This is a special post for quick takes by Raemon. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
Theory that Jimrandomh was talking about the other day, which I'm curious about:
Before social media, if you were a nerd on the internet, the way to get interaction and status was via message boards / forums. You'd post a thing, and get responses from other people who were filtered for being somewhat smart and confident enough to respond with a text comment.
Nowadays, generally most people post things on social media and then get much more quickly rewarded via reacts, based on a) a process that is more emotional than routed-through-verbal-centers, and b) you are get rewards from a wider swath of the populationl. Which means, in practice, you're getting your incentive gradient from less thoughtful people, both due to the medium, and due to regression to the mean.
I'd previously talked about how it would be neat if LW reacts specifically gave people affordance to think subtler epistemically-useful thoughts.
This new model adds a thing like "Maybe we actually just want reacts to be available to people with 1000+ karma or so. So, they increase the signal ratio from people who have demonstrated at least some reasonable threshold of thoughtfulness." (This has the obvious downside of increasing groupthink, which I do take seriously, but there's an unfortunate tradeoff between "increasing groupthink" and "getting your signal from random society which is pretty bad", and I'd currently lean towards the former if I had to pick one. I do eventually want to get a filtering system that selects more directly on "thoughtfulness", more reliably than the karma system does)
This isn’t intended at all to replace comments. The idea here is giving people accordance to do lower effort ‘pseudo comments’ that are somewhere in between an upvote / downvote and a comment, so that people who find it too effortful to write a comment can express some feedback.
Hypothesis is that this gets you more total feedback.
I was mostly reacting to "I'd previously talked about how it would be neat if LW reacts specifically gave people affordance to think subtler epistemically-useful thoughts. ", and failed my own first rule of evaluation: "compared to what?".
As something with more variations than karma/votes, and less distracting/lower hurdle than comments, I can see reacts as filling a niche. I'd kind of lean toward more like tagging and less like 5-10 variations on a vote.
There is a trade-off: would you prefer higher-quality feedback with great chance of no feedback at all, or a greater probability of feedback which will most likely be lower-quality?
Maybe this is a problem with social media: sometimes we get a lot of feedback, and sometimes we get high-quality feedback, and it kinda makes us expect that it should be possible to get lots of high-quality feedback constantly. But that is not possible, so people are dissatisfied.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.