I don't think it's a good idea to work much toward a "curated feed". My experience in neuroscience was that people "curated" their info intake way too much for good progress as a field. People who disagreed just didn't talk or read each others' work except when practically forced to by its prominence. Alignment needs to be not just a new field, but a more efficient one, given the time pressure we're working under. That means good discussion from different viewpoints to resolve areas of disagreement.
Lists of reacts is only a small step toward a curated feed, so perhaps this isn't a large consideration for this particular move. But I've heard some other attempts to move toward a curated experience of LW, so I'll voice my concern about that trend here.
I also really dislike the negative reacts. I don't think it should be made easier to say negative things about content with an identity attached, but no explanation. This seems likely to foster resentment, also contributing toward possible polarization/fractionation of the LW crowd. I think that would be a major problem for efficiency.
Sorry to be negative!
Again, this actual change shouldn't matter much. My concerns are broader. I'd like to eliminate all negative reacts so that you have to explain yourself at least a little when criticizing others' contributions. And while surfacing popular older posts seems like a great idea, I don't think it should be super customized to that users' reading history.
I often bounce through my comment history as a relatively quick way of re-finding discussions I've commented in. Just today, I wanted to re-find a discussion I'd reacted to, and realized that I couldn't do that and would have to find it another way.
this particular use case we might be able to help you with. If you go to:
1For what it's worth, I think I would neither benefit from nor object to it.
I do not plan on using something like this (as opposed to a general search-by-author page/feature for posts and comments, for example, which I would definitely use). I also do not expect most other LWers to regularly use it, nor do I expect its existence to meaningfully alter users' behavior when reacting.
So, on a purely personal level, I suppose I have no opinion on it either way.
2I just edited in an additional question to the post, which is "what if there's a page that lets you see recent reacted-comments, and lets you filter by reacts, but not users?".
1
There is currently an admin-only page that shows a list of all comments that have been reacted to (in chronological order). Periodically I think "it might just be nice to show this to everyone, and to let them filter by individual reacts, or individual users."
The reason individual reacts might be nice is to filter for things like "what comments/posts got the 'changed my mind?' react", or other reacts that stand out as some kind of an important signal.
The reason being able to follow an individual's reacts might be nice is that you might think an individual has interesting taste, and want to see things they publicly reacted to, browsing it for good reading. (I know people who used to follow individual's likes on twitter as a particularly good way to get a curated feed)
The reason you might not want this is that, while reacts are public, making it super legible and easy to follow a given individual might make people more self-conscious about reacting to things, and think of it as more of a performative act.
There are degrees of accessibility, ranging from "on a user's profile there's a button you can click taking you to a public react page filtered for that user" to "there's an obscure link somewhere to the
/reactspage that a small percentage of users find out about and use."Curious what people think about this. Does the cost seem significant? Does the upside seem significant?
Edit: also, what do you think about having a page that lets you see recent reacts of a given type, but doesn't let you filter by user?