EA - Agree/disagree voting (and other new features September 2022) by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Agree/disagree voting (& other new features September 2022), published by Lizka on September 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We’re enabling two-factor voting (karma and agree/disagree) on all (new) comment threads in the Forum. We’ll be reviewing feedback and will evaluate how the change has gone in October, but we expect to keep the feature. We wrote this post to share this update and some other changes. On that note, the Forum team continues to grow; Ollie Etherington and Will Howard recently joined our team, and we’re eagerly anticipating our new product manager. We’re also still excited to hear about promising UX designers interested in working on the Forum. As always, feedback is welcome — you can comment on this post with specific input, or request more features via the Forum feature suggestion thread. Summary of the changes Two-factor voting is going live on the Forum. This adds agree-disagree voting on top of the usual karma system. ⬇️ We’ve started curating Forum posts that don’t get enough visibility or are especially good as examples of what Forum posts should be (according to us). ⬇️ There’s finally a way to copy-paste from a Google Doc with footnotes. ⬇️ We’re testing a 1:1 service to connect people interested in working in a field with experts in that field (the current service is for people interested in mitigating global catastrophic biological risks). ⬇️ Crossposting to and from LessWrong will be easier. ⬇️ You can add topics to your public profile. ⬇️ Some other changes ⬇️ What’s new Two-factor voting (karma and agree/disagree) on all comment threads You can now vote separately on whether you appreciate a comment (and think more people should see it) and on whether you agree with the contents of the comment. Only the first of these will affect the poster’s karma. The LessWrong team implemented this feature on LessWrong two months ago, and their announcement post shares details about how it works and what they like about it; we echo basically everything in that post. Some key points made in that post: Agree/disagree voting does not translate into a user's or post's karma — its sole function is to communicate agreement/disagreement. It has no other direct effects on the site or content visibility (i.e. no effect on sorting algorithms). For both regular voting and the new agree/disagree voting, you have the ability to normal-strength vote and strong-vote. Click once for normal-strength vote. For strong-vote, click-and-hold on desktop or double-tap on mobile. The weight of your strong-vote is approximately proportional to your karma on a log-scale (exact numbers here). We’re really grateful to the LessWrong team for all their work on this and are excited about this as a potential improvement on the Forum. How sure are we that we want to keep this feature? Our default plan is to keep it, although we welcome feedback and plan to re-evaluate in October. We had planned to test the feature on the Forum more thoroughly by asking authors to opt into enabling it on their posts’ comment sections. However, the testing has been very slow, and, seeing the results on LessWrong (and on the Forum), we were increasingly feeling like we were wasting a great tool. Curation of especially good posts The number of posts that get shared on a single day is growing, and it’s increasingly hard for Forum users to keep up and see the best and most relevant-to-them posts. One way we’re trying to address this is by curating some of our favorite posts. We’ll generally leave a comment explaining why we curated the post. How this works The exact details of this system might change, but for now, they’re as follows. When a post is curated, it reappears at the top of the Frontpage with a little star next to it. The timestamp on it will show the time it got curated (although the ...