To hide votes on one’s own posts and comments from oneself, that is. I’d prefer the ability to choose whether or not to view the vote count on my own interactions, though I do enjoy having the option of upvoting other people.

This isn’t a tildes specific preference, btw, just an aspect of social media I find trying overall.

Some of you may have noticed that the threads under some topics include a comment which consists only of some paragraphs quoted from the article posted in the topic, posted by the same user who posted the topic. (I’m choosing not to link to any examples, because I don’t want to single anyone out for special attention, in case they feel persecuted by this.)

@cfabbro and I were discussing this in a quiet corner of an old thread, and we came to the conclusion that this was a topic which should be discussed by more than just us two, in the hope of finding a Tildes-wide consensus about a consistent way to treat those quote-only orphan comments.

The Context

These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you’re making.

• Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.

• Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.

• Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.

If you complete:

• Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.

• Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.

• Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.

Some people who post links also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they’re posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It becomes an orphaned comment consisting only of the quote.

The Question

Given that these quote-only orphan comments exist, the question arises: how should we treat them?

It has been observed that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to this:

• Some people vote on them, seeing them as useful summaries of the posted article, providing some context for the discussion.

• Some people label them as ‘Noise’, seeing them as pointless extracts from the article, cluttering up the discussion thread.

In one recent extreme case, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels.

This is creating some confusion among newcomers to Tildes (as well as some of the old-timers). How are they supposed to vote/label these comments? Well, there’s no clear precedent for them to follow.

@cfabbro and I decided to put it to all of you. Maybe by discussing this, we can come up with a consistent treatment for these comments.

So what do you think about these quote-only orphan comments? Are they useful context or noisy clutter? Should we be giving them votes or labelling them as noise?

I know we have talked about it to death, and even run experiments on the mechanism, but I think it's worth re-evaluating the idea of voting on comments.

I know that voting provides value to Tildes as a social platform; it acts almost like a social currency; you know that if you have a lot of votes, people appreciate what you have to say. That provides incentive for people to write more comments and participate with the community.

What I and others have come to realize is that votes also have negative effects on our community. Here's a short list of negative effects:

1. Voting is addictive. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the process of clicking on our usernames to see how many votes our last few comments have gathered. We do this because it's a dopamine hit; they act like tiny digital love letters telling us how awesome we are.

2. Voting is a measurement of popularity. Those love letters aren't actually how good you are, they measure how popular your ideas are. In other words, votes encourage group-think and creates an echo chamber that will prevent you from taking competing ideas seriously.

3. Because of number 2, we alienate people with other ideas and reduce the richness and quality of discussion on this platform.

4. Also as a result of number 2, the information that gets put into those popular threads becomes the de facto truth - weather or not it's actually true. This can prevent us from seeing the "bigger picture" or from understanding problems others might have with how we think.

5. The end result of all of these effects is that we will slowly become more and more extreme and insular as time progresses. We essentially become the same as the people stuck in conservative media prisons that we tend to look down on.

Personally speaking, I think that we would be a much more robust community if we had more conservative voices speaking up. After all, the left does not have a monopoly on the objective truth. I know we probably have a few conservatives that are lurking around, but I think that they are largely disincentivized to contribute because they don't get the same kind of votes left-leaning comments do.

With that being said, I would like to hear back from everyone what they think we should do about voting. Should we go back to hiding vote totals again? Should we get rid of them entirely? Or maybe you think things are good as they are? Please let us know your reasoning.

I've been on Tildes for several months now, but, to this day, I still have trouble discerning from the UI that I've already voted on something. I end up clicking, which makes it unvote, and I have to click to vote again.

This is less of a problem in the feed, because a voted post stands out more, but when you click through to a post page, that context is gone, and the problem is very pronounced.

I don't have any great solutions top of mind, but you could explore colour changes, wording changes, or extra wording.

Based on replies to this comment there seems to be a decent amount of interest around the topic of reworking voting, so I thought I would start a thread to get some more input. We already had similar discussions about a year ago but it looks like some people's opinions may have shifted somewhat? and as was noted in the comment thread, 1 week wasn't really enough to accurately assess the value of something like making vote counts invisible.

Things to consider:

• Do you think how voting works changes your/other's behavior on this site? and if it does, is this change positive or negative?
• Would you support reworking/modifying voting? If so, how?
• How long should we test said modifications if they are made?
• anything else you consider relevant

I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect ordering of comments even in old topics, which isn't something one would expect to happen. This is potentially confusing, as newcomers to a topic can affect comments even years after.

This simple stylus userstyle hides vote counts on both voted and unvoted comments and your own comments. I really like what Deimos did, it significantly improved my time here on Tildes. If you want the feature back, install Stylus extension, click the Stylus icon > write style for tildes.net and paste this:

/* Hide vote count for unvoted comments */
.btn-post-action[name="vote"] {
    visibility: hidden;
    position: relative;
}
.btn-post-action[name="vote"]:after {
    visibility: visible;
	content: "Vote";
    position: absolute;
}

/* Hide vote count for voted comments */
.btn-post-action[name="unvote"] {
    visibility: hidden;
    position: relative;
}
.btn-post-action[name="unvote"]:after {
    visibility: visible;
	content: "Voted";
    position: absolute;
}

/* Hide vote count for your own comments */
.comment-votes {
    display: none;
}

Known issues

• There is extra padding around Vote button
• Extensions such as Vim Vixen cannot interact with Vote button

For those who want to prolong the experiment, here is a userscript to help:

// ==UserScript==
// @name     tildes
// @version  2
// @grant    none
// @namespace   tildes.net
// @include     https://tildes.net/*
// ==/UserScript==

document.querySelectorAll('.is-comment-mine .comment-votes').forEach((v) => v.parentNode.removeChild(v));

['.btn-post-action[name="vote"]', '.btn-post-action[name="unvote"]'].forEach((sel) =>
  document.querySelectorAll(sel).forEach((b) => b.innerText = b.innerText.replace(/ \(.*/, '')));

I am fairly sure that this syntax requires ES6, so if your browser is not compatible, you need to reimplement this using ES5. Should be straightforward but a bit more verbose.

Sorry if this has been discussed already, I wasn't sure how to find it. I'm curious if votes on child comments affect the placement of their parent comments. Imagine this scenario:

• Comment 1 (25 votes)
• Comment 2 (2 votes)
  • Comment 3 (150 votes)

In this example, would the popularity of #3 cause #2 to be positioned above #1?

Edit: Oh the nested list formatting looks weird. Comment 3 is meant to be a child of Comment 2, if that wasn't clear.

Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be downvoted in disagreement, downvotes are very often used that way. This sometimes leads to less "valuable" content being on top of threads, for example jokes.

I think that it's beneficial for discussions to have good controversial opinions in higher positions as they are now on reddit. But I understand that people want to state their disagreement and don't always want to comment to do so. Also, I think many disliked that the public upvote/downvote counters were removed.

Something that could help with all of that would be a disagree button for each comment together with a counter that shows how many people clicked that button. The button wouldn't have any effect on sort sequence.

What do you all think of this?

Edit: Added clarification that there wouldn't be an effect on sort sequence.

Hey all,

One thing I always hated about Reddit was that a -20 post could have a +500 response, but the entire comment tree would be placed at the bottom of the thread.

I think it would be very cool if the value of child comments bubbled up through to the parent comment for the purpose of sorting.

Pros:

High quality responses to low quality posts would be more visible

Posts that provoke more discussion would be sorted higher than ones that don't, and posts that provoke high quality discussion would be sorted higher than low quality joke threads

Cons:

High quality posts that didn't provoke a lot of discussion might be pushed down

Probably abusable with coordination between multiple users

I apologize if this has already been planned or suggested before.

Thanks,

Urs

Currently, I am e.g. subscribed to ~tildes.official and ~tildes. That gives me a number of questions:

• if you subscribe to a tilde, do automatically you see content from sub-tildes?
• if you subscribe to a tilde and a sub-tilde, does it have any effect? Intuitively, I'd expect the subtildes content to be shown more, even if it's not as highly voted.
• What about a reverse-subscription/blacklist?

Just some thoughts, I'm curious what the status quo is and what you people think might make sense.

I know similar topics have been discussed, but I'd like to talk about removing the vote count OR, having the count appear after you've voted. To be clear, I'd like to keep the voting mechanism as-is, just reduce the visibility of the actual number of votes.

It's not foolproof, but it might reduce the "bandwagon" voting we're trying to avoid. I realize that vote count could still be guessed based on sorting by "most votes," but I think this is a worthwhile discussion to have.

*Edit 2: Removed the joke I made about spamming as I think it detracts from the conversation.

It's also not inaccurate to assume the user wants to vote on their own post. Of course 0 votes in the current system vs. 1 vote in the new system would mean exactly the same thing, the latter is a more positive experience.

I did some reading about the trust system listed in future goals today. I think that's pretty good for moderation, but one thing that I wanted to open a discussion about is submission gamification within ~, but not specifically with regards to trust/responsibilities, but one that encourages good quality submissions, or at least will isolate bad quality submissions.

With sites like reddit and others, where you have a singular generic Who's Line Is It Anyway style points system or "Karma" the acquisition of "Karma" is a driving factor for submitting content to the site. However, with this system it tends to encourage content that goes viral, hence we see the /u/GallowBoob's of the world producing low-effort content or free-booting other people's content for "karma profit".

I don't particularly think this is a very healthy system for content as a whole, but it does seem to achieve viral attention & interest and a somewhat constant stream of stuff (not necessarily good).

Someone in the Promotion thread had suggest gamifying getting the invites out there which got me thinking (although, not on board with that particular idea).

With comments tags we can categorize the type of comment we're seeing, and hopefully in the future filter the content we're seeing. If the submission incentives were based around tags instead of androgynous points of no meaning, perhaps we could get members actively seeking positive tags, similar to how someone aiming to become part of the moderation apparatus would seek this "trust" goal.

People seeking to be on top of the [Unbiased] or [Thought provoking] tags would (at least on the surface) be generally trying to produce unbiased and thought provoking content (bot voting & bullshit aside).

And people like /r/GallowBoob may become king of [Viral] or [shitpost] but we'd have the ability to filter those tags away and let people that want to meme it up meme it up on their own and not drown quality content.

Obviously this is all idealistic on paper, but with how much effort quality posting takes compared to shit-posting it'd be nice to try and give a little recognition (similar to this trust system) to those who strive for it, and not drawing the ire of unfounded censorship trolls/complaints for other areas.