Please tell us what you think! Love it/hate it/think it should be different? Let us know.
I think it’s a fine experiment but… right now I’m closest to “hate it,” at least if it was used for all posts (I’d be much happier if it was only for question-posts, or only if the author requested it or a moderator thought it would be particularly useful, or something).
It makes voting take longer (with not much value added).
It makes reading comments take longer (with not much value added). You learn very little from these votes beyond what you learn from reading the comment.
It’s liable to make the more OCD among us go crazy. Worrying about how other people vote on your writing is bad enough. I, for one, would write worse comments in expectation if I was always thinking about making everyone else believe that my comments were true and well-aimed and clear and truth-seeking &c.
If this system was implemented in general, I would almost always prefer not to interact with it, so I would strongly request a setting to hide all non-karma voting from my view.
Edit in response to Rafael: for me at least the downside isn’t anxiety but mental effort to optimize for comment quality rather than votes and mental effort to ignore votes on my own comments. I’m not sure if the distinction matters; regardless, I’d be satisfied with the ability to hide non-karma votes.
I largely agree with this. Multi-axis voting is probably more annoying than useful for the regulars who have a good model of what is considered “good style” in this place. However, I think it’d be great for newbies. It’s rare that your comment is so bad (or good) that someone bothers to reply, so mostly you get no votes at all or occasional down votes, plus the rare comment that gets lots of upvotes. Learning from so little feedback is hard, and this system has the potential to get you much more information.
So I’d suggest yet another mode of use for this: Offer newbies to enable this on their comments and posts (everywhere). If the presence of extended voting is visible even if no votes were cast yet, then that’s a clear signal that this person is soliciting feedback. That may encourage some people to provide some, and just clicking a bunch of vote buttons is way less work than writing a comment, so it might actually happen.
I broadly agree, but I’d say I consider myself a regular (have been active for nearly 2 years, have deeper involvement with the community beyond LW, have a good bit of total karma), and I still expect this to provide me with useful information.
Defaults matter: Opt-in may be better than opt-out.
For opt-out, you only know that people who disabled it care enough about not wanting it to explicitly disable it. If it’s enabled, that could be either because they’re interested or because they don’t care at all.
For opt-in, you know that they explicitly expended a tiny bit of effort to manually enable it. And those who don’t care sit in the group with those who don’t want it. That means it’s much more likely that your feedback is actually appreciated and not wasted. Additionally, comments with extended voting enabled will stand out, making them more likely to catch feedback. (And there will probably still be plenty of comments with extended votes for passive learning.)
The ability to disable the voting by the user is valuable. An alternative would be to make it optional to enable for authors. Or require a minimum karma.
I think it’s a fine experiment but… right now I’m closest to “hate it,” at least if it was used for all posts (I’d be much happier if it was only for question-posts, or only if the author requested it or a moderator thought it would be particularly useful, or something).
It makes voting take longer (with not much value added).
It makes reading comments take longer (with not much value added). You learn very little from these votes beyond what you learn from reading the comment.
It’s liable to make the more OCD among us go crazy. Worrying about how other people vote on your writing is bad enough. I, for one, would write worse comments in expectation if I was always thinking about making everyone else believe that my comments were true and well-aimed and clear and truth-seeking &c.
If this system was implemented in general, I would almost always prefer not to interact with it, so I would strongly request a setting to hide all non-karma voting from my view.
Edit in response to Rafael: for me at least the downside isn’t anxiety but mental effort to optimize for comment quality rather than votes and mental effort to ignore votes on my own comments. I’m not sure if the distinction matters; regardless, I’d be satisfied with the ability to hide non-karma votes.
I largely agree with this. Multi-axis voting is probably more annoying than useful for the regulars who have a good model of what is considered “good style” in this place. However, I think it’d be great for newbies. It’s rare that your comment is so bad (or good) that someone bothers to reply, so mostly you get no votes at all or occasional down votes, plus the rare comment that gets lots of upvotes. Learning from so little feedback is hard, and this system has the potential to get you much more information.
So I’d suggest yet another mode of use for this: Offer newbies to enable this on their comments and posts (everywhere). If the presence of extended voting is visible even if no votes were cast yet, then that’s a clear signal that this person is soliciting feedback. That may encourage some people to provide some, and just clicking a bunch of vote buttons is way less work than writing a comment, so it might actually happen.
I broadly agree, but I’d say I consider myself a regular (have been active for nearly 2 years, have deeper involvement with the community beyond LW, have a good bit of total karma), and I still expect this to provide me with useful information.
I agree that it should be an option to turn this off for oneself, but I currently feel that this will be net-positive for most users
Defaults matter: Opt-in may be better than opt-out.
For opt-out, you only know that people who disabled it care enough about not wanting it to explicitly disable it. If it’s enabled, that could be either because they’re interested or because they don’t care at all.
For opt-in, you know that they explicitly expended a tiny bit of effort to manually enable it. And those who don’t care sit in the group with those who don’t want it. That means it’s much more likely that your feedback is actually appreciated and not wasted. Additionally, comments with extended voting enabled will stand out, making them more likely to catch feedback. (And there will probably still be plenty of comments with extended votes for passive learning.)
The ability to disable the voting by the user is valuable. An alternative would be to make it optional to enable for authors. Or require a minimum karma.