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So maybe it makes it harder to remember that things can be good in multiple ways, and makes people ignore the less obvious ways.

Maybe an upvote-only mechanism (like Twitter) makes it harder to remember that statements can be actively harmful.

Maybe if goodness is more objective and badness is more subjective, it makes sense to represent badness by individual unfollows/nonfollows.

Maybe badness mostly lies in adding worthless noise, which harms many people a small amount, which means downvotes track it badly.

A comment system that lets you negatively downvote comments, canceling out the next downvote by a different person.

This isn't the same thing as an upvote if people pay attention to the upvote/downvote ratio as well as the total.

Four voting options: good, bad, not good, not bad.

The advantage of such a system is people don't end up feeling punished when enough people actively think they're harmless.

In theory, but maybe not in practice, legitimately controversial comments would have many "good"/"bad" votes, few "not good"/"not bad".

Whereas merely bland comments would get many "not good"/"not bad" votes and remain hopelessly stuck at a score of zero.

Starting these comments at -1 would mildly disincentivize chaff without making people feel rejected or attacked by a concrete person.

Just to be clear, in this system, goodness would just show as 0 until more voters said "good" than "not good". Same with badness.

Potential issue: if badness is psychologically stronger than goodness, maybe people will strategically vote "not bad" instead of "good".

If that can be solved, I think the system is better than what LessWrong currently uses, both hedonically and incentives-wise.

It would just be nice to be able to take carrots away from people who don't deserve them without hitting them with sticks.

As long as I'm dreaming, it would be nice to also have neutral-agree votes, neutral-disagree votes, and purely neutral votes.