Have you ever piloted disagree votes on posts? I think people are predictably downvoting posts they disagree with rather than disagree-voting them. it’s been requested many times, and seems like an obvious fix.
I also think that anonymous voting on substrings (like reacts but anonymous) might be good, to allow the feedback to be more targeted.
If I ran a website I would have required that a downvote [edit: or an upvote!] come with a substring and made it easy to provide a downvote reason seen only by the post creator.
as might be prompts to add reacts if you vote.
I understand that, for reasons unknown to me, your explore rate is low on these topics, which seems strange to me. My best guess is it’s just that you’re busy and this is a somewhat heavy codebase.
I think you’re throwing away a lot more value than you expect by not giving a non-downvote outlet for disagreement signals on posts.
I think downvote-only reasoning-requirements would be bad, people already don’t downvote enough. If you make them symmetrical you are basically just removing voting as a signal, because you just increased the associated friction by >10x.
I don’t feel super confident about not enabling disagree-voting on posts, but I currently think it would be pretty bad. Agree/disagree voting is already playing a kind of dangerous game by encouraging rounding the epistemic content of a comment into a single statement that it makes sense to assign a single truth-value to. This usually works fine for comments which are short, though sometimes fails. I think it basically never works for posts. I agree we could do an anonymous version of inline-reacts to get something more similar, but I think that would add too much complexity to the already very complicated react system.
Agree/disagree voting is already playing a kind of dangerous game by encouraging rounding the epistemic content of a comment into a single statement that it makes sense to assign a single truth-value to.
(I obviously haven’t thought about this as much as you. Very low confidence.)
I’m inclined to say that a strong part of human nature is to round the vibes that one feels towards a post into a single axis of “yay” versus “boo”, and then to feel a very strong urge to proclaim those vibes publicly.
And I think that people are doing that right now, via the karma vote.
I think an agree/disagree dial on posts would be an outlet (“tank”) to absorb those vibe expressions, and that this would shelter karma, allowing karma to retain its different role (“it’s good / bad that this exists”).
I agree that this whole thing (with people rounding everything into a 1D boo/yay vibes axis and then feeling an urge to publicly proclaim where they sit) is dumb, and if only we could all be autistic decouplers etc. But in the real world, I think the benefits of agree-voting (in helping prevent the dynamic where people with minority opinions get driven to negative karma and off the site) probably outweigh the cost (in having an agree / disagree tally on posts which is kinda dumb and meaningless).
This usually works fine for comments which are short, though sometimes fails. I think it basically never works for posts.
Right, but it’s already never working for posts, you just have an even lower dimensional view of it. Agree votes function more as a sink that isn’t karma-loaded when something is validly argued but seems wrong.
As someone who likely is not one of the people you’re criticizing for not downvoting enough, I’m not entirely sure I understand why others don’t, but my guess is that it feels rude. I know that downvoting someone new feels rude to me to do, so I usually leave a comment, but leaving a named comment is pretty high overhead.
If I felt it was welcome, I might have left a bunch of critical span-specific reacts on Nathan’s post, but I have the impression that that’s not considered acceptable by the mods, since I once did that and got scolded. If you want more downvoting, perhaps explicitly requesting something like this? either in the ui or as a pinned post perhaps
Have you ever piloted disagree votes on posts? I think people are predictably downvoting posts they disagree with rather than disagree-voting them. it’s been requested many times, and seems like an obvious fix.
I also think that anonymous voting on substrings (like reacts but anonymous) might be good, to allow the feedback to be more targeted.
If I ran a website I would have required that a downvote [edit: or an upvote!] come with a substring and made it easy to provide a downvote reason seen only by the post creator.
as might be prompts to add reacts if you vote.
I understand that, for reasons unknown to me, your explore rate is low on these topics, which seems strange to me. My best guess is it’s just that you’re busy and this is a somewhat heavy codebase.
I think you’re throwing away a lot more value than you expect by not giving a non-downvote outlet for disagreement signals on posts.
I think downvote-only reasoning-requirements would be bad, people already don’t downvote enough. If you make them symmetrical you are basically just removing voting as a signal, because you just increased the associated friction by >10x.
I don’t feel super confident about not enabling disagree-voting on posts, but I currently think it would be pretty bad. Agree/disagree voting is already playing a kind of dangerous game by encouraging rounding the epistemic content of a comment into a single statement that it makes sense to assign a single truth-value to. This usually works fine for comments which are short, though sometimes fails. I think it basically never works for posts. I agree we could do an anonymous version of inline-reacts to get something more similar, but I think that would add too much complexity to the already very complicated react system.
(I obviously haven’t thought about this as much as you. Very low confidence.)
I’m inclined to say that a strong part of human nature is to round the vibes that one feels towards a post into a single axis of “yay” versus “boo”, and then to feel a very strong urge to proclaim those vibes publicly.
And I think that people are doing that right now, via the karma vote.
I think an agree/disagree dial on posts would be an outlet (“tank”) to absorb those vibe expressions, and that this would shelter karma, allowing karma to retain its different role (“it’s good / bad that this exists”).
I agree that this whole thing (with people rounding everything into a 1D boo/yay vibes axis and then feeling an urge to publicly proclaim where they sit) is dumb, and if only we could all be autistic decouplers etc. But in the real world, I think the benefits of agree-voting (in helping prevent the dynamic where people with minority opinions get driven to negative karma and off the site) probably outweigh the cost (in having an agree / disagree tally on posts which is kinda dumb and meaningless).
Right, but it’s already never working for posts, you just have an even lower dimensional view of it. Agree votes function more as a sink that isn’t karma-loaded when something is validly argued but seems wrong.
As someone who likely is not one of the people you’re criticizing for not downvoting enough, I’m not entirely sure I understand why others don’t, but my guess is that it feels rude. I know that downvoting someone new feels rude to me to do, so I usually leave a comment, but leaving a named comment is pretty high overhead.
If I felt it was welcome, I might have left a bunch of critical span-specific reacts on Nathan’s post, but I have the impression that that’s not considered acceptable by the mods, since I once did that and got scolded. If you want more downvoting, perhaps explicitly requesting something like this? either in the ui or as a pinned post perhaps
EA forum has agree / disagree on posts, but I don’t spend enough time there to have an opinion about its effects.