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culi

Imo there's dimensions to which different systems let users express themselves.

1. The like button (e.g. Twitter) [1 dimension, discrete]

2. Clapping (e.g. Medium) [1 dimension, (kinda-)cotinuous]

2. Upvote/downvote (e.g. Reddit) [1 dimension, 2 directions, discrete]

3. Preset reactions (e.g. iMessage) [multiple dimensions, discrete]

4. Any emoji reaction (e.g. Slack) [(kinda-)infinite dimensions, discrete]

5. User-defined tags (e.g. Steam) [infinite dimensions, discrete]

6. Tags you can agree/disagree with (e.g. Kongregate) [infinite dimensions, bidirectional, discrete]

I could go on, but my point is that maybe the reason the like button is so bad is because it's literally the simplest possible implementation of user interactions to content. Perhaps a system that allowed for more nuance would make users consider their interaction more

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The simplest possible implementation of user interaction is writing a response. It's already as rich as it can be. It gives less power to bots because bots are incoherent. I feel like the internet devolved us from eloquent human speakers back into monkeys making few noises for communicating. Emoji is similar.

Speak. Write text. Formulate your position. We're humans not apes. Get feedback from speaking. The video format in some cases is the same - ape like reaction movies, no content. Assume you're interacting with someone intelligent who isn't convinced by the funny number of likes on your post, but by the content of what you say.

> It gives less power to bots because bots are incoherent.

ChatGPT would like a word with you.

I agree with this, but the point of these user interactions is to whittle them down to something that others can easily relate to.

If you then say "well people can agree/disagree" with comments, then we're back where we started. Why are they agreeing? Do they find it funny, useful, or just like the way the user makes their point? How MUCH do they agree? What if they disagree?

If your reaction is that we should completely kill these interactions then... well have you ever been on giant forums with no way to sort? Sometimes they're fine. Like when there's low volume. Some forums evolve chronologically and that method works as well. But if you're not gonna commit to reading a pamphlet, you're probably not gonna find such a comment section very useful

I've always wondered why someone hasn't created what I call the 'orange slice' expression button. Much like cutting an orange in half it gives a preset amount of positive and negative values. Sort of a play off the meta moderation that Slashdot did.

For positive values it you could have something like

[I believe this is truthful], [I like this content],[Funny],[Positive message]

and for negative values

[I believe this is false/untruthful],[I dislike this content],[Sad/hateful],[Something else negative I can't think of at the moment?]

That's what trive.news was about. Turns out crowd sourcing truth gives a weighted average towards accuracy. Something tells me businesses relying on getting "experts" to sell you on things, would want to keep general public opinion out of the equation.

http://www.trive.news/Whitepaper.0.2.6x.pdf

the whitepaper offers no evidence for such claims except some vague about the "wisdom of the crowd"

Experience from political betting spaces tells me that the wisdom of the crowd rarely actually holds up to scrutiny. Political bettors[0] hardly ever do as good as simple poll aggregators like 538 or RCP.

[0]: https://electionbettingodds.com/

The wisdom of crowds is a well known principle, used in engineering to overcome something that is extremely difficult to measure (noisy data for instance), considering only one single measurement would be very dangerous, since it might be extremely imprecise. However, if you measure 1000 times and take the average, the errors cancel out and you have a pretty accurate measurement :)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HNQ3GccCAI0

That's not wisdom of the crowds. That's just a big sample size

Also, the video you posted points out a critical part of it working: diversity

I think that's why an aggregation of independent pollsters, as few of them as there might be, often ends up giving us a more accurate prediction than the millions of users that engage in PredictIt or similar betting websites

Interview of trive founder, where he explains the process

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJDL-kaJ_sY

The Wisdom of Crowds v.s. The Stupidity of Herds

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FuObIEngySA

BBC - The Wisdom of the Crowd (original experiment)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU

The maximum amount of nuance is here: the Reply button. But I agree with your point. We need something short of the Reply button because reading large numbers of replies just to get a sentiment analysis is not practical.

Right, I generally agree. But even comments can be agree/disagreed with or voted on or saved to lists or... etc. We're back to where we started

Imagine hackernews or stackexchange if there was absolutely no upvote/downvote mechanism

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