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Daily Tildes discussion - move comment vote counts to the bottom?
We've had a few discussions already related to the voting mechanics (mostly about whether we should change the name, which is still definitely a possibility). Something that came up in one of those that I think is an interesting idea is moving a comment's current "score" to the bottom of the comment instead of the top. I'm a little uncertain about this, so I wanted to see what other people think.
Some thoughts:
- I do think that having the vote button at the bottom of the comment is the correct placement. People shouldn't be voting before they've read the comment, and (especially if you're on mobile), needing to scroll back up to the top of the comment to vote after reading it is strange.
- Because of that, if we move the score to the bottom it could even just be on the vote button itself, similar to how it already is for topics.
- I do also think that having the comment tags at the top of the comment is correct. They're generally meant to be informational, and it's useful to get that information before reading the comment. For example, if I can see that a string of jokes is coming up, I may just want to collapse the thread and skip it, instead of needing to read them to recognize that they're jokes.
- Comment scores are useful information overall and I don't think we should totally hide them, but some other sites have tried to de-emphasize or hide them in various ways (some of that is also related to the possibility of negative scores, which can't happen here). For example, Hacker News doesn't show comment scores at all except to the comment's author, and many subreddits on reddit hide the comment scores initially for a few hours to try to reduce biased voting from seeing them.
Let me know what you think. This is a pretty minor decision overall, but even little things like this can have significant effects, so I'm interested in other opinions about it.
I like the idea of moving it to the vote button itself. Don't really have anything to expand on, you hit most of the reasons why I feel that way in your list.
I think moving to the bottom makes sense for the resons you already mentioned. An alternative would be to not bold the score and give it a spot in the comment header after the other meta data (author name, post time). That way it is in a spot that (in my mind anyway) makes sense while grabbing less attention.
Related, I think that the tags currently do attract too much attention being colored and all. They do a great job of highlighting what I want to avoid but at the same time function as visual clutter. I also fear that they might just attract the same behavior from people "looking for trouble".
So I'd probably fancy a way to possibly collapse threads with a certain tag threshold for personal usage. For general usage I think they could benefit from being less attention grabbing.
Edit: A reason against moving it next to the vote button is that this is more likely to encourage the effect where a highly upvoted thing because it already is highly upvoted. Score and vote button being detached somewhat lessen that potential issue.
Arguments to keep it at the top:
probably more :)
I'm indifferent about the placement, honestly. Unlike reddit, where hivemind mentality takes over and a string of upvotes or downvotes will likely result in other people upvoting or downvoting accordingly, votes here only go up and emphasize content that people think should be more visible.
I can see two arguments, both equally valid:
Placing the vote count at the top makes it likelier that people will ignore comments with lower vote counts and focus on ones with higher vote counts.
Placing the vote count at the bottom makes it more difficult to seek out more insightful comments and may cause the Vote/Tag/Reply section to feel more cluttered and less readable.
I like the vote count on the bottom as well. Also I'd encourage everyone to take a look at Writingprompts on reddit as they've moved the username to the bottom as well as the scores. I remember it being something about preventing certain users who had developed a large writing fan base from having their responses unfairly bumped to the top, causing people to be less likely to read new user's responses. I wonder if it helped with that problem.
Regardless of where the vote count ends up, I think it's important that the actions (vote/tag/reply) remain at the bottom of comments. That way, users have to make at least a minimal show of having read the comment before they can take action on it.
Honestly in term of UX, anything informative should be readily available to the user.
This means that, imagining a long comment, seeing tags on the first line is definitely a must do.
The vote count... does it really tells me something about the content?
Imho no. But what could do is influence me to uniform with the majority and vote for a comment. That could be a side effect.
So, yeah. I'd move the vote count on the button to vote itself. Leaving the tags on the first line of a comment anyway.
I also like the idea of moving the vote count to the button.