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 -
Agreed, upvoted, considered high-quality. But what is «Quality»? (We could add any number of voting dimensions really, while we're at it. Even nonsense ones, «bananas» or something, or little hearts and diamonds like on gaudy old forums. Zorba, don't take this seriously).
I admit being that guy who frequently uses downvote button as a disagreement button.
That's because this place does not even more effort and eloquence in peddling bad takes. Reddit maybe (let normies cut their teeth on mock debates), not The Motte. Basic literacy and politeness are requirements for participation, not virtues. This is not a Powerful Takes Magazine to boast of your VQ and radicalism; a well-polished turd should be getting two downvotes at once. And if a take is good (by my account), then I usually don't disagree all that much, it's just a... respectable difference in opinion.
But on the other hand, a genuine high-quality post may not get an upvote if I disagree with it and wish its ideas would have less influence acquired by peer pressure. If there was a button to signal instead «this is a substantial effort on a crucial topic, this deserves engagement, but ultimately seems wrong-headed and worthy of a comparably well-written takedown» – then there'd be many posts upvoted on this dimension by me. And it's equivalent to rating the post [-1; 1].
And perhaps my own posts would come to score more on this metric. If nothing else, it's a interesting hypothesis to test, personally.
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