I think specific/precise positive feedback is almost as good (and in some cases better) as specific criticism, especially if you (implicitly) point to features that other posts don’t have. This allows onlookers to learn and improve in addition to giving a positive signal to the author. For a close reference class, the LessWrong team often has comments explaining why they like a certain post.
The type of social/”fluffy” content that some readers may be worried about is if lots of our threads have non-substantive comments like this one, especially if they’re bloated and/or repeated often. I don’t have a strong sense of where our balance should be on this.
I don’t see bloat as much of a concern, because our voting system, which works pretty well, can bring the best comments to the top. If they’re not substantive, they should either be pretty short, or not be highly upvoted.
I will personally feel bad downvoting low-information comments of encouragement, even if they’re currently higher up on the rankings than (what I perceive to be) more substantive neutral or negative comments.
Perhaps comments/posts should have more than just one “like or dislike” metric? For example, it could have upvoting or downvoting in categories of “significant/interesting,” “accurate,” “novel,” etc. It also need not eliminate the simple voting metric if you prefer that.
(People may have already discussed this somewhere else, but I figured why not comment—especially on a post that asks if we should engage more?)
I think specific/precise positive feedback is almost as good (and in some cases better) as specific criticism, especially if you (implicitly) point to features that other posts don’t have. This allows onlookers to learn and improve in addition to giving a positive signal to the author. For a close reference class, the LessWrong team often has comments explaining why they like a certain post.
The type of social/”fluffy” content that some readers may be worried about is if lots of our threads have non-substantive comments like this one, especially if they’re bloated and/or repeated often. I don’t have a strong sense of where our balance should be on this.
I don’t see bloat as much of a concern, because our voting system, which works pretty well, can bring the best comments to the top. If they’re not substantive, they should either be pretty short, or not be highly upvoted.
I will personally feel bad downvoting low-information comments of encouragement, even if they’re currently higher up on the rankings than (what I perceive to be) more substantive neutral or negative comments.
Perhaps comments/posts should have more than just one “like or dislike” metric? For example, it could have upvoting or downvoting in categories of “significant/interesting,” “accurate,” “novel,” etc. It also need not eliminate the simple voting metric if you prefer that.
(People may have already discussed this somewhere else, but I figured why not comment—especially on a post that asks if we should engage more?)