Perhaps a prompt to give optional anonymous, private, and/or brief constructive feedback after each upvote/downvote could help posters learn what was good/bad about the post while avoiding most of the costs of posting a lengthy comment.
I don’t love the idea (suggested by one comment here) of having separate anonymous feedback, for these reasons:
Public feedback allows people to upvote comments if they agree (very efficient for checking on how popular a view is)
Public feedback makes it easier for the author to respond
Most importantly, public feedback generally strengthens our norm of “it’s okay to criticize and to be criticized, because no one is perfect and we’re all working together to improve our ideas”.
Of course, these factors have to be balanced against the likelihood that anonymous feedback mechanisms will allow for more and more honest feedback, which is a considerable upside. But I’d hope that the EA community, of all groups, can find a way to thrive under a norm of transparent feedback.
Beyond the ‘silent downvote → anon feedback’ substitution (good, even if ‘public comment’ is even better) substitution, there could also be a ‘public comment --> anon feedback’ one (less good).
That said, I’m in favour of an anon feedback option: I see karma mostly serving as a barometer of community sentiment (so I’m chary of disincentivizing downvotes as this probably impairs resolution). It isn’t a good way of providing feedback to the author (a vote is only a bit or two of information). Text is better—although for me, the main reasons I don’t ‘explain my downvotes’ are mostly time, but occasionally social considerations. An anon option at least removes the latter disincentive.
What about feedback that’s anonymous but public? This has some other downsides (e.g. misuse potential) but seems to avoid the first two problems you’ve pointed out.
I agree that this doesn’t run into the first two problems, though it could make giving anonymous feedback even more tempting. More practically, it seems like it would be pretty annoying to code, and provide less value than similarly tech-intensive features that are being worked on now. If I hear a lot of other calls for an “anonymous feedback” option, I may consider it more seriously, but in the meantime, I’ll keep pushing for open, honest criticism.
I haven’t read every comment on every post, but so far, I’ve seen barely any posts or comments on the new version of the Forum where someone was criticized and reacted very negatively. Mostly, reactions were like this post (asking for more details) or showed someone updating their views/adding detail and nuance to their arguments.
My initial reaction is to really like the idea of being prompted to give anonymous feedback. I think there probably are also reasons against this, but maybe it’s at least worth thinking about.
(One reason why I like this is that it would be helpful for authors and mitigate problems such as the one expressed by the OP. Another reason is that it might change the patterns of downvotes in ways that are beneficial. For example, I currently almost never downvote something that’s not spam, but quite possibly it wouldn’t be optimal if everyone used downvotes as narrowly [though I’m not sure and feel confused about the proper role of downvotes in general]. At the same time, I often feel like the threshold for explaining my disagreement in a non-anonymous comment would be too high. I anticipate that the opportunity to add anonymous feedback to a downvote would sometimes make me express useful concerns or disagreements I currently don’t express.)
Perhaps a prompt to give optional anonymous, private, and/or brief constructive feedback after each upvote/downvote could help posters learn what was good/bad about the post while avoiding most of the costs of posting a lengthy comment.
I don’t love the idea (suggested by one comment here) of having separate anonymous feedback, for these reasons:
Public feedback allows people to upvote comments if they agree (very efficient for checking on how popular a view is)
Public feedback makes it easier for the author to respond
Most importantly, public feedback generally strengthens our norm of “it’s okay to criticize and to be criticized, because no one is perfect and we’re all working together to improve our ideas”.
Of course, these factors have to be balanced against the likelihood that anonymous feedback mechanisms will allow for more and more honest feedback, which is a considerable upside. But I’d hope that the EA community, of all groups, can find a way to thrive under a norm of transparent feedback.
Beyond the ‘silent downvote → anon feedback’ substitution (good, even if ‘public comment’ is even better) substitution, there could also be a ‘public comment --> anon feedback’ one (less good).
That said, I’m in favour of an anon feedback option: I see karma mostly serving as a barometer of community sentiment (so I’m chary of disincentivizing downvotes as this probably impairs resolution). It isn’t a good way of providing feedback to the author (a vote is only a bit or two of information). Text is better—although for me, the main reasons I don’t ‘explain my downvotes’ are mostly time, but occasionally social considerations. An anon option at least removes the latter disincentive.
What about feedback that’s anonymous but public? This has some other downsides (e.g. misuse potential) but seems to avoid the first two problems you’ve pointed out.
I agree that this doesn’t run into the first two problems, though it could make giving anonymous feedback even more tempting. More practically, it seems like it would be pretty annoying to code, and provide less value than similarly tech-intensive features that are being worked on now. If I hear a lot of other calls for an “anonymous feedback” option, I may consider it more seriously, but in the meantime, I’ll keep pushing for open, honest criticism.
I haven’t read every comment on every post, but so far, I’ve seen barely any posts or comments on the new version of the Forum where someone was criticized and reacted very negatively. Mostly, reactions were like this post (asking for more details) or showed someone updating their views/adding detail and nuance to their arguments.
My initial reaction is to really like the idea of being prompted to give anonymous feedback. I think there probably are also reasons against this, but maybe it’s at least worth thinking about.
(One reason why I like this is that it would be helpful for authors and mitigate problems such as the one expressed by the OP. Another reason is that it might change the patterns of downvotes in ways that are beneficial. For example, I currently almost never downvote something that’s not spam, but quite possibly it wouldn’t be optimal if everyone used downvotes as narrowly [though I’m not sure and feel confused about the proper role of downvotes in general]. At the same time, I often feel like the threshold for explaining my disagreement in a non-anonymous comment would be too high. I anticipate that the opportunity to add anonymous feedback to a downvote would sometimes make me express useful concerns or disagreements I currently don’t express.)