I don't like that the dislike button encourages giving negative feedback without requiring any effort from the disliker. I'm not sure what the upside of having the dislike button is to Manifold. I want to change it to a 'flag as spam' .
Resolves N/A if we don't do it within 6 months.
Update 2025-04-16 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - Resolution: This market will be resolved as N/A immediately, rather than waiting for the six-month period.
Rationale: The creator has indicated that no action will be taken on the proposal.
1,000People are also trading
like and dislike for the comments sounds no different to me than upvoting and downvoting on Reddit, and personally I really dislike that culture.
What is the actual purpose of either? I think the dislike button is unneeded (personally) because people sometimes do so out of emotion and not rationale, therefore drowning legit comments.
The same can be said about the like button, but at least it has the potential upside of highlighting important info.
If anything i would replace both buttons with "this was useful" as a way to get truly valuable comments visible in the market so people can be more informed when voting.
I don't believe manifold should be another social media, but that's imo.
"flag as spam" or "report" is a legitimate option and should be behind the 3 dots or something.
I'm always confused by people who are opposed to the concept of a like dislike pair (I've used YouTube my whole life so the concept of a sole like button is considered abnormal). The worst argument is that there's "no effort" on the part of the disliker, but that same criticism can be applied to the like button, it's a no effort way to back someone up. I've seen terrible, snarky, and nonsense arguments get liked a lot. It's no effort, they don't need to verify the comment, fact check it as true, just agree with the vibe. If you want to remove the dislike button for that reason then you have to remove both. Otherwise do what LessWrong did and make separate quality and agreement buttons.
You can see a similar reaction in YouTube comments. Someone will write a basic opinion comment, gets a lot of likes, then someone replies saying "wrong" and that's it, or sometimes they make a longer sentence to the same effect. They get a few likes. Then someone replies to that saying something snarky like "wow that's a well researched argument", not realizing that he's returning the favor since the original comment also contained no reasoning or evidence at all. That second reply gets many more likes. Occasionally you see a third reply making the same case as me, which is that both comments contained no effort so it's irrational to get angry at one and not the other
@PeterNjeim the difference is, those low-effort replies can be punished. Whereas the downvote facilitates it.
@OP not sure where the difference is. Low effort or high effort, you can agree or disagree, that's what the like and dislike is for. There is no distinction between them
@PeterNjeim With only upvotes, there’s a comment that has to stand for any proposition. Those comments can be policed for quality.
Quality aside, negativity on platforms isn’t fun. Any feature that encourages or enables mindless negativity leads to worse engagement. (Either less, or more aggro.) Even if I’m arguing with someone, it feels worse if they give me negative internet points while doing so.
@OP you're conflating two different definitions of "negative". There's negative as in "bad feeling", and negative as in "against". There's nothing bad about disliking a comment, it means someone disagrees. Mindless "positivity" (meaning agreement) is also bad. Once again, you fail to demonstrate a difference between likes and dislikes, you only talk about quality. Comments you agree or disagree with can either be high quality or low quality, there's no correlation.
What isn't fun is a comment you think is wrong getting lots of likes without any dislike button to counter it. Forcing disagreers to write lengthy rebuttals to low effort comments is wrong. Forcing agreers to write lengthy verifications is also wrong (in this case there's only a dislike button). Having both lets people agree or disagree without needing to do anything, why should certain opinions require more effort to express? It's an arbitrary distinction. Likes and dislikes are equal, there isn't any difference between them
@PeterNjeim you don't need a lengthy rebuttal to a low effort comment, see? I just did pretty quick ;) also if you agree with something you can just say "yup", if you disagree with what I'm saying don't be childish and explain why...
@PeterNjeim your lack of arguments could be done with the dislike button so I can see why you would want it :)
@Choms without elaboration, your comments, which cause a notification unlike likes and dislikes, are tantamount to spam. Yet another reason low effort agrees and disagrees should be likes and dislikes, not worthless comments that take up space and notify needlessly
@PeterNjeim you can block me and you won't get any notifications, I'm explaining clearly and with honestly you playing ball as a live example my point, I disagree with you, I explain why ;)
@Choms No, you merely claimed without evidence that my comments were low effort, proceeded to fail to elaborate, proceeding to prove that the dislike button is good because there aren't notifications, then the one piece of substance you did give was that blocking is one solution to avoiding notifications.
Thank you for your suggestion, but as a non-soy boy, I believe blocking is for beta males. I've never blocked anyone on any platform ever, it is not part of my ethos. It's also a mediocre solution, as when someone has a change of heart and writes a substantive comment, I'll miss it. I prefer to participate in discussions not avoid them, so I'd rather people who want to passively agree and disagree just click the like or dislike button. Leave the notifications and the webpage real estate for those that want to elaborate and expand
Just as an example, GitHub used to have a problem on issue threads where people would write "+1" (similar to your "yup" example). This would notify all participants and would require lots of scrolling to get through them. A few years ago they added emoji reactions. They have thumbs up and thumbs down, as well as a few other ones. The problem was solved, no more endless notifications of people agreeing or disagreeing. They even more recently than that added the option for mods to minimize comments and give a reason for it (from a premade list of common reasons). Hidden comments are still viewable, just like on Manifold. I think Manifold did the right thing imitating GitHub on both of these.
As for the topic of this market, without the thumbs down emoji, GitHub just wouldn't be the same. So many viral comments that were heavily thumbs downed, creating a nice community vs. garbage maintainer dynamic. With the dislike button, Manifold is starting to develop a trader vs. garbage market creator dynamic. Hopefully this creates a large enough social pressure to make unclear resolution criteria less likely in the future
@PeterNjeim look, my point was you can be brief, you can also chose to write a lot of text like you do, but that's your choice, you don't really need to. Also this is not github, you don't need to rank my contributions...
@Choms No need to explain your point when I already demonstrated that I understand it. Your point has been countered by me. You can be brief by clicking the dislike button, plus there's no notification. You're just making the case that in the absence of a dislike button you can emulate one by writing a brief comment, you're not making the case that such a comment is superior to a dislike button.
We're on the same page but you don't seem to want to engage on whether short and useless comments that create notifications are considered spam or not and that the reduction of this spam is desirable. That's okay if you don't want to engage, just click the dislike button and move on
