That palette is not just great in the abstract, it’s great as a representation of LW. I did some very interesting anthropology with some non-rationalist friends explaining the meaning and significance of the weirder reacts.
A lot of what I explained was how specific reacts relate to one of the biggest pain points on LW (and EAF): shitty comments. The reacts are weirdly powerful, in part because it’s not the comments’ existence that’s so bad, it’s knowing that other people might read them and not understand they are shitty. I could explain why in a comment of my own, but that invites more shitty comments and draws attention to the original one. It’s only worth it if many people are seeing and believing the comment.
Emojis neatly resolve this. If several people mark a comment as soldier mindset, I feel off the hook for arguing with it. And if several people (especially people I respect) mark a comment as insightful or changing their mind, that suggests that at a minimum it’s worth the time to engage with the comment, and quite possibly I am in the wrong.
You might say I should develop a thicker skin so shitty comments bug me less, and that is probably be true on the margin, but I think it’s begging the question. Emojis give me valuable information about how a comment is received; positive emojis suggest I am wrong that it is shitty, or at least how obvious it is. It is good to respond differently to good comments, obviously shitty comments, and controversial comments differently, and detailed reacts make it much easier. So I think this was a huge win for LessWrong.
Meanwhile on the EAForum…
[ETA 2023-11-10: turns out I picked a feel-good thread with a special react palette to get my screen shots. I still think my point holds overall but regret the accidental exaggeration. I should have been more surprised when I went to get a screen shot and the palette wasn’t what I expected]
This palette has 5 emojis (clapping, party, heart, star, and surprise) covering maybe 2.5 emotions if you’re generous and count heart as care and not just love. It is considerably less precise than Facebook’s palette. I suspect the limited palette is an attempt to keep things positive, but given that negative comments are (correctly) allowed, this only limits the ability to cheaply push back.
I’ll bet EAF put a lot of thought into their palette. This isn’t even their first palette, I found out the palette had changed when I went to get a screen shot for this post. I would love to hear more about why they chose these 5.
This is not quite as bad as the feel-good palette (I’m so sorry!), but I still think leaves a tremendous amount of value on the table. It gives no way to give specific negative feedback to bad comments like “too combative” or “misunderstands position?” . It’s not even particularly good at compliments, except for “Changed my mind”.
How common do you think “shitty comments” are? And how well/poorly do you think the existing karma system provides an observer with knowledge that the user base “understand[s] they are shitty”? (To be sure, it doesn’t tell you if the voting users understand exactly why the comment is shitty.)
I’m not sure how many people would post attributed-to-them emojis if they weren’t already anonymously downvoting a comment for being shitty. So if they aren’t already getting significant downvotes, I don’t know how many negative emojis they would get here.
They’re especially useful for comments of mixed quality- e.g. someone is right and making an important point, but too aggressively. Or a comment is effortful, well-written, and correct within its frame, but fundamentally misunderstood your position. Or, god forbid, someone make a good point and a terrible point in the same comment. I was originally skeptical of line-level reacts but ended up really valuing them due to that.
There’s also reacts like “elaborate”, “taboo this word” and “example” that invite a commenter to correct problems, at which point the comment may become really valuable. Unfortunately there’s no notifications for reacts so this can really easily go unnoticed, but I it at least raises the option.
If I rephase your question as “how often do I see comments for which reacts convey something important I couldn’t say with karma?”; most of my posts since reacts came out have been controversial, so I’m using many comment reacts per post (not always dismissively).
I also find positive emojis much more rewarding than karma, especially Changed My Mind.
I like the LW emoji palette, but it is too much. Reading forum posts and parsing through comments can be mentally taxing. I don’t want to spend additional effort going through a list of forty-something emojis and buttons to react to something, especially comments. I am often pressed for time, so almost always I would avoid the LW emoji palette entirely. Maybe a few other important reactions can be added instead of all of them? Or maybe there could be a setting which allows people to choose if they want to see a “condensed” or “extended” emoji palette? Either way, just my two cents.
I agree EAF shouldn’t have a LW-sized palette, much less LW’s specific palette. I want EAF to have a palette that reflects its culture as well as LW’s palette reflects its culture. And I think that’s going to take more than 4 reacts (note that my original comment mortifyingly used a special palette made for a single post, the new version has the normal EAF reacts of helpful, insightful, changed my mind, and heart), but way less than is in the LW palette.
I do think part of LessWrong’s culture is preferring to have too many options rather than making do with the wrong one. I know the team has worked really hard to keep reacts to a manageable level, while making most of them very precise, while covering a wide swath of how people want to react. I think they’ve done an admirable job (full disclosure: I’m technically on the mod team and give opinions in slack, but that’s basically the limit of my power). This is something I really appreciate about LW, but I know shrinks its audience.
Hi! I think we might have a bug — I’m not sure where you’re seeing those emojis on the Forum. For me, here are the emojis that show up:
@Agnes Stenlund might be able to say more about how we chose those,[1] but I do think we went for this set as a way to create a low-friction way of sharing non-anonymous positive feedback (which authors and commenters have told us they lack, and some have told us that they feel awkward just commenting with something non-substantive but positive like “thanks!”) while also keeping the UX understandable and easy to use. I think it’s quite possible that it would be better to also add some negative/critical emojis, but I’m not very convinced right now and not convinced that it’s super promising relative to the others stuff we’re working on, & something we should dive deeper into. It won’t be my call in the end, regardless, but I’m definitely up for hearing arguments about why this is wrong!
Not a bug—it’s from Where are you donating this year, and why? which is grandfathered into an old experimental voting system (and it’s the only post with this voting system—there are a couple of others with different experimental systems).
I’m so sorry- I should have been more surprised when I went to get a screenshot and it wasn’t the palette I expected. I have comments set to notify me only once per day, so I didn’t get alerted to the issue until now.
I wrote this with the standard palette so I still think there is a problem, but I feel terrible for exaggerating it with a palette that was perfectly appropriate for its thread.
I’ll bet EAF put a lot of thought into their palette.
As Ollie mentioned, I made the set you referenced for just this one thread. As far as I remember it was meant to to support positive vibes in that thread and was done very quickly, so I would not say a lot of thought went into that palette.
LessWrong’s emoji palette is great
That palette is not just great in the abstract, it’s great as a representation of LW. I did some very interesting anthropology with some non-rationalist friends explaining the meaning and significance of the weirder reacts.
A lot of what I explained was how specific reacts relate to one of the biggest pain points on LW (and EAF): shitty comments. The reacts are weirdly powerful, in part because it’s not the comments’ existence that’s so bad, it’s knowing that other people might read them and not understand they are shitty. I could explain why in a comment of my own, but that invites more shitty comments and draws attention to the original one. It’s only worth it if many people are seeing and believing the comment.
Emojis neatly resolve this. If several people mark a comment as soldier mindset, I feel off the hook for arguing with it. And if several people (especially people I respect) mark a comment as insightful or changing their mind, that suggests that at a minimum it’s worth the time to engage with the comment, and quite possibly I am in the wrong.
You might say I should develop a thicker skin so shitty comments bug me less, and that is probably be true on the margin, but I think it’s begging the question. Emojis give me valuable information about how a comment is received; positive emojis suggest I am wrong that it is shitty, or at least how obvious it is. It is good to respond differently to good comments, obviously shitty comments, and controversial comments differently, and detailed reacts make it much easier. So I think this was a huge win for LessWrong.
Meanwhile on the EAForum…
[ETA 2023-11-10: turns out I picked a feel-good thread with a special react palette to get my screen shots. I still think my point holds overall but regret the accidental exaggeration. I should have been more surprised when I went to get a screen shot and the palette wasn’t what I expected]
This palette has 5 emojis (clapping, party, heart, star, and surprise) covering maybe 2.5 emotions if you’re generous and count heart as care and not just love. It is considerably less precise than Facebook’s palette. I suspect the limited palette is an attempt to keep things positive, but given that negative comments are (correctly) allowed, this only limits the ability to cheaply push back.I’ll bet EAF put a lot of thought into their palette. This isn’t even their first palette, I found out the palette had changed when I went to get a screen shot for this post. I would love to hear more about why they chose these 5.This is not quite as bad as the feel-good palette (I’m so sorry!), but I still think leaves a tremendous amount of value on the table. It gives no way to give specific negative feedback to bad comments like “too combative” or “misunderstands position?” . It’s not even particularly good at compliments, except for “Changed my mind”.
How common do you think “shitty comments” are? And how well/poorly do you think the existing karma system provides an observer with knowledge that the user base “understand[s] they are shitty”? (To be sure, it doesn’t tell you if the voting users understand exactly why the comment is shitty.)
I’m not sure how many people would post attributed-to-them emojis if they weren’t already anonymously downvoting a comment for being shitty. So if they aren’t already getting significant downvotes, I don’t know how many negative emojis they would get here.
They’re especially useful for comments of mixed quality- e.g. someone is right and making an important point, but too aggressively. Or a comment is effortful, well-written, and correct within its frame, but fundamentally misunderstood your position. Or, god forbid, someone make a good point and a terrible point in the same comment. I was originally skeptical of line-level reacts but ended up really valuing them due to that.
There’s also reacts like “elaborate”, “taboo this word” and “example” that invite a commenter to correct problems, at which point the comment may become really valuable. Unfortunately there’s no notifications for reacts so this can really easily go unnoticed, but I it at least raises the option.
If I rephase your question as “how often do I see comments for which reacts convey something important I couldn’t say with karma?”; most of my posts since reacts came out have been controversial, so I’m using many comment reacts per post (not always dismissively).
I also find positive emojis much more rewarding than karma, especially Changed My Mind.
I like the LW emoji palette, but it is too much. Reading forum posts and parsing through comments can be mentally taxing. I don’t want to spend additional effort going through a list of forty-something emojis and buttons to react to something, especially comments. I am often pressed for time, so almost always I would avoid the LW emoji palette entirely. Maybe a few other important reactions can be added instead of all of them? Or maybe there could be a setting which allows people to choose if they want to see a “condensed” or “extended” emoji palette? Either way, just my two cents.
I agree EAF shouldn’t have a LW-sized palette, much less LW’s specific palette. I want EAF to have a palette that reflects its culture as well as LW’s palette reflects its culture. And I think that’s going to take more than 4 reacts (note that my original comment mortifyingly used a special palette made for a single post, the new version has the normal EAF reacts of helpful, insightful, changed my mind, and heart), but way less than is in the LW palette.
I do think part of LessWrong’s culture is preferring to have too many options rather than making do with the wrong one. I know the team has worked really hard to keep reacts to a manageable level, while making most of them very precise, while covering a wide swath of how people want to react. I think they’ve done an admirable job (full disclosure: I’m technically on the mod team and give opinions in slack, but that’s basically the limit of my power). This is something I really appreciate about LW, but I know shrinks its audience.
I’m not on LW very often, how frequently do you see these emojis being used?
From a UX perspective, I agree with Akash—it seems like there are way too many options and my prior is that people wouldn’t use >80% of them.
Hi! I think we might have a bug — I’m not sure where you’re seeing those emojis on the Forum. For me, here are the emojis that show up:
@Agnes Stenlund might be able to say more about how we chose those,[1] but I do think we went for this set as a way to create a low-friction way of sharing non-anonymous positive feedback (which authors and commenters have told us they lack, and some have told us that they feel awkward just commenting with something non-substantive but positive like “thanks!”) while also keeping the UX understandable and easy to use. I think it’s quite possible that it would be better to also add some negative/critical emojis, but I’m not very convinced right now and not convinced that it’s super promising relative to the others stuff we’re working on, & something we should dive deeper into. It won’t be my call in the end, regardless, but I’m definitely up for hearing arguments about why this is wrong!
I don’t view this as a finalized set — I think there’s a >50% chance (75%?) that we’ve changed at least something about it in the next ~6 months.
Not a bug—it’s from Where are you donating this year, and why? which is grandfathered into an old experimental voting system (and it’s the only post with this voting system—there are a couple of others with different experimental systems).
I’m so sorry- I should have been more surprised when I went to get a screenshot and it wasn’t the palette I expected. I have comments set to notify me only once per day, so I didn’t get alerted to the issue until now.
I wrote this with the standard palette so I still think there is a problem, but I feel terrible for exaggerating it with a palette that was perfectly appropriate for its thread.
Semi-tangential question: what’s the rationale for making the reactions public but the voting (including the agree/disagree voting) anonymous?
Where are you seeing that emoji palette on here?
See sister thread- this was for a specific positivity focused thread I picked completely at random 😱.
As Ollie mentioned, I made the set you referenced for just this one thread. As far as I remember it was meant to to support positive vibes in that thread and was done very quickly, so I would not say a lot of thought went into that palette.
@Lizka and co: could I ask for some commentary on this?