We have been playing around with up/down vote functionality for the past couple of weeks and just activated it in the Lounge prior to this thread.
1. Everyone can vote a post up or down. The vote totals themselves show up on the bottom right of the post. You can't vote on your own posts (the up/down vote is hidden), but you will see the totals once it's voted on.
2. If a post meets some criteria for being "good," the post will be given a yellow border (so that others are drawn to the "good posts" in a big thread).
3. Similarly, if a post meets some criteria for a "bad post," it will be shaded. If a post meets criteria for a "terrible post," it will be shown collapsed with a red bar. The red bar of a collapsed post shows the user's name, and you can click a button at the right to show the post.
4. This functionality doesn't mess with the order of posts.
I'm using "some criteria" only because we're sure it'll change. The border, shading, and collapsed posts are based on the difference between up and down votes, not a total number of one or the other. We'll be making adjustments based on usage, especially with collapsed posts.
We have questions about whether it'll work here vs a place like reddit. A few of us like the idea while others have brought up legitimate concerns. In the end, we decided to roll it out, at least temporarily.
This is a trial run.
We'll give it a week or two depending on how things go, then we'll put it to a vote as long as it's not an obviously terrible idea. The goal is make threads a little easier to scroll through -- easier to find the best contributions and easier to scroll past the trolling and derailments. We aren't out to completely hide posts and will adjust as needed to keep that percentage really low, or based on your feedback. [Reply]
Originally Posted by hometeam:
Sooooo do we have an option to turn it off in our user options?? Because we know from reddit that it just becomes an echo chamber.
TBH, its a shit idea.
Eh, reddit's entire interface is based on voting. This will have a pretty minimal impact on your actual experience here. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaFace:
Na, downvote it to hell. The nice thing about this system is that it's post-specific, so it's not like I have some aura of shitty posts hanging around me or anything.
Originally Posted by DaFace:
Eh, reddit's entire interface is based on voting. This will have a pretty minimal impact on your actual experience here.
It works for reddit because its reddit. It works because there are millions of users. Here its a bunch of people with a lot of history, and the same couple hundred 'faces' over and over.
Here we are immature enough that its just gonna be a suckfest to see which echo is the loudest.
Originally Posted by hometeam:
It works for reddit because its reddit. It works because there are millions of users. Here its a bunch of people with a lot of history, and the same couple hundred 'faces' over and over.
Here we are immature enough that its just gonna be a suckfest to see which echo is the loudest.
Originally Posted by hometeam:
It works for reddit because its reddit. It works because there are millions of users. Here its a bunch of people with a lot of history, and the same couple hundred 'faces' over and over.
Here we are immature enough that its just gonna be a suckfest to see which echo is the loudest.
Shit idea.
It doesn't work for reddit; anything that counters the current accepted narrative of the hive mind gets wiped off the site and seen by maybe a fraction of total users. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Discuss Thrower:
It doesn't work for reddit; anything that counters the current accepted narrative of the hive mind gets wiped off the site and seen by maybe a fraction of total users.
Yea thats what im saying. It does work in the way that its made reddit popular, and likely spawned this idea as well~ I suppose here it depends on the vote thresholds and whatever, and you can always uncollapse a post, but its just like... why?
Originally Posted by hometeam:
It works for reddit because its reddit. It works because there are millions of users. Here its a bunch of people with a lot of history, and the same couple hundred 'faces' over and over.
Here we are immature enough that its just gonna be a suckfest to see which echo is the loudest.
Shit idea.
Who knows, that's the experiment. But just to make sure it's clear, our vision is that only a tiny portion of posts are impacted beyond the numbers on the post itself (which basically do nothing other than show you the vote counts).
If more than 1% of posts are being hidden or 5% of posts are being highlighted, we're doing it wrong and will probably consider adjusting the limits. [Reply]
