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; some way to indicate that a particular thread of a discussion is resolved, at least for the time being.
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.
Reactions could be limited to the recipient of a comment.
The red “Criticized” label is far more prominent than reactions would be.
Reactions can be ambiguous. It wouldn’t always be clear which part of an idea someone is reacting to.
I could implement reactions on a per-paragraph basis.
It isn’t clear what would happen during a revision. A paragraph might be changed or deleted. Too complicated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Effective Altruism forum has an interesting way to react to posts.
There’s an ‘Agree’ button and a ‘Disagree’ button. Those are apparently anonymous. Then separately, there’s a button to ‘Add a reaction’ of either ‘Heart’, ‘Helpful’, ‘Insightful’, ‘Changed my mind’, or ‘Made me laugh’. And those are apparently not anonymous.
I wonder why they chose to make some reactions anonymous but not others. I don’t think I’d want a ‘Heart’ or ‘Made me laugh’ button, they seem too social-network-y. Also, ‘Heart’ seems like a duplicate of ‘Agree’. But ‘Insightful’ and ‘Changed my mind’ seem epistemologically relevant. Maybe ‘Helpful’, too.
If I did decide to go with ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ buttons, I wouldn’t make them anonymous, though.
This seems both complicated and restrictive. People could easily sidestep the restriction anyway: nothing stops someone from leaving a comment with only a single emoji in it.