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Add Agree/Disagree Voting

The move from Reddit to a dedicated forum is a huge opportunity to mix things up. We should take advantage. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc.

One thing I would suggest (if technical limitations allow) would be the addition of a two-tiered voting system, somewhat like what LessWrong has implemented, where users can vote both on the quality of a post, and separately on whether or not they agree with it. I think this could have really positive effects for the kind of community and discussion the Motte was created to promote. The Motte's raison d'etre is to promote discussion and debate with people you disagree with. Separating voting on quality from voting on agreement would promote that goal in a couple different ways. Fundamentally, there is a tension between upvoting a post you think is well-done, and downvoting that same post because you disagree with its content. I think the Motte wants to be a place that encourages outsider or minority views, and separating the "quality" vote from the "agreement" vote would help promote this. From what I have noticed in this community, despite our commitments to encouraging debate and discussion with people you disagree with, posts coming from a more liberal/left-wing/social justice/woke viewpoint tend to get downvoted, even when their quality is equivalent or superior to other posts.

I'll also quote from the reasons given on the above LessWrong post about this feature, because I think the reasons given are good ones.:

I personally feel much more comfortable upvoting good comments that I disagree with or whose truth value I am highly uncertain about, because I don’t feel that my vote will be mistaken as setting the social reality of what is true.

I also feel very comfortable strong-agreeing with things while not up/downvoting on them, so as to indicate which side of an argument seems true to me without my voting being read as “this person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at length”.

Similarly to the first bullet, I think that many writers have interesting and valuable ideas but whose truth-value I am quite unsure about or even disagree with. This split allows voters to repeatedly signal that a given writer's comments are of high value, without building a false-consensus that LessWrong has high confidence that the ideas are true. (For example, many people have incompatible but valuable ideas about how AGI development will go, and I want authors to get lots of karma and visibility for excellent contributions without this ambiguity.)

There are many comments I think are bad but am averse to downvoting, because I feel that it is ambiguous whether the person is being downvoted because everyone thinks their take is unfashionable or whether it's because the person is wasting the commons with their behavior (e.g. belittling, starting bravery debates, not doing basic reading comprehension, etc). With this split I feel more comfortable downvoting bad comments without worrying that everyone else who states the position will worry if they'll also be downvoted.

I have seen some comments that previously would have been "downvoted to hell" are now on positive karma, and are instead "disagreed to hell". I won't point them out to avoid focusing on individuals, but this seems like an obvious improvement in communication ability.

Would this be a doable change? And would it be a good one? I am strongly in favor, but open to reasons why I'm wrong.

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Get rid of the voting system altogether.

Rational as we think we are, we are still monkeys and big number better than small number. Discussions where you don't know if your position is popular or not via proxy of similar comments are far more natural and prevents sliding into lazy thinking. The proxy of consensus is a bug not a feature in this forum!

Voting systems are great for restaurant reviews. Not so great for anything not concerning matters of taste, We want to eliminate that variable. Imagine you had a bunch of studies to include in a meta analysis but they came with aggregated votes of what other scientists thought of those studies.. Terrible idea eh?

The discussions here on the motte are more akin to choosing the best studies than the best restaurant.

Counterpoint, I check upvotes on my own posts some time afterwards and use them to retroactively approximate how much minor engagement they received: people who read the post and liked it but didn't feel like they needed to comment/respond. There's a difference between a post with 2 karma and 0 replies versus one with 8 karma and 0 replies. Assuming Although technically this can't distinguish between a pot with 8 upvotes minus 6 downvotes, and one with just 2 upvotes, but assuming I haven't written anything especially controversial then downvote proportion is probably low and it gives a proxy.

So I can in some sense using this as feedback to tailor future posts and determine which topics people do and don't want to hear about, or methods of writing, or length, or whatever. On the other hand, this might just be my monkey brain trying to get positive feedback for agreeing with consensus. But I think there's something valuable here that would be lost, even if something else would be gained. A voting system that could only be seen by the commenter would give this feedback without influencing public opinions, but that seems kind of silly and I'm not sure voters would care enough to use it.

The question being should a discussion forum optimize for bidirectional communication or unidirectional communication.

There have been times I had nothing to add to a discussion but did enjoy reading a post. And a voting system lets the writer know that he has readers, which is fair. But as I said it does have its tradeoffs. And one can make the argument that;

  1. Readers benefit from posts and discussions. Making discussions better at the cost of posts might not be a net loss to readers.

  2. Why do we want to encourage posts that get no replies? It's a discussion forum, not a soapbox.

Which demographic the motte should optimize for..? Idk. Given the mods have a lot more control now, they can probably run A/B tests and surveys to get feedback on that.