I often see people thinking that this is bragading or something when actually most people just don’t want to write a response, they either like or dislike something
If it were up to me I might suggest an anonymous “I don’t know” button and an anonymous “this is poorly framed” button.
When I used to run a lot of facebook polls, it was overwhelmingly men who wrote answers, but if there were options to vote, the gender was much more even. My hypothesis was that a kind of argumentative usually man tended to enjoy writing long responses more. And so blocking lower effort/less antagonistic/ more anonymous responses meant I heard more from this kind of person.
I don’t know if that is true on the forum, but I would guess that the higher effort it is to respond the more selective the responses become in some direction. I guess I’d ask if you think that the people spending the most effort are likely to be the most informed. In my experience, they aren’t.
More broadly I think it would be good if the forum optionally took some information about users—location, income, gender, cause area, etc and on answers with more than say 10 votes would display some kind of breakdown. I imagine it would sometimes be interesting to find out how exactly agreement and disagreement cut on different issues.
edit More broadly I think it would be good if the forum tried to find clusters and pattterns in votes, perhaps allowing users to self nominate categories and then showing how categories split once there were enough votes. I’m a little wary of the forum deciding what categories are important and embedding that, but I’d like to see if an opinion was mainly liked by longtermists, women, etc.
Also I think it’s good to be able to anonymously express unpopular views. For most of human history it’s been unpopular to express support for LGBT+, the rights of women, animals. But if anonymous systems had existed we might have seen more support for such views. Likewise, pushing back against powerful people is easier if you can do it anonymously.
It seems like we could use the new reactions for some of this. At the moment they’re all positive but there could be some negative ones. And we’d want to be able to put the reactions on top level posts (which seems good anyway).
I think that it is generally fine to vote without explanations, but it would be nice to know why people are disagreeing or disliking something. Two scenarios come to mind:
If I write a comment that doesn’t make any claim/argument/proposal and it gets downvotes, I’m unclear what those downvotes mean.
If I make a post with a claim/argument/proposal and it gets downvoted without any comments, it isn’t clear what aspect of the post people have a problem with.
I remember writing in a comment several months ago about how I think that theft from an individual isn’t justified even if many people benefit from it, and multiple people disagreed without continuing the conversation. So I don’t know why they disagreed, or what part of the argument they through was wrong. Maybe I made a simple mistake, but nobody was willing to point it out.
I also think that you raise good points regarding demographics and the willingness of different groups of people to voice their perspectives.
I agree it would be nice to know, but in every case someone has decided they do want to vote but don’t want to comment. Sometimes I try and cajole an answer, but ultimately I’m glad they gave me any information at all.
People voting without explaining is good.
I often see people thinking that this is bragading or something when actually most people just don’t want to write a response, they either like or dislike something
If it were up to me I might suggest an anonymous “I don’t know” button and an anonymous “this is poorly framed” button.
When I used to run a lot of facebook polls, it was overwhelmingly men who wrote answers, but if there were options to vote, the gender was much more even. My hypothesis was that a kind of argumentative usually man tended to enjoy writing long responses more. And so blocking lower effort/less antagonistic/ more anonymous responses meant I heard more from this kind of person.
I don’t know if that is true on the forum, but I would guess that the higher effort it is to respond the more selective the responses become in some direction. I guess I’d ask if you think that the people spending the most effort are likely to be the most informed. In my experience, they aren’t.
More broadly I think it would be good if the forum optionally took some information about users—location, income, gender, cause area, etc and on answers with more than say 10 votes would display some kind of breakdown. I imagine it would sometimes be interesting to find out how exactly agreement and disagreement cut on different issues.edit More broadly I think it would be good if the forum tried to find clusters and pattterns in votes, perhaps allowing users to self nominate categories and then showing how categories split once there were enough votes. I’m a little wary of the forum deciding what categories are important and embedding that, but I’d like to see if an opinion was mainly liked by longtermists, women, etc.
Also I think it’s good to be able to anonymously express unpopular views. For most of human history it’s been unpopular to express support for LGBT+, the rights of women, animals. But if anonymous systems had existed we might have seen more support for such views. Likewise, pushing back against powerful people is easier if you can do it anonymously.
It seems like we could use the new reactions for some of this. At the moment they’re all positive but there could be some negative ones. And we’d want to be able to put the reactions on top level posts (which seems good anyway).
I think that it is generally fine to vote without explanations, but it would be nice to know why people are disagreeing or disliking something. Two scenarios come to mind:
If I write a comment that doesn’t make any claim/argument/proposal and it gets downvotes, I’m unclear what those downvotes mean.
If I make a post with a claim/argument/proposal and it gets downvoted without any comments, it isn’t clear what aspect of the post people have a problem with.
I remember writing in a comment several months ago about how I think that theft from an individual isn’t justified even if many people benefit from it, and multiple people disagreed without continuing the conversation. So I don’t know why they disagreed, or what part of the argument they through was wrong. Maybe I made a simple mistake, but nobody was willing to point it out.
I also think that you raise good points regarding demographics and the willingness of different groups of people to voice their perspectives.
I agree it would be nice to know, but in every case someone has decided they do want to vote but don’t want to comment. Sometimes I try and cajole an answer, but ultimately I’m glad they gave me any information at all.
What is bragading?
Think he was referring to “brigading”, referred to in this thread
Generally, it is voting more out of allegiance or affinity to a particular person, rather than an assessment of the quality of the post/comment.