think moving the karma + agree-voting to the bottom is often the right choice. For example, it’s what we do in the feed!
On the feed we make sure we collapse comments to a height where you can always see the bottom of the comment if you are looking for it. Doing this in other contexts it’s pretty tricky, but maybe worth figuring out.
There are two big reasons why I don’t want to just move the agreement-karma to the bottom:
It just adds visual clutter by needing to have substantially taller spacing for comments at the bottom. This alone seems overcomeable.
Making it clear to users that on LessWrong, we factor out agreement from approval is a really important cultural touchstone, and if you separate them visually then that factorization is much less clear
Maybe you could repeat the karma at the bottom of the comment, next to the recently moved agreement?
When I tried this it felt pretty disorienting, especially to new users, but I am not confident it couldn’t be made to work.
The way I would probably structure it is to have just the karma at the top, without any vote buttons, and then to have the full interactive version of the karma and agreement at the bottom. I probably have some mockups where I try this somewhere, but it never really quite came together.
That’s awesome, nice! I haven’t used the new feed. I went to check the average comment case and the post case, but hadn’t considered that feature.