Vladimir_Nesov comments on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2009 04:45PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (628)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 27 February 2009 09:44:34PM *  3 points [-]

I'd prefer a clear explanation of intended semantics of voting, linked to on "About" page, and posted one of these days on the front page to get anyone's attention and users' suggestions.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 28 February 2009 12:49:11AM *  2 points [-]

It might also be good to stick a reminder of what up-voting is intended to mean right next to the up-vote and down-vote buttons. Or to change the names: instead of "vote up" and "vote down", perhaps something like "high-quality discussion" and "low-quality discussion".

Comment author: thomblake 28 February 2009 02:48:31AM 2 points [-]

Not sure about that - those labels at least would look ugly. Maybe a title attribute on the "vote up" and "vote down" would be sufficient.

Comment author: Nick_Hay 28 February 2009 08:49:09AM 6 points [-]

How about buttons "High quality", "Low quality", "Accurate", "Inaccurate". We're increasing options here, but there's probably a nice way to design the interface to reduce the cognitive load.

Using the word "vote" seems broken here more generally -- we aren't implementing some democratic process, we're aggregating judgments (read: collecting evidence) across a population.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 05 March 2009 05:12:20AM 3 points [-]

I completely agree about the word "vote".

"High quality" / "Low quality" has good brevity, but for myself I'm still tempted to blend in agreement/disagreement with my ratings when I picture those words -- to regard comments I disagree with as "low quality". If we could have the question "Does this add to or subtract from the conversation?" surrounded by up/down arrows (or by "adds" / "subtracts"), I imagine myself voting better.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 05 March 2009 07:14:37AM 5 points [-]

For example, I just up-voted James Andrix's and Kurige's comments about their religious beliefs.

I up-voted the comments because they're good data, I'm glad the commenters shared it, and it looks like stuff more eyes should look at within the thread. But I hesitated, because "up-voting" gives the appearance of agreement. Rating Kurige's comment "high quality" feels a bit similar, like calling it "high quality reasoning". But clicking up-arrow next to the question "Does this add to the conversation?" would feel obvious, to me in this case.