Still somewhat sad about this, as it feels to me like a half-solution that's pumping against human nature.
My claims in previous discussions about alternate voting systems were that:
- It was going to be really important to have a single click, not multiple clicks (i.e. any two-separate-votes system was going to have people overwhelmingly just using one of the votes and largely ignoring the second one)
- It was going to be really important to use visual cues and directionality and not just have two things side by side
I wanted something like the following:
... where users would single-click one of the four buttons and could click-hold to strong vote, but would with a single click show:
- Upvote this and also it's true (the dark blue one)
- This seems true but slight downvote/it's not helping/it's making things worse (the light blue one)
- This seems false or sketchy but slight upvote/it's helping/I'm glad it's here (the light orange one)
- Downvote this and also it's false (the dark orange one).
True-false is on the forward/backward axis, in other words, and good/bad is on the vertical axis, as usual.
The display for aggregation could look a lot of different ways; please don't hate the below for its ugly...
display an aggregated "what's this user's rep" function
Agreement votes must never be aggregated, otherwise there is incentive for uncontroversial commenting.
I agree with the sentiment here, but I think you have too little faith in some people's willingness to be disagreeable... especially on LessWrong! Personally I'd feel fine/great about having a high karma and a low net-agreement score, because it means I'm adding a unique perspective to the community that people value.
I suspect it's a half-solution that will decay back to mostly-people-just-use-the-first-vote
Regardless of whether it's a bad solution in other respects, I predict that people will use the agree/disagree vote a ton, reliably, forever.
I don't think it lets me grok the quality of the reaction to a comment at a glance; I keep having to effortfully process "okay, what does—okay, this means that people like it but think it's slightly false, unless they—hmm, a lot more people voted up-down than true-false, unless they all strong voted up-down but weak-voted tru—you know what, I can't get any meaningful info out of this."
I mostly care about agree/disagree votes (especially when it comes to specifics). From my perspective, the upvotes/downvotes are less important info; they're mostly there to reward good behavior and make it easier to find the best content fast.
In that respect, the thing that annoys me about agree/disagree votes isn't any particular relationship to the upvotes/downvotes; it's that there isn't a consistent way to distinguish 'a few people agreeing strongly' from 'a larger number of people agreeing weakly', 'everyone agrees with this but weakly' from 'some agree strongly but ...
I predict that people will use the agree/disagree vote a ton, reliably, forever.
I feel zero motivation to use it. I feel zero value gained from it, in its current form. I actually find it a deterrent, e.g. looking at the information coming in on my comment above gave me a noticeable "ok just never comment on LW again" feeling.
(I now fear social punishment for admitting this fact, like people will decide that me having detected such an impulse means I'm some kind of petty or lame or bad or whatever, but eh, it's true and relevant. I don't find downvotes motivationally deterring in the same fashion, at all.)
EDIT: this has been true in other instances of looking at these numbers on my other comments in the past; not an isolated incident.
More detail on the underlying emotion:
"Okay, so it's ... it's plus eight, on some karma meaning ... something, but negative nine on agreement? What the heck does this even mean, do people think it's good but wrong, are some people upvoting but others downvoting in a different place—I hate this. I hate everything about this. Just give up and go somewhere where the information is clear and parse-able."
Like, maybe it would feel better if I could see something that at least confirmed to me how many people voted in both places? So I'm not left with absolutely no idea how to compare the +8 to the -9?
But overall it just hurts/confuses and I'm having to actively fight my own you'd-be-happier-not-being-here feelings, which are very strong in a way that they aren't in the one-vote system, and wouldn't be in either my compass rose system or Rob's heart/X system.
It was going to be really important to have a single click, not multiple clicks (i.e. any two-separate-votes system was going to have people overwhelmingly just using one of the votes and largely ignoring the second one)
I feel like it's slightly less work for me to consider one axis and up/downvote it, and then consider the second axis and up/downvote it, than it'd be to vote on two axes with a single click. The former lets me consider the two separately, "make one decision and then forget about it", whereas the latter requires me to think about both at the same time. That means that I'm (slightly) more likely to cast two votes on a multiple-click system than on a single-click system.
Though I do also consider it a feature if the system allows me to only cast one vote rather than forcing me to do both. E.g. in situations where I want to upvote a domain expert's comment giving an explanation about a domain that I'm not familiar with, so don't feel qualified to cast a vote on its truth even though I want to indicate that I appreciate having the explanation.
After using the new system for a couple of days, I now believe that a single-click[1] system, like the one Duncan describes, would probably be preferable for interaction efficiency / satisfaction reasons. (Having to click on two different UI widgets in two different screen locations—i.e., mouse move, click, another mouse move, click—is an annoyance.)
One downside of Duncan’s proposed widget design would be that it cannot accommodate the full range of currently permissible input values. The current two-widget system has 25 possible states (karma and agreement can each independently take on any of five values: ++, +, 0, −, −−), while the proposed “blue and orange compass rose” single-widget system has only 9 possible states (the neutral state, plus two strengths of vote × four directions).
It is not immediately obvious to me what an ideal solution would look like. The obvious solution (in terms of interaction design) would be to construct a mapping from the 25 states to the 9, wherein some of the 25 currently available input states should be impermissible, and some sets of the remainder of the 25 should each be collapsed into one of the 9 input states of the proposed widget. (I haven’t...
Whereas in Duncan's suggestion, a) all votes contain two bits of information and hence take a stand on something like agreement
I didn't notice that! I don't want to have to decide on whether to reward or punish someone every time I figure out whether they said a true or false thing. Seems like it would also severely enhance the problem of "people who say things that most people believe get lots of karma".
For what it's worth, I quite dislike this change. Partly because I find it cluttered and confusing, but also because I think audience agreement/disagreement should in fact be a key factor influencing comment rankings.
In the previous system, my voting strategy roughly reflected the product of (how glad I was some comment was written) and (how much I agreed with it). I think this product better approximates my overall sense of how much I want to recommend people read the comment—since all else equal, I do want to recommend comments more insofar as I agree with them more.
all else equal, I do want to recommend comments more insofar as I agree with them more
It's a fair point. Sometimes the point of a thread is to discuss and explore a topic, and sometimes the point of a thread is to locally answer a question. In the former I want to reward the most surprising and new marginal information over the most obvious info. In the latter I just want to see the answer.
I'll definitely keep my eye out for whether this system breaks some threads, though it seems likely to me that "producing the right answer in a thread about answering a question" will be correctly upvoted in that context.
I almost wonder if there should be a slider bar for post authors to set how much they want to incentivize truth-as-evaluated-by-LWers vs. incentivizing debate / spitballing / brainstorming / devil's advocacy / diversity of opinion / uncommon or nonstandard views / etc. in their post's comment section.
Setting the slider all the way toward Non-Truth would result in users getting 0 karma for agree-votes. Setting the slider all the way toward Truth would result in users getting lots of karma (and would reduce the amount of karma users get from normal Upvotes a bit, so people are less inclined to just pick the 'Truth' option in order to maximize karma). Nice consequences of this:
- It gives users more control over what they want to see in their comment section. (Similar to how users get to decide their posts' moderation policies.)
- Over time, we'd get empirical evidence about which system is better overall, or better for certain use cases. If the results are sufficiently clear and consistent, admins could then get rid of the slider and lock in the whole site at the known-to-be-best level.
Partly because I find it cluttered and confusing, but also because I think audience agreement/disagreement should in fact be a key factor influencing comment rankings.
I have a different ontology here. I'd say that "truth-tracking" is pretty different from "true". A comment section with just the audience's main beliefs highly upvoted is different from one where the conversational moves that seem truth-tracking are highly upvoted. The former leans more easily into an echo-chamber than the latter, which better rewards side-ways moves and thoughtful arguments for positions most people disagree with.
I could imagine this sort of fix mostly solving the problem for readers, but so far at least I've been most pained by this while voting. The categories "truth-tracking" and "true" don't seem cleanly distinguishable to me—nor do e.g. "this is the sort of thing I want to see on LW" and "I agree"—so now I experience type error-ish aversion and confusion each time I vote.
I would be extremely surprised if karma does not track with agreement votes in the majority of cases. I only expect them to diverge in a narrow range of cases like excellently stated arguments people disagree with, extremely banal comments that are true but don't really add anything, actual voting, and high social conflict posts. If we can operationalize this prediction I'm interested in a bet.
I used to think this and now disagree! (See e.g. the karma vs. agree/disagree on this post)
Would be open to operationalizing this (just to be clear, I of course still expect them to be correlated).
I'm currently pretty dissatisfied with the icons for Agree/Disagree. They look ugly and cluttered to me. Unfortunately all the other icons I can think of ("thumbs up?", "+ / - "?) come with an implication of general positive affect that's hard to distinguish from upvote/downvote.
Curious if anyone has ideas for alternate icons or UI stylings here.
I think I'd change the left/right for regular karma to up/down, to match common usage. I agree with dissatisfaction for the agree/dis icons, but I'm not sure what's better. Perhaps = and ≠, but that's not perfect either. Perhaps a handshake for agree, but I don't know the opposite for disagree.
edit: I'd also swap the icons. Good on the left, bad on the right. Only works if the votes are no longer less-than/greater-than symbols, though.
The problem with doing up/down is mostly just that this is hard to combine with the bigger arrows we use for strong-votes. If you just rotate them naively, the arrows stick out from the comment when strong-voted, or we have to add a bunch of padding to the comment to make it fit, which looks ugly and reduces information density.
Aesthetically speaking, this current implementation still looks rather ugly to me. Specific things I find ugly:
- Left-right arrows in the comments vs. down-up arrows on LW posts.
- The visible boundary box around normal votes & agree-disagree votes.
- I might understand vertical lines between date & normal upvotes, and between normal upvotes & agree-disagree votes. But why do we need boundary lines at the top & bottom?
- And rather than even vertical lines, maybe just extra whitespace between the various votes might already be enough?
- The boundary boxes even seem to push some of the other UI elements around by a few pixels:
- See this screenshot from desktop Firefox: the boundary box creates a few pixels of extra whitespace above and below the comment headline. This creates undesirable wasted space.
- Also, the comment menu button on the right (the three vertical dots) are not aligned with the text on the left, but rather with the upper line of the boundary box.
- None of the comment hover tooltips are aligned: That is, when hovering over comment username, date, normal downvote & upvote button, normal karma, agree & disagree vote button, and agreement karma, the tooltips just seem to pop up at semi-random but inconsistent positions.
Should we show the agreement number as a ratio rather than a sum? regular votes can be summed, because "low total" doesn't matter much whether it's a mix of up and down, or just low engagement overall. But for agreement, I want to know how agreed it was among those who bothered to have an opinion. Not having an opinion is not a negative on agreement.
I think I'd either show total and number of votes (as 20 / 12), or just the ratio (1.66).
edit: I may get this in the current setup from looking at agreement compared to karma, once I get used to it. But that makes it worth aligning the default self-votes for the two, so comments don't start out controversial.
Pulling together thoughts from a variety of subthreads:
I expect this to meaningfully deter me/create substantial demoralization and bad feelings when I attempt to participate in comment threads, and therefore cause me to do so even less than I currently do.
This impression has been building across all the implementations of the two-factor voting over the past few months.
In particular: the thing I wanted and was excited about from a novel or two-factor voting system was a distinction between what's overall approved or disapproved (i.e. I like or dislike the addition to the conversation, think it was productive or counterproductive) and what's true or false (i.e. I endorse the claims or reasoning and think that more people should believe them to be true).
I very much do not believe that "agree or disagree" is a good proxy for that/tracks that. I think that it doesn't train LWers to distinguish their sense of truth or falsehood from how much their monkey brain wants to signal-boost a given contribution. I don't think it is going to nudge us toward better discourse and clearer separation of [truth] and [value].
It feels like it's an active step away from that, and therefore it makes me sa...
I very much do not believe that "agree or disagree" is a good proxy for that/tracks that. I think that it doesn't train[ LWers to distinguish their sense of truth or falsehood from how much their monkey brain wants to signal-boost a given contribution. I don't think it is going to nudge us toward better discourse and clearer separation of [truth] and [value].
See my other comment. I don't think agree/disagree is much different from true/false, and am confused about the strength of your reaction here. I personally don't have a strong preference, and only mildly prefer "agree/disagree" because it is more clearly in the same category as "approve/disapprove", i.e. an action, instead of a state.
I think the hover-over text needs tweaking anyways. If other people also have a preference for saying something like "Agree: Do you think the content of this comment is true?" and "Disagree: Do you think the content of this comment is false?", then that seems good to me. Having "approve/disapprove" and "true/false" as the top-level distinction does sure parse as a type error to me (why is one an action, and the other one an adjective?).
I also think we should definitely change the hover for the karma-vote dimension to say "approve" and "disapprove", instead of "like" and "dislike", which I think captures the dimensions here better.
I think the karma dimension already captures the-parts-of-the-agreement-dimension-that-aren't-truth.
I'm sad this is your experience!
I interpret "agree/disagree" in this context as literally 'is this comment true, as far as you can tell, or is it false?', so when I imagine changing it to "true/false" I don't imagine it feeling any different to me. (Which also means I'm not personally opposed to such a change. 🤷)
Maybe relevant that I'm used to Arbital's 'assign a probability to this claim' feature. I just tihnk of this as a more coarse-grained, fast version of Arbital's tool for assigning probabilities to claims.
When I see disagree-votes on my comments, I think I typically feel bad about it if it's also downvoted (often some flavor of 'nooo you're not fully understanding a thing I was trying to communicate!'), but happy about it if it's upvoted. Something like:
- Amusement at the upvote/agreevote disparity, and warm feelings toward LW that it was able to mentally separate its approval for the comment from how much probability it assigns to the comment being true.
- Pride in LW for being one of the rare places on the Internet that cares about the distinction between 'I like this' and 'I think this is true'.
- I mostly don't perceive the disagreevotes as 'you are flatly telling me to my face
I look forward to seeing what it feels like once it's just part of things. Currently, it feels like complexity and distraction for pretty low information value.
Also, why the indirect metaphor text of "agreement up/down vote", rather than much more straightforward "agree/disagree" labels? I'm not sure about the x/check icons - I can't think of better, though it doesn't quite feel right, especially because it's next to the left/right voting icons, which never seemed weird to me, but now they kind of do. I do like the detailed hover text, and it makes me continue to be grateful that I'm not usually on mobile on this site.
Also, also - it's a bit confusing that karma defaults to a normal upvote by the poster, but the agreement defaults to none (but it can be added by the poster if they actually agree with themselves)?
Also, also - it's a bit confusing that karma defaults to a normal upvote by the poster, but the agreement defaults to none (but it can be added by the poster if they actually agree with themselves)?
On this point, I suggest making it so that people cannot vote agree/disagree on their own comments. It's one thing to say "I find my own comment here so valuable that I use a strong upvote on it so more people see it" - that's weird and somewhat discouraged by the community, but at least carries some information.
But what's the equivalent supposed to be for agreement? "I find my own comment so correct that I strongly agree with it"? Just disallow that in the software.
Currently, it feels like complexity and distraction for pretty low information value.
Strong disagree
Also, why the indirect metaphor text of "agreement up/down vote", rather than much more straightforward "agree/disagree" labels?
Agree
I am pretty uncertain about whether this change is good, and I don't think anyone can confidently say it is or isn't good. But no other forum with voting does this (AFAIK), so it's good to try it and see what happens.
Something to think about: What sorts of observations might constitute evidence in favor of or against this system?
It might be good to explicitly state in the hover text over the upvote and downvote buttons that they mean "would like to see more of this" and "would like to see less of this", rather than the mysterious and vague "like" and "dislike".
More radically, instead of vague "agree" and "disagree", one could imagine placing a small probability distribution in each comment and votes consist of marking how much credence you have in whatever that comment is saying. This is more confusing if the comment makes multiple claims, though, but that's a failure mode of the agree and disagree also.
Perhaps it should be possible to highlight sections of a comment and mark them with probability distributions that pop up when you hover over them and which also subtly color the highlight (divide probabilities into three ranges: red=0-33%, green=33-67%, blue=67-100%, then weight the RGB values by the number of votes in each range), as well as putting a small unobtrusive icon shaped like the probability distribution (perhaps in the margin?) when not hovering...
I just made a bunch of claims all at once... that is indeed a failure mode of this system which is going to regularly occur.
To combat the negativity bias that internet comments have (you only comment if something is wrong/bad/broken), I'll state that I find the current design intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, useful and on the whole a big step up from the past voting norms on the site, to the point that I don't have any ideas how that particular piece of lesswrong could be improved.
This comment is an experiment. I'm trying out a variant of the proposed idea of voting by headings/block quotes: this comment contains my comment, and the replies below contain claims extracted from my comment for agree/disagree voting.
Agree/disagree buttons incentivizes knee-jerk, low-effort reactions rather than deliberate, high-effort responses
Something I like about LW's system of upvotes meaning "things you want to see more of" and having no agree/disagree button is that there's no simple way of expressing agreement or disagreement. This means that when there's something I disagree with, I'm more incentivized to write a comment to express it. That forces me to think more deeply because I need to be able to state clearly what it is I'm agreeing or disagreeing with, especially since it can be quite nuanced. It also feels fairer because if someone went to the effort of writing a comment, then surely it's only fair that I do likewise when disagreeing. (Unless of course it was a low effort comment, in which case I could always just downvote.)
I suspect that if there's an agree/disagree button, the emotional part of me would be satisfied with clicking the disagree button, ...
Shortform posts created in the past don't have agreement voting for new top level comments, which are otherwise intended to be analogous to new posts/threads.
I appreciate this voting system in controversial threads, but find it a bit overkill otherwise.
Maybe you could make this option "enabled by default", so if a thread creator doesn't think it's a good fit for a post, they can opt out of it by unchecking a box?
Posts tend to make a lot of claims at the same time, such that "agree/disagree" became less meaningful, and it also came with more substantial UI challenges (having a whole second number visible from the frontpage per post would add a lot of clutter).
Probably any GW users have already noticed this, but just in case any have not:
GreaterWrong now supports the new agreement voting feature.
(As usual, double-click for strong-vote.)
Instead of a single value that shows the sum of all agreement upvotes and downvotes, what’s displayed by default is a ratio of the number of ‘agree’ to the number of ‘disagree’ votes (that’s the “10:1” in the screenshot).
You can also hover over the ratio to see the aggregated total, same as the way it would appear on Less Wrong (that’s the “Epistemic Status: 19” in the screenshot below), plus some more details:
Have any other online forums tried something similar? If so, knowing what results they had seems decently valuable. I say decently instead of a stronger word because what works for one community doesn't necessarily work for another, especially one as unique as LessWrong.
Hmm didn't really find anything similar, but here are some examples of rating systems I found that looked interesting (though not necessarily relevant):
2-factor rating systems
SaidIt: (1) Insightful & (2) Fun
SaidIt is a Reddit alternative which seeks to "create an environment that encourages thought-provoking discussion". SaidIt has two types of upvotes to choose from: 1) insightful, and 2) fun.[1]
Goodfilms: (1) quality & (2) rewatchability
Goodfilms is a movie site for users to rate, review, share films and find movies to watch. Users rate movies on two dimensions: quality and rewatchability. The ratings are displayed as a scatterplot, giving users a better sense of the type of movie (e.g. most people agree it is highly rewatchable, but there is disagreement on its quality => may not be very good, but is fun to watch).[2]
Suggestion by Majestic121: (1) Agree/Disagree & (2) Productive/Unproductive
A Hacker News comment by Majestic121 suggests a 2-factor voting system:
...Up/Down : Agree/Disagree Left/Right : Makes the discussion go backward/forward
This way you could express disagreement while acknowledging that the point is inte
I am opposed to this change, because it makes voting more cognitively expensive. Now I feel forced to produce two judgments on each comment, which in turn makes me think about the exact difference between them. A single "liked this / disliked this" requires much less thinking. Multiply it by the number of comments each day.
Doing this for short time may be an interesting experiment, but if this feature stays here, I will probably just try to ignore it and only use the first button. But then from my perspective the UI just got cluttered.
I would appreciate if...
Update a couple days in: I do find myself being a little annoyed at having to decide whether to click an extra button, and confused about the norms about whether/when I should.
I tentatively quite like this.
Quite a bit of what I say gets lots & lots of karma votes but sort of middle ground net karma. It'd be helpful to know if this is about people being split on whether they agree with what I'm saying, or if it's a split on whether it belongs on LW whatsoever.
…although maybe folk won't make a very careful distinction between those when voting, so maybe I still don't get to know!
A minor suggested tweak for this experiment: Maybe change the "overall karma" hovertext to say something more along the lines of "How much do you thin...
Enabling it on all new comment threads is an experiment (you can always disable it if it ends up not working out). Getting the results of that experiment is valuable. The value of those experimental results seems like it's the more important consideration.
This so far feels really good for me to use, as a reader. It's almost immediately obvious-to-me how it works (as a reader), and I feel relief and satisfaction when I get to separate out my agreement from my upvote.
I wonder how it'll be as a commenter and poster!
I think I'm confused why the chosen distinction is something like "good/bad vs. agree/disagree" rather than "approve/disapprove vs. true/false."
I do not have faith that people will use the agree/disagree voting for assessments of truth, which was the thing I personally wanted added to our voting system. Right now it feels like there are just two S1 monkey buttons and no nudge toward teasing out different strands of value.
I think this is why this button will be a very strong pressure away from LW, for me.
If the button claims to be about evaluating the truth or falsehood of the content of a comment, and also my comment has said a bunch of true stuff, and has a -17 on it or something, I will absolutely find this emotionally relevant and be Sad about it and want to spend much much less time on LW.
And if the button is not about the truth or falsehood of the content, and is just a signal of ... how Other I am, versus how much I am Like the rest of the monkeys reading it, I expect to very frequently be receiving blunt You Are Not Like Us signals, all the time, and to have those signals permanently inscribed on all of my commentary ("look at what the guy that everybody disagrees with thinks!") and to find this sad and alienating.
Like, I really cannot overstate the strength of the deterrent of the -n numbers on my comments on this post, alone. I'm keeping my hand on the hot stove because this feels important, but it does not feel good.
If this change sticks as it currently is, it will be really really difficult and painful for me to be on LW. Or, to be more specific: it's already quite difficult and painful ...
So someone can make a statement: "X". X might be indexical or not. Indexical statements refer to the speaker, like "I think that probabilities are cool" or "I see a parrot.". Non-indexical statements don't, like "Probabilities track priors + evidence" or "There are parrots in the world". The line is blurry: is "Probabilities are cool" implicitly indexical? Agree/disagree with X could be taken to mean, "It would be true if I said X, with the index pointing to me", while true/untrue means, "X is the case". If X is non-indexical, asserting agree/disagree is the same as asserting true/untrue. If X is indexical, they're not the same; disagreeing with "I see a parrot" means "I (the disagree-er) don't (myself) see a parrot", while saying " 'I (the original speaker) see a parrot' is untrue" means "No, you don't see a parrot".
Duncan, what would you think about a button that means agree/disagree in that sense, i.e., "I could also say this truthfully"? (As opposed to, it would be good for me to say this, or I would actually say this.) Is there a way to make that meaning clear? habryka, would that button get the value for you?
I love this change, for most of the same reasons as Ben. Thanks, LessWrong team! Some ideas for further ways to empower finer-grained epistemics at the community level:
- (additional metrics) I think it'd be nice to have a drop-down or hover-over to see more fine-grained statistics on a post or comment, such as:
- total_upvotes := the the total number of upvotes (ignoring downvotes)
- total_downvotes
- voting_activity := total_upvotes + total_downvotes
- voting_controversy := min(total_upvotes, total_downvotes)
- total_agreement
- total_disagreement
- agreement_activi
I feel quite happy to see this implemented site-wide; ever since I saw it selectively enabled on some posts, I've thought that it worked really well and felt it incomprehensible that it wasn't already in use everywhere.
If there's going to be an agreement-disagreement axis, maybe reconsider how and whether voting strength interacts with it. I saw a comment in this thread which got to -10 agreement from one vote. Which is, if not laughably absurd, certainly utterly unintuitive. What is that even supposed to mean?
As with most things in life: this seems like it could be a real improvement, it's great that we're testing it and finding out!
People previously didn't like being downvoted into the negatives. I wonder whether the same will be true along the disagreement axis. On the one hand "I disagree with this comment" isn't really saying something contentious in the same way that "I dislike this comment" is, so being "in the red" along the disagreement axis shouldn't really feel too bad. On the other hand, I have a feeling that being "in the red" along any dimension just has a certain inherent social disapproval kinda feeling that is pretty uncomfortable.
If the latter is true (people find bei...
i think, in retrospect, this feature was a really great addition to the website.
Bug: When comment threads are loaded as a permalink, comment sorting is wrong or at least influenced by agreement karma.
Example: This comment thread. In this screenshot, the comment with 2 karma and 1 agreement is sorted above the comment with 8 karma and 0 agreement.
I notice myself wanting to vote on things I like, and being confused about whether to upvote or agree.
My guess at what's happening: the part of me that forms an opinion is basically driven by status (reward good thought vs slap down bad thought) and I've tuned this well enough that it's a good judge of quality. Two-axis karma forces me to go to system 2, which is sometimes good, but my system 1 is already pretty good at flagging things like "just because they disagree with you doesn't mean they suck or you suck".
I'll probably get used to it.
Thread for changes that might be good for the voting system. (I'm going to make my ideas separate comments so people can agree-vote on ones they like)
i didn't intend to comment .but then i read comment about fighting negativity bias and decided the commenter right, so, I'm doing it to - this new feature is really good, i encountered it in the wild, find it intuitive (except the sides of the votes, but when i doing it wrong the colors clarify it and i fix that immediately), and basically very good and useful feature. in my model of the world, 70%+ of users like this feature, and don't say that, so the result is the comment section below.
i also find it much better then Duncan's suggestion below, for reaso...
Would it be possible to add a forum-wide search/sorting option for comments with unusually high [disagreement*karma]?
Usually, karma is strongly correlated with agreement on some level, even with this system. So if a comment has high disagreement and high karma, the karma has been deconfounded and seems much more likely to have been caused by people having updated on it, or otherwise thought the arguments have gone underappreciated. And if a high proportion of people updated on it, then it's more likely that I will too.
Finding comments like this is a great ...
I'm confused about why you can agree with your own post. What is that supposed to do?
(I strong-agreed with this post.)
- Agree/disagree voting does not translate into a user's or post's karma — its sole function is to communicate agreement/disagreement. It has no other direct effects on the site or content visibility.
Then that's not much incentive for me to stop upvoting/downvoting stuff I agree/disagree with, then, is it?
[/pro-echo-chamber-jack-sparrow]
Displaying the combined agreement score loses context.
It may be more helpful to split the information out:
< 45 > 6 people agree, 42 people disagree.
Needless to say, a lot of people won't simply vote reflecting their own agreement or disagreement, but aim at the net amount of agreement minus disagreement they think the comment should have.
I started a [link post to this on the EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/e7rWnAFGjWyPeQvwT/2-factor-voting-karma-agreement-for-ea-forum) to discuss if it makes sense over there.
One thing I suggested as a variation of thi:
> 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).
Starting today we're activating two-factor voting on all new comment threads.
Now there are 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.
How the system works
For the pre-existing voting system, the most common interpretation of up/down-voting is "Do I want to see more or less of this content on the site?" As an item gets more/less votes, the item changes in visibility, and the karma-weighting of the author is eventually changed as well.
Agree/disagree is just added on to this system. Here's how it all hooks up.
Ben's personal reasons for being excited about this split
Here's a couple of reasons that are alive for me.
I could go on but I'll stop here.
Please give us feedback
This is one of the main voting experiments we've tried on the site (here's the other one). We may try more changes and improvement in the future. Please let us know about your experience with this new voting axis, especially in the next 1-2 weeks.
If you find it concerning/invigorating/confusing/clarifying/other, we'd like to know about it. Comment on this post with feedback and I'll give you an upvote (and maybe others will give you an agree-vote!) or let us know in the intercom button in the bottom right of the screen.
We've rolled it out on many (15+) threads now (example), and my impression is that it's worked as hoped and allowed for better communication about the truth.
appreciation for high-quality comments that many users disagree with.