I disagree. Because absence of evidence is evidence of absence, that would mean that everyone who did not push the button, would be implied to disagree.
This would mean that everyone would have an additional burden when replying, to decide whether to press "agree" or not. Which would be more likely to discourage people from replying with actual content than to encourage them to do so.
I wouldn't mind however for the creation of a alternate system that was designed for the purposes of polling. So that e.g. a person ticked a checkbox [Ask Yes/No] when writing a comment, and all the people replying to him could choose Yes or No. This would be far far more elegant than "upvote here if you agree, downvote there for karma balance."
What would the result of the button look like?
In Facebook, a comment is followed by a caption 'Liked by ---, ----, ----'.
Would this be similar? ("----, -----, ---- express agreement.")
(Disagree)
Many posts make multiple points. Making someone agree or disagree with an entire post is enforcing the affect heuristic.
I don't think that's a big problem, "agree" would be interpreted as "mostly agree", and if many people disagree with only one of the points, there will be a highly upvoted/agreevoted reply.
The halo effect causes people to judge things as good or bad overall, estimating all aspects as better or worse than they actually are. Making people choose whether a post is good puts the points that it contains into a mental category, which makes people more prone to this bias. An AI could decide whether it mostly agrees without any effects on its juddment of individual points, but humans are quite a bit more fallible.
I don't propose changes to the LessWrong codebase because it seems at the moment that we have a lot more ideas for changes than people hacking on the codebase.
I agree, and even suggested this elsewhere. This is a good idea because it alleviates Why our kind can't cooperate type problems, as well as being easier and less cluttering than having lots of "I agree", "I disagree" comments.
Can you provide some more detail and/or an example? I don't quite get what you're talking about.
While conserving the anonymity of the current voting system add an optional third option that allows you to publicly signal agreement with the author.
One can already make their votes on posts public, I wonder why that option isn't either being removed or extended to include votes on comments?
I guess because it's possible to just make a comment that says "I agree, and here's some expansion/clarification/minor disagreement/implications."
I often find I have nothing more to say than "I agree with this comment" to someone who has replied to me, which I don't consider worthy of a comment so I just remain silent. I don't know how much this gives the false impression that they and I are arguing.
Once or twice I've wound up in an exchange where, as far as I can tell, I and my correspondent both held the same position on a subject, but they seemed to think I was disagreeing with them. I think this is especially hazardous in an environment where people pose hypotheticals, counterfactuals and thought experiments as a matter of course.
While voting works pretty well on this site, there are often up-and-back discussions between 2 people, and it seems valuable to know if the person you're replying to agrees with your point. Would be nice to have a button for that.