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 whether knowledge of such aggregates [...]

---

Outline:

(00:30) The LessWrong interface prioritizes social information

(01:32) A 2013 RCT supports the upvote-anchoring concern

(02:23) Inline reaction indicators also seem anchoring

(03:28) Concrete proposals

(05:47) Prior discussion and results

(07:35) Please show social signals after the comment!

(08:00) Appendix: Filter list

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
April 27th, 2026

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