Reaction-ballot voting has a “you make what you measure” feel to me.
You make what you measure.
I learned this one from Joe Kraus. [3] Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.
If people can vote on your comments along an axis of eg. seeking truth vs conflict, I expect that users will spend more effort to seek truth rather than conflict.
However, there is a risk of unintended consequences. For example, the presence of the truth vs conflict axis might push people away from babble-y and contrarian comments. I actually expect that this would happen in a non-trivial way with the current axes. But if there was an additional axis like “bold vs timid”, I think that would offset the effect. Eg. in the sense of how sticking your neck out is a rationalist virtue, as opposed to using language like “X might be the case”.
On the contrary, I wonder if this might be useful in highlighting “true but conflict-seeking” things or whatnot. When I see a user with −10 because they were being a jerk, maybe now they could be at −20 conflict and +10 truth.
To note: I do kind of expect people to (accidentally?) correlate on the axes (like a halo-effect sort of thing), but the current system FORCES that at all times, so I think it would still be better to be 75% correlated instead of 100%
Reaction-ballot voting has a “you make what you measure” feel to me.
If people can vote on your comments along an axis of eg. seeking truth vs conflict, I expect that users will spend more effort to seek truth rather than conflict.
However, there is a risk of unintended consequences. For example, the presence of the truth vs conflict axis might push people away from babble-y and contrarian comments. I actually expect that this would happen in a non-trivial way with the current axes. But if there was an additional axis like “bold vs timid”, I think that would offset the effect. Eg. in the sense of how sticking your neck out is a rationalist virtue, as opposed to using language like “X might be the case”.
On the contrary, I wonder if this might be useful in highlighting “true but conflict-seeking” things or whatnot. When I see a user with −10 because they were being a jerk, maybe now they could be at −20 conflict and +10 truth.
To note: I do kind of expect people to (accidentally?) correlate on the axes (like a halo-effect sort of thing), but the current system FORCES that at all times, so I think it would still be better to be 75% correlated instead of 100%