[deleted]

Twitter has announced a new policy of deleting accounts which have had no activity for a few years. I used the Wayback Machine to archive Grognor's primary twitter account here. Hal Finney's wife is keeping his account alive. 
I do not know who else may have died, or cryo-suspended, over the years of LW; nor how long the window of action is to preserve the accounts.

I'd appreciate it if clicking on the regular upvote / downvote didn't open the more complex dialog, and rather just did a simple up / down vote, and instead there was a button to access the more detailed voting. That way, by default, voting is easy and I can ignore the more nuanced system unless I deliberately wanted to use it.

(Also, since we're on the topic of the voting UI, I've mentioned to multiple members of the LW team that strong upvoting is broken on iPad, since the OS says long press = select text. On iPhone, a different gesture is used, but it's activated based on screen size, so it doesn't work on iPad. This should be easily fixable by simply adding a check for OS that makes the double-tap always work on iOS (though things are often not as simple as one may expect). I'm a little frustrated that this hasn't been fixed yet, though I also understand that dev resources are limited)

It took a minute to "click" for me that the green up marks and red down marks corresponded to each other in four opposed pairs, and that the Truth/Aim/Clarity numbers also corresponded to these axes. Possibly this is because I went straight to the thread after quickly skimming the OP, but most threads won't have the OP to explain things anyway. So my impression is it should be less opaque somehow. I do like having votes convey a lot more information than up/down. I wonder if it would be best to hide the new features under some sort of "advanced options" in... (read more)

It's easy to write a comment that's net positive overall. It's hard to write one that's separately net positive on each axis. I expect a system like this would lead to me spending more time crafting my comments and posting fewer (better) comments overall.

I like the idea of using the Open Thread for testing new karma systems.

Adding multidimensionalilty to it certainly seems like a good idea. In my experience, karma scores on comments seem to be correlated not just to quality of content but also to how well it aligns with the community narrative, to entertainment value, to the prior status of the commenter, and even to the timing of the comment relative to that of the post. Disentangling these would be helpful.

But then, what is it we really want karma to represent? If community members are not vigilant in ho... (read more)

Some tiny bugs on this Walled Garden LW page:

• Clicking on the "Walled Garden" banner leads to this URL, which doesn't exist.
• The second sentence here is incomprehensible: "If you have an event invite link, please use that to enter. If you have been granted full-access, to log in."

Some thoughts on the individual axes:

• True/False -- this seems not always applicable and similar to agree/disagree in the cases where it is? Could be missing something, but I don't think I like this.
• Hits the Mark/Misses the point -- SlateStarCodex had the "two of {true/kind/necessary}" policy; going off topic was fine as long as it was kind and true. My impression has been that something like this is true on LessWrong as well, which seems good? I don't think this one is a good idea at all, at least not if people vote on it all the time.
• Clear/Muddled --

Epistemic Status: groping around at an event idea I hope others are interested in

I don't know how to communicate this yet, but there's a ritual I want to do with friends this summer. The following describes some inspirations and gestures toward the general aesthestic.

• It was part of my step-family's lore to learn camping skills and wilderness survival, at one point even giving little "merit badges" for demonstrating mastery. With a similar spirit they would also host summer 'art shows' where'd we'd learn about a different culture and put things we made that

I don’t like this voting feature on mobile. It makes it impossible to press the normal vote arrow without zooming in because I keep fat-fingering something other than the regular vote arrow.

I'm not a fan of this voting system tbh. I guess I just find it too distracting.

I kind of feel like there should be a funny/not funny axis. Sometimes I read a good joke or a fun take in a comment, and I would like to signal I liked it, but the overall karma does not seems like a good way to signal that.

Also true and hits the mark do not seem orthogonal to me. Can something be false and still get the point ?
 

1. Experiments

The missed opportunity to be able to vote on the post itself this new way stands out - so I'll put it here: 🎉!

2.

The old voting problem is still present: Roughly, the longer the comment (or post), the more likely the same person has different views of parts.

3.

The (modular) anonymity aspect (and the dichotomy aspect) limit some combinations as being clearly from the same person.

Seeks Truth/Seeks Conflict

Combine both and you can get something. Seeks Cruxes? (Currently blocked by exclusive restriction.)

Skeptical + Enthusiastic*

Not quite the same... (read more)

Another weird bug, found here. Also see the comment by Zack_M_Davis.

The bug: this is an intentionally broken unclickable link. It's supposed to link to "http:// asdf", and it seems like leaving a space in it is enough to make it unclickable.

Tiny bug with the LW 2020 Review progress bar: The dates on the progress bar disappear depending on horizontal window size. At its full size, the bar ends on "Feb 1st"; at a slightly smaller window size, the bar ends on "Final Voting", with "Feb 1st" out of view; and once the window is small enough, and the progress bar is displayed at the top, then it no longer displays dates at all.

Here is a gif of the problem.

epistemic status: felt sense poetry

Think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind.

We often dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. It's an important goal. It's not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, tied to this pale blue dot. Sol III, Terra, the world that birthed us. And when we do leave, we will take much of it with us. Some of it we will take intentionally, because we're sentimental like that. But some we will take in... (read more)

Bug: In this post, there's one footnote, but its return-from-footnote link does not work. That is, when I click on it, the browser screen doesn't move back to the footnote link. However, when I load that return-from-footnote link in a new tab, it does correctly center the screen on the footnote link.

My immediate (kneejerk System-1-ish emotional) reaction to the experimental voting popup is along the lines of "meh, too much effort, won't bother".

My slightly less immediate reaction turns out to be much the same. So e.g. I think "I should give this a try", take a look at the comment currently presented to me first, and ... well, there are now 9x as many things to decide about it as before (overall opinion, 4 "axes", and 4 possible reaction emoji), and all but the first feel as if they require substantially more mental work to arrive at a useful opinion a... (read more)

I'm not sure what it says about LW that in the current Open Thread there is only one comment that isn't either (1) about the voting-system experiment or (2) deleted.

(And I slightly suspect that that one comment may have been inspired at least slightly by the voting-system experiment, not that there's anything at all wrong with that.)

I actually really enjoyed these voting axes.

I wouldn't be opposed to them being rewritten, but I really liked being able to separate these things out. I will say that not knowing whether or not I voted on an axis from overview is annoying (like how you can see green or red arrows on a post when you regular-vote it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8297542/ (bias: authors include employees of one of the companies being evaluated, Xpert) might help us choose between all the different tests floating around for sale. It was published on July, 2021 and discusses products from the following firms:

• Accula
• BioFire
• cobas
• Cue
• ID NOW
• Lucira
• Xpert
• Visby

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7785428/ (Bias: "Cue Health provided readers and cartridges for the study.") was published on May 2021 and evaluates Cue Health.

I agree that voting might be little bit annoying. 

On the other side, it could potentially make the search for specific qualities of comment much easier if automated (by sorting). (E.g. "Now I am not in the mood for solving difficult concepts so I want something with high clarity evaluation." or "Now I am too tired to argue/fight so I want something empathic now.")

The UI for the reactions works pretty well on iPhone, the only issue is that it's tricky to dismiss the dialog, though it can generally be done with less than 10 seconds of fiddling (usually closer to 1 or 2 seconds). If there was a button to dismiss the dialog, that could make it a lot smoother to use (and should work well on other platforms as well, even if it's not strictly needed on other platforms)