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 donāt 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 āthis person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at lengthā.
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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
How about Favorites, Engaging, and Rulebreaking? This would be <3, š”, and a judgeās gavel as symbols.
Voting a post as engaging pushes it higher in the default comment hierarchy, but we can keep the score hidden, and the default effect will be to increase the position in the comment hierarchy. For instance if a post gets 30 direct child comments, the engaging+ will boost the position of the most engaging comment. āEngagingā is the right way to think about it, because it could be low effort but still very engaging, and high effort but not very engaging. The most engaging three comments in the chain could have a unique identifier so that a casual reader with limited time can quickly read through āgenerally goodā comments. To make up for new comments not being defaulted, maybe each post can have a New: X toggle, so you can only see New or only see Engaging. I read most comment, but busier users certainly do not, and thereās no reason to make it so difficult for busy users to find the most engaging comments.
Favoriting a comment will give the user a notification that it has been favorited. This is positive reinforcement without positive punishment, and the science shows that positive punishment reduces engagement. Downvotes are a form of punishment. For added benefit, the user can get a notification that they received +10 or +25 favorites in intervals, along with āmilestoneā imagery and so on. This is simply to encourage participation, nothing else.
For comments that truly ought to be punished, this seems to overlap with comments that ought to be modded. In which case there should be a unique button for that distinct from Engaging/Favorites, maybe the button looks like a judgeās gavel. This would be hidden from users but seen by mods. This makes sense because most of us are probably reading bad comments anyway, so the downvote system doesnāt really do its intended thing of orienting the best comments. Instead of something obviously punishing like being at -80 (like when I made fun of Magnus Carlsen on the chess subreddit yesterday), itās sufficient to leave the comment at the bottom of the comment hierarchy, and if it should be modded thereās a mechanism for that.
More options
Context Copy link