Thanks for your thoughts. Our hypothesis based on interviews is that authors will appreciate the more nuanced positive feedback from reactions beyond "changed my mind". That said, I think the easiest way to get to an answer is trying a set of reactions, seeing how readers and authors find them after a few weeks, and being open to revising.

I do think karma is a bit of a catch-all, and mostly I think that's OK. We need a way to integrate a diversity of positive / negative sentiment into a metric, even if people have different reasons for their votes.

In terms of the tool tip, the other sites lack any explanation for their "upvote" or "like" buttons, and one of the reasons we have a whole explanation is to differentiate karma-votes from agree-votes, which other sites don't have.

That said, It's possible that reactions will help call out some of the behaviors we want to encourage on the Forum, like truth-seekingness and helpfulness. We're also open to other suggestions for core reactions, but as mentioned in the post we do value simplicity.

Thanks, I think this is a good point. We'll try out what a clear negative react at the post level could be to see if we can maintain this option for readers. FWIW, one reason we don't have agree/disagree at the post level is that a post often contains a bunch of different points, which makes it hard to agree/disagree on the whole.

Fair points, we'll definitely be iterating on this as we learn what works, and I should have been clear that this isn't the one and only decision point!

The main reason for this is that in our interviews with an initial set of reactions that included negative attitudes, we found that authors felt fairly strongly compelled to respond to these reactions in some way - clarifying their writing, understanding the nature of the reaction, etc. With this experience in mind, we felt that it would be preferable for negative reactions to be articulated as comments with some explanation.

Reading the comments here so far, I think I’m more open to some very clear negative reactions to bring more balance particularly at the post level - (e.g. thumbs down or disagree at the post level).

But broadly, I’m personally more worried about the downsides of negative reactions to discussion coherence than the risks of reactions being positive-biased.

Thanks Michael, karma and author name do seem reasonable to add if we can easily keep episodes up to date from a technical perspective. Will put this on our list and work out how to prioritize it.

Interesting, thanks for your takes. One of the pros that we've been most excited about is sharing positive feedback beyond karma back with authors (some combination of your pros). The "serious" culture is super valuable, but also has the effect of scaring people away from posting their ideas, so we're thinking about what the right balance is.

Anyway, thanks for your takes! We'll probably post some ideas in the next week for more feedback.

You can give feature suggestions here any time.

Hi Will, we're playing with some designs for reactions now. One question we have is whether to introduce reactions at the comment level or the post level. Do you have any gut takes on that?

Fair point! Even seeing these things mentioned at this level from the execs and some senators seemed like a positive step to me.

Thanks for pulling out these quotes, I found this useful!

Interesting, the hearing was much more directly focused on core AI Safety issues than I expected. I find myself continuing to get more optimistic about some dynamics like whether AI Safety discussions are happening in serious venues, but continue to be uncertain about some dynamics like open source / decentralized systems and fast takeoff scenarios.