I'd like to see my old suggestion either folded into this feature, or perhaps as an independent one, whichever makes more sense.
I also agree with the spirit of this, but I think dividing upvotes by the number of reads penalizes reads excessively, because each reader doesn't decide how to vote independently. Once a post already has a high score, a new reader is not likely to upvote it more even if they think it's high quality. Also we ought to encourage people to create highly popular articles that spread our ideas beyond the local community, and this system would serve to discourage that. On the other hand we also don't want to penalize people for writing specialized content that only a few others might read. I'm not sure what the right solution is here.
Well, I think I might've been unclear. I wasn't actually suggesting that upvotes come with authorship labels. All the reasons you list for why this isn't a great idea, I agree with.
I was saying, rather, that the upvote/downvote system is fundamentally missing something; that it can't substitute for expressing explicit verbal agreement. The immediate corollary that should occur to us is: what is voting even for?
Consider a scenario. I write a post about software usability. A hundred people read it, and have a strong enough opinion on its quality that they are moved to click the voting widget. 99 of those people are ordinary LessWrongers, with no particular expertise in the subject. They upvote me. The 100th person is Jakob Nielsen. He downvotes me.
My post now has a score of 99 points. Is this an accurate representation of its value?
No. One “layman” doesn't equal one Jakob Nielsen, when it comes to evaluating claims or opinions about usability engineering. Even 99 laymen doesn't equal one Jakob Nielsen. If Nielsen thinks that my post is crap, and that basically everything I'm saying is wrong and confused, well, basically, that's that. 99 non-expert LessWrongers doesn't “balance that out”, and the sum of “99 LessWrongers think I'm right” and “Jakob Nielsen thinks I'm wrong” does not come out to “a score of +99! what a great post!”. That's just not how that math works.
Furthermore, suppose Nielsen posts a comment under my post, saying “this is crap and you're a nincompoop”. What, now, is the value of that “99” score, to a reader? You now know what a domain expert thinks. Unless other domain experts weigh in, there's nothing more to discuss. That 99 LessWrongers disagree with Jakob Nielsen about usability is... interesting, perhaps, in some academic sense. But from an epistemic standpoint, Nielsen's hypothetical comment tells you all you need to know about my post. The upvote score is obviated as a source of information about my post's value.
And yet, it's the upvote score that would be used, by various automated parts of the system (and by readers who aren't checking the comments carefully), to decide how good my post is. That seems perverse! Now, I'm not suggesting that "sort by experts' opinions, as expressed in comments" is a viable algorithm, of course. But this scenario, in my mind, calls into serious question what upvotes mean, and what sense there is in using them as a way to judge the value of content.
I personally think to grey lines on the side do a pretty good job, but I also think that the boxes on LW 1 are doing something that makes things clearer. I do think that the LW 1 comments boxes do look a little junky though, and I'm very much enjoying the clean look of LW 2.0 overall. Not sure what a good compromise would be. Maybe all top level comments are a little more distinguishable in some way?
I agree there is something nice about being able to see who upvoted or downvoted a comment or post, but I don't think I'd want this to be the default. I expect I'd feel uncomfortable voting on some stuff if I knew that my vote would be public. Maybe after voting, an option could appear that said something like “Make vote public”. Then you could have something pop up on hover (or with a tap on tablets/phones) that showed something like “Malo and 3 other people upvoted this post”. Though that would probably get unweildy if lots of people made their votes public. I think there's a good idea in there though, just not sure about implementation specifics.
