LessWrong Shows You Social Signals Before the Comment

When reading a comment, the first thing you see is what other people think. That design choice reduces 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 Less Wrong 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 concernFrom 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 distorts decision-making. Prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects. Whereas negative social influence inspired users to correct manipulated ratings, [an initial upvote] increased the likelihood of positive ratings by 32% and created accumulating positive herding that increased final ratings by 25% on average.Inline reaction indicators also seem anchoringInline reactions are shown as little icons to the right of the line of text. Here's an image of sidelined reactions to a comment of mine:I find these "reactions" distracting. They discourage people from forming independent opinions and probably produced too much agreement with my comment.When I'm reading LessWrong content and see an icon on the side, the icon gra