As many of you know, on LessWrong there is now:
two axes on which you can vote on comments: the standard karma axis remains on the left, and the new axis on the right lets you show much you agree or disagree with the content of a comment.
I was thinking we should have this on EA Forum for the same reasons ... to avoid (i) agreement with the claim/position being confounded with (ii) liking the contribution to the discussion/community.
Reading the comments over there, it seems there are mixed reviews. Some key critiques:
- Visual confusion and mental overload (maybe improvable with better formats)
- It's often hard to discern what 'agree with the post' means.
My quick takes:
A. We might consider this for EAFo after LW works out the bugs (and probably the team is considering it)
B. Perhaps the 'agreement' axis should be something that the post author can add voluntarily, specifying what is the claim people can indicate agreement/disagreement with? (This might also work well with the metaculus prediction link that is in the works afaik).
What are your thoughts...? [1]
- On two-factor voting for EA Forum overall
- On "post author chooses what the agreement target ('central claim') is"
- On whether the considerations here are different for EA Forum vs. LessWrong
Meta: wasn't sure whether to post this as a link post or question post âŠī¸
I can't think of many examples where I agreed with a position but didn't want to see it or wanted to see a position that I disagreed with. I think that I've only experienced the latter case when I want to see discussions about the topic. In those cases I feel like you should balance between the good and the bad on upvoting and choose between the 5 levels (if you take into account the strong votes and no vote) that the current system provides. Also, if you believe that a topic that you want to talk about (and believe that others too) is going to be divised, you can just write "Let's discuss about X" and then reply it with your opinion.
I read examples on the comments that I disagreed with and I feel more comfortable counterarguing them all in this comment:
Agree with:
But I believe that the downsides are worse. So, if you were to encourage people to upvote unpopular views, then they could get even more points that the popular views, no matter how "bad" they are. Also there could be more bad arguments at the top than good ones. That sounds pretty confusing and annoying honestly. I think better options are to reply to those comments and upvote good replies and to not show points below 0 nor hide those comments.
Also: