This is specifically about voting on comments, and not articles. I think voting for topics is clear and intuitive.

I've noticed that, while reading users' comments on topics, I have a tendency to think "This is right, so I will vote it up," or "I agree with this, so I will vote it up." I'm not sure I should be doing this, or rather, I'm not sure that's the best use of my ability to vote on comments. I always worry that sites I frequent will morph into echo chambers, and I want to avoid that for this site. I want to encourage expressing alternate viewpoints, because exposure to alternate views helps me grow a human. The vote button is a low-effort means of accomplishing that, and I intend to use it as such.

I think the vote button should be used on comments that enhance the discussion, and help engage people, and not necessarily only on comments that make me feel happy, good or righteous. So, lately, I've been trying to explicitly vote up comments which have replies, especially ones which have several replies, but aren't voted as highly as their children or peers. If someone's comment can engage several people to reply and contribute positively to a conversation, then that comment is worthy of being seen and so I vote it up. I do this regardless of whether or not I agree with the substance of the message.

I've noticed a trend where there will be a low-voted comment with many replies. These aren't trolling comments, because if they were, then they would be removed. These are comments which are engaging people and furthering the conversation, but it seems like the community doesn't value these comments due to their low vote count. This leads me to suspect that the number of votes on a comment might be merely a tally of the number of people who agreed with it.

So, I'm curious. Do you vote on comments?

How do you decide to vote on a comment?

How should we collectively be using the vote for comments?

(As an aside, I also wonder how the psychology of reading comments would change if vote tallies on comments were hidden.)

Hi, I was wondering if the current duration before voting gets locked on a post is still 30 days? I tried to find the answer in the docs but didn’t see it (apologies if I missed it) and all I turned up in a search of the site was a topic from 3 years ago mentioning the 30 days, so I wanted to see if that’s still accurate.

Thanks !

I don't understand why people think an individual vote changes anything. I don't mean this as an insult, I just don't understand by what mechanism my vote matters. To be clear, I am not saying you shouldn't vote, simply that one persons vote is a neutral act.

I assume that if I vote in an election my vote will literally be counted; the votes for one candidate will go from 100,000 to 100,001. In tiny elections, it is possible, not likely, for a single vote to change a result. However, arguing for a system from its top 0.1% best case scenario is a bit disingenuous. In 99.9% of elections, it does not come down to one vote.

I have also been told I should just choose the candidate that is closest to my beliefs or even put in a blank ballet. In the US, a 3rd-party candidate will not win any non-local election; in other countries, I understand that it is different, but I can't speak from personal experience. And its not like I would ever choose any of the main party candidates; some are much worse than others, but none represent my beliefs. My understanding of this idea is that what is being valued is the performance of representation, not my actual representation in the system. 'The medium is the message', or who you vote for does not matter, what matters is that you vote.

I've heard people say something to the effect of 'if you don't vote, you have no right to complain about the political system'. This idea ignores the fact that not voting is an explicitly political act. I am engaging with the system by refusing to play what I perceive to be a rigged game.

But its not like the political system changes whether I vote or not; its not like anyone can know if I voted or not, unless I tell them or wear one of those 'I voted' stickers. I've heard people argue that if everyone thought this way, then the OTHER SIDE would win. But other people's decision to vote or not isn't my responsibility.

Is there something I am missing?

EDIT:

I changed my formatting to be more clear and edited the text, as a few responses seem to have missed some of my points.

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?

Article: https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/04/25/First-Past-The-Post-Civil-Rights-Issue/ (April 2019)

Press release (October 9th, 2019) about the court filing: Court challenge against Canada’s unfair voting system to be filed today

Tweet confirming the filing: https://twitter.com/Challenge4FV/status/1181992387394113536

(Sorry about the weird format but I couldn't find a recent news article and I wanted to provide more info than just the press release.)

I tend to be generous with votes if I like specific posters and want to encourage them. I like to assume that's ok, but is there an official take on that?

And what about people who are likely to share an IP address with me? I'm on a small node with fewer than 200 users, and at least 2 or 3 come here (got invited by one). I don't necessarily know them but will that look like alt accts boosting votes? Is there a whitelist or something like that for verified individuals on the same address maybe?

I've been posting these since time immemorial 9 months by now. Since almost the first post my plan was to hand the responsibility of posting them over to someone; as of recent it seems to me that soon I'll lack the time to properly participate in them as the organiser that keeps the discussion alive and fruitful. In fact, the last few posts I've either posted one comment or none at all.

So maybe the 25th or the 26th topic should be posted by the New Guy™? Has the time come? My answer is yes, TBH. In the comments, you can criticise my decision, call me lazy, or name yourself as a candidate freely. I guess we'll use votes on candidate comments to determine the next guy. If there is a tie, I'll name one of them as the next guy (tell me in the comments if you disagree with this). Voting will be over roughly when this post becomes three days old. I don't think too much precision is required, or else we can try something else.

IDK if this is a nice way to do it, but I don't want to do this Guido van Rossum style—say "bye, figure this out for yourselves, you lot" and leave. Hope I'm not over- or underdoing it. I'll ask a few prolific posters to name themselves as candidates through PMs.

Edit: I'll close voting around 3 PM UTC+3 24th of July, which means I'll edit to record votes I see by that time, including a timestamp. I'll then speak to the user with the highest amount of votes, informing them of the (rather simple) process of posting and maintaining these threads. Most probably, from #25 onwards, the new guy will take over.

Thanks a lot for taking this seriously and helping this nice feature of ~books move on with a new maintainer!

Edit 2: I'm closing votes, it's 24th of July 2019, 18:20 UTC+3. @acdw has 10 votes, @iiv has 6. I'll contact @acdw, and the next WAYRC topic will include an announcement. Thanks a lot for your participation and interest in the future of this fun little thing we do!

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

So, votes are supposed to be used on quality content and comments that contribute to the conversation, right? I think the problem with this is, most of the content on Tildes is to that standard, and if it isn't, we can just tag/report it. Voting feels redundant to me. What does everyone else think?

Why? My mouse, as well as my vision, are focused on the left. The vote box feels like its light years away on a 16:9 screen. It's on the opposite side of the screen from everything else I might click in the GUI. Its a waste of time/movement.

HTH!

This is, of course, all anecdotal.

Spiteful downvotes are a common occurrence on Reddit. Sometimes I'm arguing in a deeply nested thread with a single person, and every one of my responses receives an immediate combo of reply and downvote. It's clear that the person arguing with me is the one making the downvotes, which doesn't seem fair. That's not an indication of my contribution to the debate, they just wanna "win".

In other occasions, when I go against the hive-mind, subjective interpretations of my phrasing renders a torrent of downvotes. I'm not talking about active belligerence on my part, but subtle differences that indicate minor defiance to the norm.

Upvoting seems less toxic. Some subs can use it to brigade /r/all, but that's easily addressable by the admins (I'm not saying they do). While downvotes can easily go unnoticed, upvotes are public by nature, they attract lots of attention, so if something vicious is upvoted the backlash it receives is frequently enough to put the author in their right place.

Tildes lack of downvotes is liberating. Not that I have the urge to post controversial stuff, but the lack of an easy "fuck you button" makes it possible for me to speak with nuance. I'm more preoccupied with what I wanna say than with the 300 implicit rules [1] I must follow to avoid being buried for offending the intricate biases of every sub.

And before this gets political, please notice that I never post on those subs. I'm speaking of "silly" places like /r/aww, /r/DunderMifflin/, /r/howyoudoin and /r/programmerHumor/.

So yeah: thank you, Tildes!

[1] I have no trouble following explicit ones.

We have the "Exemplary" label for comments, which identifies comments as particularly good, and even boosts their ranking within threads.

Now that we've had this for a while, I keep finding myself want to do the same for topics. I'll read an article and want to give it an extra boost because it's better than average.

I'm ready for an equivalent to the "Exemplary" label for topics.

I've seen some discussion of what voting should be used for here on tildes.

Here are the things I try to follow when voting on comment:

• Does it have a reputable looking source ( I open the source and check it out)?
• Does it have new information?
• Is this a comment whose votes are acting as a form of population polling?
• Does it contain a well thought out point/ multiple paragraphs?

Here are the things I try to follow when voting on a post:

• Is it important for other people to see?
• Is it reputable?
• Does it contribute to the greater tildes dialogue?

I try to make sure it takes more than one of these for me to vote on a comment or page but that certainly isn't always the case. The one thing I try to stay away from is from voting just because I liked the title or because I agreed with an easy 1-3 sentence opinion unless I think that opinion is really important.

A problem I've noticed on Reddit (and here sometimes) is that a thread will have a good subject and a good amount of replies, but less than half the upvotes/votes than there are replies, even though people are clearly enjoying the discussion. So, I was wondering if we'd be able to implement a feature that automatically votes for a post if you comment on it. Or, instead of forcing it, have a checkbox near the post form specifying whether or not you'd like to vote the post up upon completion of the comment. That might give good discussion posts some visibility instead of just posts that are a shitshow in the comments section

EDIT: I don't know what I'm talking about move along please

The only benefit that I can think of is that it gives users a rough idea of how good a post or comment is, which in my opinion, is not a very good thing. It prompts us to judge a post based on how many votes it has, when we should judge the post based on its actual content instead. It doesn't do a very good job as a quality meter either. A post with 12 votes is not that much "better" than a post with 10 votes but seeing those number, it sure does feel like it. On the other hand, is a post at 100k ten times better than a post at 10k? Voting as a way to sort content is fine as the sorting is like a suggestion, the number next to it however makes it feel like a popularity contest.

I know this is a very petty thing to complain about, just want to know if anyone else feels the same way. Personally, I've caught myself getting jealous when my submission "only" have 2 upvotes while also thinking of comments with higher vote count as more trustworthy before actually read them.