“LessWrong Shows You Social Signals Before the Comment” by TurnTrout

About this episode

The episode discusses how social signals influence opinion formation in comment sections and proposes design changes to mitigate this effect.

When reading comments, you see is what other people think before reading the comment. As shown in an RCT, that information anchors your opinion, reducing your ability to form your own opinion and making the site's karma rankings less related to the comment's true value. I think the problem is fixable and float some ideas for consideration. The LessWrong interface prioritizes social information You read a comment. What information is presented, and in what order? The order of information: Who wrote the comment (in bold); How much other people like this comment (as shown by the karma indicator); How much other people agree with this comment (as shown by the agreement score); The actual content. This is unwise design for a website which emphasizes truth-seeking. You don't have a chance to read the comment and form your own opinion first. However, you can opt in to hiding usernames (until moused over) via your account settings page. A 2013 RCT supports the upvote-anchoring concern From Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment (Muchnik et al., 2013):[1] We therefore designed and analyzed a large-scale randomized experiment on a social news aggregation Web site to investigate…

People in this episode

Host: LessWrong

Guest: TurnTrout

Topics covered

• social signals
• commenting
• opinion formation
• karma rankings
• truth-seeking
• user interface design

Keywords

• social signals
• commenting
• opinion formation
• karma
• user interface
• RCT
• anchoring

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: LessWrong

Books & works: Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment

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