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Notes -
Few suggestions on quality and engagement
Instead of sorting use basic visualization/statistics widget. I don’t know how burdensome it is to maintain, but even trivial tags cloud, thread graphs with key words – would do better than srting (not even speaking of fancy plots, powered by nlp embeddings). In general, it’s a market design problem, where we want to match commenters based on their expressed opinions and avoid monopolies (people who get most attention due to their positioning)
Not sure if this fits the ethos, but I’d like to see more purely empirical stuff, like discussion of econ or polscsi papers (many of them could be deployed in CW battles anyway). If we speak about empirics, then we can maintain a pinned list of “solved”, open and controversial questions so that anyone can benefit from the common, opensource knowledge; anyone can find the question he wants to attack/contribute to; anyone can take pride in her contribution.
@coffee repeatedly suggested similar "community engineering" techniques.
Voting specifically
Votes as a negative feedback is tricky. False-negative rate is high – I often see comments I agree with, which are net downvoted. Downvoting w/t explanation might lead to withdrawal or unnecessary antagonism.
Voting for sorting is harmful, I believe. In reddit it clearly gave advantage to early responders and popular messages, creating a sort of oligopoly, where outsiders struggle to get noticed. When no one replies to you, it feels even more discouraging, than being downvoted but engaged with.
Votes as a positive feedback are important for people to feel their effort valued and opinion agreed with
If anyone wants to leave voting in place, at least it should get more granular. Among others @FiveHourMarathon suggested there should be better incentives to vote. @DaseindustriesLtd mentioned (ibid) quadratic voting - ironically or not, but I like the idea: if you have a limited (and expiring) number of votes, you would "dispense justice" more stretegically, and this erodes monopolies.
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