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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

22 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 07 July 2015 09:40PM

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Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 07 July 2015 09:40:05PM *  3 points [-]

I just thought about how valuable genuine personal feedback is and in the context of LW that there is some tradition to post anonymous feedback forms (see .g. here). And I wondered: Could this be made into something more structured and valuable? Assuming feedback is valuable could a medium be found that supports that? I wondered whether a forum like Stackoverflow could be medified and employed to give and receive feedback. Or an addition to an existing foum for anonymous feedback. The difficulty is if anonymity is provided it can be abused. Esp. if you encourage feedback e.g. by karma.

So the crazy idea itself is this: Provide a platform where users can give and receive feedback. Honor giving feedback with karma. Receiving feedback costs karma (so you are encouraged to give it if you can). Before feedback is received it is passed thrue one or more unrelated reviewer (by some distance measure) who also gains karma by reviewing consistently. Could a forum work for encouraging to give and at the same time protect people from feedback?

Yes this is a typical engineers solution to a social problem. Yes we can't do this right now (same as with prediction markets) but just for the sake of the idea this it is.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 July 2015 10:21:41PM 1 point [-]

Formspring was a simpler version of this, and it devolved into bullying. That's a failure mode of any anonymous feedback system.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 09 July 2015 10:30:55PM 0 points [-]

Yes, I guessed so. Therefore the reviewing.

Comment author: Nornagest 08 July 2015 06:28:28PM 1 point [-]

There have been a few apps based around this, though usually lacking the karma part. The one that comes to mind is Honesty Box for Facebook. (Which may no longer exist? I last heard of it several years ago.)

Comment author: g_pepper 08 July 2015 12:26:55AM 1 point [-]

Here's a web site that supports anonymous feedback, although I don't think it does anything like the karma calculation or review process that you mentioned. I have not used it; I just happened to notice that another LWer was using it when I was reading his comments earlier this week.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 09 July 2015 07:50:13AM 1 point [-]

I have an anonymous feedback link in my LW profile that's been present for over a year. I've only gotten a couple pieces of feedback.