Something I have been wondering about is how social/‘fluffy’ the EA Forum should be. Most posts just make various claims and then the comments are mostly about disagreement with those claims. (There have been various threads about how to handle disagreements, but this is not what I am getting at here.)
Of course not all posts fall in this category: AMAs are a good example, and they encourage people to indulge in their curiosity about others and their views. This seems like a good idea to me.
For example, I wonder whether I should write more comments pointing out what I liked in a post even if I don’t have anything to criticise instead of just silently upvoting. This would clutter the comment section more, but it might be worth it by people feeling more connected to the community if they hear more specific positive feedback.
I feel like Facebook groups used to do more online community fostering within EA than they do now, and the EA Forum hasn’t quite assumed the role they used to play. I don’t know whether it should. It is valuable to have a space dedicated to ‘serious discussions’. Although having an online community space might be more important than usual while we are all stuck at home.
One positive secondary effect of this is that Great but uncontroversial posts will be seen by lots of people. Currently posts which are good but don’t generate any disagreement get a few upvotes then fall off the front page pretty quickly because nobody has much to say.
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?)
IMO the best type of positive comment adds something new on top of the original post, by extending it or by providing new and relevant information. This is more difficult than generic praise, but I don’t think it’s particularly harder than criticism.
Fairly strongly agreed—I think it’s much easier to express disagreement than agreement on the margin, and that on the margin people find it too intimidating to post to the EA Forum and it would be better to be perceived as friendlier. (I have a somewhat adjacent blog post about going out of your way to be a nicer person)
I strongly feel this way for specific positive feedback, since I think that’s often more neglected and can be as useful as negative feedback (at least, useful to the person making the post). I feel less strongly for “I really enjoyed this post”-esque comments, though I think more of those on the margin would be good.
An alternate approach would be to PM people the positive feedback—I think this adds a comparable amount to the person, but removes the “changing people’s perceptions of how scary posting on the EA Forum is” part
I wrote a quick post in response to this comment (though I’ve also been thinking about this issue for a while).
I think people should just share their reactions to things most of the time, unless there’s a good reason not to, without worrying about how substantive their reactions are. If praise tends to be silent and criticism tends to be loud, I worry that authors will end up with a very skewed view of how people perceive their work. (And that’s even before considering that criticism tends to occupy more space in our minds than praise.)
Something I have been wondering about is how social/‘fluffy’ the EA Forum should be. Most posts just make various claims and then the comments are mostly about disagreement with those claims. (There have been various threads about how to handle disagreements, but this is not what I am getting at here.) Of course not all posts fall in this category: AMAs are a good example, and they encourage people to indulge in their curiosity about others and their views. This seems like a good idea to me.
For example, I wonder whether I should write more comments pointing out what I liked in a post even if I don’t have anything to criticise instead of just silently upvoting. This would clutter the comment section more, but it might be worth it by people feeling more connected to the community if they hear more specific positive feedback.
I feel like Facebook groups used to do more online community fostering within EA than they do now, and the EA Forum hasn’t quite assumed the role they used to play. I don’t know whether it should. It is valuable to have a space dedicated to ‘serious discussions’. Although having an online community space might be more important than usual while we are all stuck at home.
One positive secondary effect of this is that Great but uncontroversial posts will be seen by lots of people. Currently posts which are good but don’t generate any disagreement get a few upvotes then fall off the front page pretty quickly because nobody has much to say.
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?)
IMO the best type of positive comment adds something new on top of the original post, by extending it or by providing new and relevant information. This is more difficult than generic praise, but I don’t think it’s particularly harder than criticism.
Fairly strongly agreed—I think it’s much easier to express disagreement than agreement on the margin, and that on the margin people find it too intimidating to post to the EA Forum and it would be better to be perceived as friendlier. (I have a somewhat adjacent blog post about going out of your way to be a nicer person)
I strongly feel this way for specific positive feedback, since I think that’s often more neglected and can be as useful as negative feedback (at least, useful to the person making the post). I feel less strongly for “I really enjoyed this post”-esque comments, though I think more of those on the margin would be good.
An alternate approach would be to PM people the positive feedback—I think this adds a comparable amount to the person, but removes the “changing people’s perceptions of how scary posting on the EA Forum is” part
I wrote a quick post in response to this comment (though I’ve also been thinking about this issue for a while).
I think people should just share their reactions to things most of the time, unless there’s a good reason not to, without worrying about how substantive their reactions are. If praise tends to be silent and criticism tends to be loud, I worry that authors will end up with a very skewed view of how people perceive their work. (And that’s even before considering that criticism tends to occupy more space in our minds than praise.)
I agree, positive feedback can be a great motivator.