The move from Reddit to a dedicated forum is a huge opportunity to mix things up. We should take advantage. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc.
One thing I would suggest (if technical limitations allow) would be the addition of a two-tiered voting system, somewhat like what LessWrong has implemented, where users can vote both on the quality of a post, and separately on whether or not they agree with it. I think this could have really positive effects for the kind of community and discussion the Motte was created to promote. The Motte's raison d'etre is to promote discussion and debate with people you disagree with. Separating voting on quality from voting on agreement would promote that goal in a couple different ways. Fundamentally, there is a tension between upvoting a post you think is well-done, and downvoting that same post because you disagree with its content. I think the Motte wants to be a place that encourages outsider or minority views, and separating the "quality" vote from the "agreement" vote would help promote this. From what I have noticed in this community, despite our commitments to encouraging debate and discussion with people you disagree with, posts coming from a more liberal/left-wing/social justice/woke viewpoint tend to get downvoted, even when their quality is equivalent or superior to other posts.
I'll also quote from the reasons given on the above LessWrong post about this feature, because I think the reasons given are good ones.:
I personally feel much more comfortable upvoting good comments that I disagree with or whose truth value I am highly uncertain about, because I don’t feel that my vote will be mistaken as setting the social reality of what is true.
I also feel very comfortable strong-agreeing with things while not up/downvoting on them, so as to indicate which side of an argument seems true to me without my voting being read as “this person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at length”.
Similarly to the first bullet, I think that many writers have interesting and valuable ideas but whose truth-value I am quite unsure about or even disagree with. This split allows voters to repeatedly signal that a given writer's comments are of high value, without building a false-consensus that LessWrong has high confidence that the ideas are true. (For example, many people have incompatible but valuable ideas about how AGI development will go, and I want authors to get lots of karma and visibility for excellent contributions without this ambiguity.)
There are many comments I think are bad but am averse to downvoting, because I feel that it is ambiguous whether the person is being downvoted because everyone thinks their take is unfashionable or whether it's because the person is wasting the commons with their behavior (e.g. belittling, starting bravery debates, not doing basic reading comprehension, etc). With this split I feel more comfortable downvoting bad comments without worrying that everyone else who states the position will worry if they'll also be downvoted.
I have seen some comments that previously would have been "downvoted to hell" are now on positive karma, and are instead "disagreed to hell". I won't point them out to avoid focusing on individuals, but this seems like an obvious improvement in communication ability.
Would this be a doable change? And would it be a good one? I am strongly in favor, but open to reasons why I'm wrong.
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Notes -
For this to work, people commenting would have to use both votes together: 'I disagree with this post (so downvote) but I think it is well-argued (so upvote)'.
In practice, I think it would happen that people would use "upvote/downvote for agree/disagree" or "upvote/downvote for quality", but not both, so we'd end up once again with the problem of "was this post downvoted because people think the idea is stupid/they dislike the person posting, or was it downvoted because it was a good idea but poorly expressed?"
The trouble with all voting systems is that they do end up as popularity contests, and on here the danger is popularity of an idea, more than popularity of a single person. There is already the history of complaints that left-wing ideas get dogpiled, it's even mentioned within the original post:
So we'd end up with the worst of both worlds: people arguing that the large amount of upvotes for right-wing idea means that everyone on here agrees with the content (not merely the presentation) and that this is indeed unfriendly and hostile to left-wing/liberal ideas. How many critics are going to carefully parse out "this post on the Holocaust got 200 upvotes for quality, but 500 downvotes for disagreement"? How many of them will take it as read that "upvoted for quality" means "agree with it"? End result being yet more coverage of "over there a post on Holocaust denial got 200 upvotes, we told you they were all far-right and now this proves it!"
I agree for sure, in general, but I also think that a population like this one might be about as resistant to such behavior as a population can be. (Is that enough? I don't know!)
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