Veritula – Meta
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.
Veritula should have some way to indicate agreement.
If there’s no criticism, that implies agreement.
Not necessarily. Maybe somebody just forgot to reply or doesn’t know what to say.
People could wrongly think they have epistemological relevance. For example, they might adopt an idea that has pending criticism just because it got positive reactions.
The red “Criticized” label is far more prominent than reactions would be.
In a way, reactions might have epistemological relevance.
If an idea has pending criticisms, it can still have parts worth saving in a revision. Reactions based on paragraphs (#2458) could point out those parts.
Reactions could be limited to the recipient of a comment.
That limits the scope of the problem but doesn’t eliminate it. A single recipient could still react in a distracting way.
There’s value in others being able to react as well. Maybe an idea affects them in some way or they want to voice support.
There could be an explanation somewhere stating that emoji reactions do not have epistemological relevance.
Hardly anyone reads those, and many of those who do forget.
Reactions can be ambiguous. It wouldn’t always be clear which part of an idea someone is reacting to.
I can speculate ahead of time, but I might implement reactions and find that this is not an issue after all. And if it is, I can either retire the feature or improve it.
That only happens if people submit bulk ideas, and people shouldn’t do that anyway.
But not everyone will always use the platform in an ideal way, and I don’t want to make it easier for issues to compound.
I could implement reactions on a per-paragraph basis.
Then what does somebody do who wants to react to an idea as a whole? Do they react to the last paragraph?
The way I picture it, as you hover over different paragraphs, a reaction button appears and moves between paragraphs. So it would always be clear that reactions are on specific paragraphs. The user would pick whatever paragraph they most wish to react to.
But this doesn’t address the scenario where someone wants to react to no particular paragraph but the idea as a whole.
Too complicated/ambitious for a first implementation. Start piecemeal. But could be a promising approach if reactions to ideas as a whole end up being ambiguous (#2166).
It isn’t clear what would happen during a revision. A paragraph might be changed or deleted. Too complicated.
But presumably, the same is true for reactions to ideas as a whole. Reactions would have to be removed for revisions.
For reactions to paragraphs, at least you could tell if the content someone reacted to has changed, and only then remove the reaction.
Those run the risk of turning Veritula into yet another social network like Reddit or messenger like Telegram.
This is speculation, see #4106. If it really becomes an issue, I can retire the feature or improve it.
Not if I do reactions on a per-paragraph basis. I think that’s a new feature none of those sites have.
I plan to go piecemeal by starting with reactions to ideas as a whole, then maybe to paragraphs/block-level elements down the line.
The purpose of the reaction would be to record a kind of agreement or acknowledgment.
That way, Veritula could show unacknowledged criticisms to users. So in addition to revising or counter-criticizing, they get a chance to acknowledge a criticism without having to comment.
Posting arbitrary emojis doesn’t achieve that purpose.
Posting arbitrary emojis doesn’t achieve that purpose.
Maybe it does. Any kind of reaction is a response that turns a criticism from unacknowledged to acknowledged.
Doesn’t need to be arbitrary emojis, it could just be a handful that you choose, each being a different flavour of acknowledgement.
Thumbs up,
Thinking emoji,
Mind-blown emoji,
Etc.
Edit: X spaces are an example of a limited set of emojis working well.
I think the reason the limited set works well in X spaces is that there’s no text input. So there’s no way to sidestep the restriction.
For Veritula, it would be more like an emoji restriction on tweets. That wouldn’t work because you couldn’t stop people from posting arbitrary emojis in tweets by just typing them with their keyboards.
Edit: …
Pointing out changes is discouraged. Version history and diffing take care of that for you.
This is a good idea.
I often receive criticisms that I have no counter-criticisms for, and it would be nice to be able to acknowledge those, both as a way to display gratitude, and as a way to indicate that I think something is tentatively settled.