hello,

I've been wondering a little bit about what a well-designed voting system on a website like reddit or Tildes would look like, and as I do not have a definitive answer, I do have a suggestion to make. I've originally posted this on another website, but I thought that it could also be fruitful to discuss this here, seeing that efforts have already been made in that direction (similar features have even already been implemented).

Looking forward to reading you!

I was wondering whether Aether should support downvotes or not, seeing that they are often misused on other discussion platforms to suppress content that is disliked rather than non-contributory or low-quality. People may then not view content that was heavily downvoted, even though it may have been high-quality.

Should we rather use some other mechanism to serve that function? If so, what would it be?

Personally, I'd suggest that we experiment with two-dimensional weighted voting.

In a word, it would allow users to express both whether they agree or disagree with (alternatively, like or dislike) a piece of content (and how strongly so) and whether they think that that piece of content is high-quality or low-quality (and how strongly so).

In practice, it could look like this (for users): upon clicking on the voting icon, a square with two scaled axes would appear. One for the quality of content, the other for the level of (dis)agreeance. A user, who had for instance found a piece of content to be very high-quality, but who somewhat disagreed with it, could then express that opinion by click and dragging right to the top of the square, but somewhat left of its center.

That simple mechanism would therefore allow us to distinguish between those two criteria and better capture the intention behind a vote, and help alleviate the issue of seeing deeply unpopular content being buried despite its high quality. It would also allow users to express how strongly they feel about a piece of content by letting them adjust the weight of their vote. Plus, it wouldn't be too cumbersome to use (in my opinion).

(Voting strongly should be slightly inconvenient or cumbersome to do, so as to deter users from voting strongly every time, thereby rendering strong votes meaningless. In practice, that could mean having to move one's mouse only a little for a soft vote, but more and more as the vote gains more weight.
Axes should also be sticky, so as to make it easy to vote with respect to one criterion only (we shouldn't need to try and aim precisely).)

We could also put in place some additional mechanism to let users rate content with regard to other criteria (how informative it is, or impressive, exciting, funny, etc.). I do not expect users to rate all the content they read, but allowing them to do so could still be useful. They may still bother to do it for content they find especially informative, impressive, etc., and that would then allow other users to sort content with regard to one or several of these criteria and find content tailored to their interests.

(We could then also display for any piece of content a chart (that could look like this) showing how it was rated with regard to all these criteria. That's not really important, but I find that cool.

We could also plot the number of votes as a function of vote strength, find the average vote strength and so on... That would also be cool, and interesting.)

What do you think?

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/6

Join the Tildes private leaderboard! You can do that on this page, by entering join code 730956-de85ce0c.

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

"Recently" can be whatever window of time you want it to be.

I figure a lot of us probably have some holiday shopping to do, and this might be a good way of figuring out some good things to get and some bad things to avoid. That said, what you share here doesn't have to be a gift idea, so don't feel limited in that regard. I'm also just interested in hearing what people have recently bought, good or bad.

I was wondering if anybody had any tips for muscling through a game. I've got a few games I want to play or go back to, such as Stardew Valley (I completed it before the 1.3 update, wanna play 1.4), and Factorio (I bought in a fit of passion, haven't gotten an hour in). There are others, but these are the two I find myself going "I'm going to play this!" and I just never get to, and it's not for time.

I like the concepts of these games, and I've got something like 135 hours on Stardew Valley, but seem to get bored after I've restarted it (I lost some key items and bugs caused me to never get them back, plus the mine completion bug fixed in 1.3). I started Slime Rancher after playing through it in early access, but can't seem to get back into it after it went gold a couple years ago.

I realize I'm sort of asking for a way to force myself to play games, but has anybody done this? I'm thinking for a given game I can set smaller goals to strive for, and work on doing that, but was wondering if anybody has any ideas.

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/5

Join the Tildes private leaderboard! You can do that on this page, by entering join code 730956-de85ce0c.

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Many years ago I used Ebay to sell used items such as cameras, computers, etc. I haven't sold anything online in over a decade.

So, I was curious if there were other platforms besides Ebay that people trust and use.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?