Maybe an upvote/downvote mechanism encourages evaluation by the first simple binary criterion that comes to mind, like agree/disagree.
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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.
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Four voting options: good, bad, not good, not bad.
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The advantage of such a system is people don't end up feeling punished when enough people actively think they're harmless.
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In theory, but maybe not in practice, legitimately controversial comments would have many "good"/"bad" votes, few "not good"/"not bad".
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Whereas merely bland comments would get many "not good"/"not bad" votes and remain hopelessly stuck at a score of zero.
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Starting these comments at -1 would mildly disincentivize chaff without making people feel rejected or attacked by a concrete person.
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Just to be clear, in this system, goodness would just show as 0 until more voters said "good" than "not good". Same with badness.
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Potential issue: if badness is psychologically stronger than goodness, maybe people will strategically vote "not bad" instead of "good".
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If that can be solved, I think the system is better than what LessWrong currently uses, both hedonically and incentives-wise.
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It would just be nice to be able to take carrots away from people who don't deserve them without hitting them with sticks.
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As long as I'm dreaming, it would be nice to also have neutral-agree votes, neutral-disagree votes, and purely neutral votes.
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None of these would affect comment score or karma, but they would be counted, and even purely neutral votes would be meaningful information.
End of conversation
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