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Luke_A_Somers comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong
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What I was wondering was a bit different:
Imagine a forum with no upvotes and downvotes. (It might still have a "report as spam/abuse" button, moderation, and the like — I don't mean that it's completely unfiltered.) It will have some level of people posting comments of agreement and ones of disagreement.
Now, imagine a forum identical to that one, but with upvotes and downvotes added. Some people who otherwise would comment on others' words, instead use a vote button. (And some do both.)
In the second forum, there may be fewer total comments — because many people who would post "I agree!" or "Me too!" or "No way!" or "Shut up!" will instead use the voting mechanism. But does the addition of a voting mechanism absorb proportionately more expressions of approval than disapproval?
(It may be that what I'm thinking of here is the old Usenet annoyance at people who posted merely to agree with another poster — "posting 'me too' like some brain-dead AOLer", as Weird Al put it. Voting mechanisms let us tell people not to post "me too" posts, but maybe some "me too" posts are more rewarding for the person they're responding to.)
I've long wanted a 'me too!' facility in forum posts - where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It'd be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.
It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - 'I'd sign that without reservation"
I think it'd be helpful to have a small textbox to add a short comment to a poster where I can put "I agree!" or "Fallacious reasoning" or "inappropriate discussion" that only shows up in the poster's view so there is some feedback besides Up/Down, yet doesn't clog up the thread.
I've never seen that function in a forum though, so perhaps the programming is simple.
Me too.
In seriousness, I was thinking that allowing us to see who has upvoted our comments/posts would probably be helpful and encouraging, although hiding who has downvoted would help protect the voter's integrity and help avoid downvotes being taken as a personal insult.
The risk would be the development of identifiable cult followings, undeserved reciprocation of upvotes, and similar.
Identifiable cult followings is an upside. We WANT people who get upvoted by the same people over and over to be noticed for this, and to notice it.
I have seen other forums that use this mechanism. They list which users "liked" the post right underneath the post itself. Those forums did not have a karma system, though, and it might seem that the systems are somewhat redundant, but I, for one, would process the two types of feedback differently in my meat-brain.
In short, I sign the above comment without reservation.