This open thread introduces an experimental extension of LessWrong's voting system: reactions. Unlike votes, reactions are public; hovering over the reactions will show a list of users who reacted. For now, this feature is only for comments on this post in particular; after collecting feedback, we might roll out more broadly, or make significant alterations, or scrap it entirely. Reactions to comments in this thread will be preserved while discussions here are active, but they may be lost later if the feature changes in an incompatible way. Using this feature in various ways is planned to have karma minimums, but for this experimental post, those karma minimums are temporarily reduced to zero.
These are similar to the reactions found on other sites such as Slack and Discord, but with a few twists. The first difference is the palette of reactions offered.
The palette of available reactions, and the first page of reactions in particular, is explicitly a claim about what we think people should care about in comments (both positive and negative). On LessWrong, that means ways of relating to comments epistemically, reasons why comments are good and bad contributions.
Reactions currently can only be applied to comments (not posts), only on this thread (for experimentation purposes), and only on entire comments, not individual comment sections. Depending on feedback, we may roll it out to comments on all posts, allow reactions to posts not just comments, and maybe implement something to allow reacting to specific parts of comments and not just to the whole thing.
Antireacts
Unlike other sites that have reactions, LessWrong has antireactions. An antireaction is like downvoting a reaction, or placing -1 reactions. This doesn't affect anyone's karma, but will show your name in the hover-over as someone who disagreed with the react. If there are at least as many antireactions of a given type as there are reactions of that type, then the icon won't be shown to people who don't hover over the reactions icon.
The idea here is that, since we are trying to promote reactions that have more semantic content than the reactions you would find on most sites, many of the reactions in the palette are capable of being incorrect in a way that purely emotive reactions aren't.
Motivation
In my experience, seeing a list of names that I respect, marked as having reacted positively to my writing, feels much more motivating than a high karma number. Conversely, seeing negative reactions from names I don't respect feels less bad than a low karma number. And seeing a mixed reaction, with positive reactions from people I recognize and negative reactions from people I don't, creates a feeling of community.
Other sites on the internet (most notably Facebook) try to use reactions to bias interactions towards positive vibes. I theorize that rationality culture is accidentally doing the opposite; that is, LessWrong has a problem with asymmetrically muted signal. When people see content they agree with and want to support, that mostly gets expressed through upvotes; when they see content they disagree with, that's more likely to result in writing a comment. This biases the perceived reception in a negative direction.
Reactions are meant to serve as a middle ground between voting and commenting. This may capture feedback that would have been lost otherwise. In the case of positive feedback, this makes it more salient and motivating. In the case of negative feedback, I expect (though I could be mistaken) that receiving a reaction that expresses some specific criticism will at least be better, from an author's perspective, than a negative score with no replies.
The default palette of reactions contains many reactions that represent specific virtues, and common flaws, that we want people to know about. This is a culture shaping tool; seeing the default palette of reactions, and seeing commonly used reactions on comments, is meant to influence what people optimize for when writing their comments.
Finally, reactions are now present on so many other sites that they've become a part of how people communicate, and there's value in maintaining feature-parity with the rest of the internet.
Feedback
The main form of feedback I'm hoping for is theorizing about the effect that this will have on site culture, if this feature rolls out broadly (for comments on all posts, and for posts themselves). I'm also interested in feedback about the current UX, and reactions that are worth adding to the palette.
If you're proposing reactions to add to the palette, please include an icon; it should be an image that is legible when it's very small and in greyscale or muted color, and is at least somewhat a mnemonic for the concept it represents.
Separately, I'm skeptical of this feature because I fear the prospect of getting this kind of feedback would be draining and aversive and distracting.
NEGATIVE FEEDBACK: LW has a feature to see karma upvotes but not downvotes in the top corner periodically. I think it's the default. It's a great feature! Negative feedback is helpful but also exhausting; low-bandwidth negative feedback has all the emotional energy costs without much of the benefits. Here we're making negative feedback very on-the-nose / difficult to ignore, and coming from specific people, which makes it worse I think.
POSITIVE FEEDBACK: Is also an issue!! I have issues checking feedback over and over when I have better things to do. I'm mostly managing the issue on LW, with the help of a browser tweak that hides karma and approval on my user page. I feel like I'm a recovering alcoholic and this feature is putting a bottle of wine on my nightstand. Two things in particular: the lack of anonymity and ability to request clarification etc. would make me feel like I should check over and over because it's part of an active conversation. Like, I already have issues checking feedback when there's no logical reason to! Second, also related to the anonymity, I think there's a bigger dopamine hit when I'm getting complimented by a person I know. Maybe that's why I have a harder time with checking for likes on Facebook and Twitter after posting, than with checking for karma / approval on LW after posting. Of course I compensate by tweeting or facebooking much less than I otherwise would.
I wouldn't ask anyone to design their site around my stupid unresolved self-control issues, so feel free to ignore.