Idea that could change Tildes - Agree/Disagree buttons
At first I didn't want to post this idea, because its pretty big change, but I think I'll post my idea here, thanks to @kiyoshigawa. Here is my comment that pretty much sums up my idea.
My idea is, that when people read something, and they agree/disagree with it, they want to express their agreement/disagreement (this is covered in this thread). When you want to express disagreement, you have to, because it's no downvote here, comment to disagree with some opinon. But when you want express agreement, and you don't want to comment (or simple 'I agree' wouldn't add anything to the debate), you just hit the upvote button. And that's problem, as the Vote button should serve as "quality content here" indicator, not "popular content" indicator. We've seen it on Reddit, where the effect is even larger because of the downvote button.
So my idea is - Add agree/disagree buttons. These buttons doesn't have to do something - I even think, that it'll be better if they didn't do anything. But they'll help users express themselves, so when someone agrees with me, but doesn't want to simply say "I agree", he can hit the 'I agree' button - and he won't hit the vote button. This way, popularity won't affect the "quality" score of the post.
Edit: As @Kat, @Kijafa, and others said, maybe add only agree button - not the disagree one. I think they might be right, disagree button might have negative effect, as now users have to express disagreement via comments.
Edit 2: Thank you all for discussion. You made me change my mind about disagree buttons, you are right - it'd be used as downvote and would probably suppress discussion. However, I'm still curios about the "I agree" button and if it would decrease of usage Vote button to express agreement.
This is, IMO, the best thing about this site. If you want to let someone know you don't like what they have to say, you actually have to engage with them. You can still gauge the community feeling about a topic based on the vote counts, but you can't just shit on someone's post/comment without letting them know why and putting yourself out there to also be argued with. I think this is a one of those "feature not a bug" situations personally.
I agree with you on this, this is one of things I love on Tildes - people actually discussing instead of just downvoting. I edited my post to better reflect this. However, I initially wanted my post to be more about the agree button - what do you think about it?
I don't think it'd hurt, but I'm not sure it'd bring a whole lot to the table either. As soon as people realize that the "agree" button is less validating on a personal level than the "good quality" button, people will start using whichever they think will make the commenter more validated.
Unless you allowed for both at the same time maybe? I guess you'd have to. Yeah, that might work.
That is the way I interpreted it. One for stuff you agree with, another for stuff you think is high quality.
Seeing it from this angle makes me question my comment on the other thread. On the one hand, voting should ideally be done for comments that contribute to a discussion even if you disagree with them. On the other, your point about requiring people that disagree to post makes sense. This does have a side effect of making a lot of topics seem adversarial, though, since people tend to vote when they agree, and only post if they disagree as discussed in the thread that inspired this one.
Yeah I put my thoughts on it in that thread too.
Topics with lots of vote swings are adversarial. Someone getting a lot of "I disagree" votes will feel like they are up against a crowd. The thing is, if you make that crowd engage with them at least it's not a faceless mob. They have a chance to at least put a username with the disagreement, and get some feeling as to why people disagree with them. Which I think would be a huge improvement over other platforms.
Exacly: being required to discuss your disagreement is far better than a one-word tag. Tagging it "troll" or "noise" seems useless–just don't vote for it. It might be useful to a new user to get a feel for the community (noise posts are rampant on a lot of discussion forums, yet very sparse here), but I think it's just an easy out from quality discussion.
I totally agree, especially as someone who often has opinions that would be heavily downvoted on reddit. I didn’t think the downvotes mattered to me at all on Reddit because I couldn’t care less about meaningless internet points but I find that I’m more likely to comment here on tildes where my comments won’t be judged like that without a thoughtful reply
It really kills me when I put a lot of effort into typing up thoughtful replies, making sure I'm being polite and rewriting sentences until I think I've found the best way to express what I want to say, trying to be rational and respectful of the other person's point of view, etc. And later I check out the comment and it's all in the negatives with not a single reply telling me why. Like, I'd understand it if I was being rude, aggressive, difficult, snobby, pedantic... But not when I'm genuinely doing my best to politely engage in a discussion I deem to be interesting and with the potential for being constructive.
So the conclusion of this would be to add only a "agree" button - after all that was the original issue in the comment OP linked. So if you agree, you usually have nothing to say but "yep", so a vote is sufficient. If you disagree, you can voice your disagreement, and people coming in after you can voice theirs by agreeing with you. So if you are looking at a controversial matter, the way to get a feel of the general consensus is to compare agreement with the OP with agreement of rebuttals.
Yeah, that sounds better. I'm not sure how much it would add to have separate buttons for "agree" and "good quality" but I don't see how it'd hurt at all.
Well, I for one would think that it adds being able to acknowledge a good argument without endorsing its message. I could say "you argued your point well and people should see this, but I don't want them to think that I agree with you." by using the votes only. And If I want to elaborate why I didn't also agree, I'd reply.
While I agree with you on principle, I worry that once we get big we will get a bunch of "You're an idiot!" replies.
Still better than just downvotes. Plus if you're just being a dick mods/admins will ban you.
I really dislike that idea, and it looks like it just clutters up the thread visually. There's no control in place to prevent someone from "troll tagging" posts of someone they disagree with. If they want to call someone out on a comment, it's worth it to respond with more than just "troll." That's not quality discussion; it's post-shaming. It just gives another tool to add a single-word response that adds basically nothing to good discourse.
Thanks for the links. Very interesting discussion there. I wish I could post in them, but they're way too old for anything to be seen.
Looking at the first few links here, it becomes clear to me that in that form they cause the reader to form a judgement about the comment before even reading it, even worse than downvotes do. If I scroll down the page and see
Flamex2 before a comment, I've already used someone else's opinion to inform my own opinion of the comment, something I think should be severely avoided. Right below that is one withTrollx9Noisex3Flamex2. Now how do I feel about that comment, before even reading it? Even if you put it at the bottom of the comment, most are short enough that I'll recognize the colors in my peripheral vision and again, my thoughts are prejudiced. The only way I can see them working is if they don't appear until after you've tagged it yourself, meaning you read it without prejudice and decided on your own tags, if any.Yeah, I'm looking forward to when comment tags are enabled.
re-enabled. They were previously on, but were disabled after some users abused them (think what would happen on Reddit if you had a button that made a big green "Troll" box show up on a users comment) as any sort of system from accountability wasn't in place yet
Ahhh okay. Thanks for that info.
I didn't see what it looked like, but I imagine the tags should be visually similar to the vote counts. Meaning not too visually striking.
One of the reasons why were they removed was because they had really big impact - and were way too visible. So Deimos disabled them until they will be tweaked (probably alongside with the trust system added).
What I want to say, they probably won't be so visible when they will be added back.
As a relatively new user, I have not seen the comment tags in action before now. I didn't realize that they could be applied multiple times, showing counts. Given this new (to me) information, I agree that the comment tags may be a good implementation for agree/disagree 'buttons.' I suppose it will have to be handled in a way that deals with all the issues that led to them being temporarily removed in the first place, though.
Yeah you can see where the tagged person starts feeling the need to reply to the tags, which is pretty much the opposite of the kind of discussion I want to have here.
Definitely, I believe there was some talk of using a color gradient based on the number of times the tag was applied as a potential workaround. That's something I think will be key to their use in the future to avoid biasing user's reactions before they even read the comment
I think the tags may work if they only showed themselves after a certain threshold has been met. Like if someone has reached 15 troll tags, or whatever number it is, then it shows up. This may prevent brigading an unpopular post.
One partial solution to brigading is to heavily limit the number of tags/votes a user can distribute within a certain window. Slashdot has a tagged vote system for comments, but only allows a user to apply those votes if they have "mod points", which are distributed randomly to qualified users (account age > x, y amount of recent activity), and cannot be used in the same thread a user has already participated via commenting. On top of this, votes on a given comment are capped to the -1/+5 range, any more than that won't show up.
With this approach, even if a user wanted to brigade the impact would be very limited.
Great point. I didn't think about that. I was just focusing on the mob mentality aspect that voting can take on but I guess that doesn't matter if it's visible at some point either way.
can there really be brigading in a community with ~4000 members and no sub-communities? we don't have the directly opposing boards Reddit has like SRS and TiA, as long as we maintain a more polite community that's pretty centralized I can't see it being an issue
Tildes is growing and will continue to grow. It will have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of members, and many groups and sub-groups. We can't design the site for how it is now, we have to design the site for how it will be - and it will be bigger than this.
I'm glad to see that it shows all the tags and not some random number trying to "sum" them up or something like that
oh boy that thread was a bit of a dumpster fire. I like the idea of comment tags being used with the trust system.
I agree, this is great idea
Good point, I've edited post to reflect this, as you're probably right with this.
What is your opinion on the agree button?
I'm not talking about voting for
an opinion I find harmful or unethical just because it’s polite and well‐written. But you're not wrong in your first paragraph.I think that voting should stand for "this is good high-quality content", not "haha lol ur right". This means that ideally, people would vote for high-quality content, even if they don't agree with it - but it doesn't mean, that just because someone writes, for example two page high quality essay about how "all black people are inferior", that I'll upvote it! There is a certain border between posts I don't agree with and posts that I find
harmful or unethical. I upvote the former, but not the latter.The problem is with, as I mentioned, voting for content "haha lol ur right" - not the high quality one.
This culture opposes just posting "I agree" comments every time you see something you agree with. If you want to express your agreement, most people would hit the Vote button - which is problem. I don't want to see popular posts - I can always go to Reddit if I want this. I want to see high-quality content. If we teach people to hit "I agree button" if they agree with the post (which would do nothing) instead of the "Vote" button (which does something), it could help, especially when Tildes will be open to everyone - because lot of newbies will come here, not aware of our culture.
Yes. Especially agree button, disagree button probably isn't even needed.
The point is to make users, which don't want to comment to express agreement, click on something else then the Vote button, which should be used for quality content only.
I'm not sure this will necessarily solve any problems as I can see many issues where even the truth will be disagreed with, but I'd like to see how it plays out. It might help cut down some of the noise of redundant comments.
I honestly don't know as well if this even helps with the problem, but as I said in the comment I linked: I'm curious to see if it'd help. And if Deimos likes the idea, maybe it could be added temporarily to see if it has some effect.
But I think, it could help at least a little bit with popular posts gaining high score (not necessarily now, as on Tildes, mostly high-quality stuff is upvoted, but in the future, when Tildes will be open, this could really have some effect - especially with newbies which don't know much about Tildes culture).
The reason I liked this idea so much is that it makes the vote button's purpose more clear. Every time I read a comment and I agree with it, I find myself more inclined to vote on it. This isn't the stated purpose of a vote button, but that's just where my mind goes on its own. I have to force myself to think in terms of the quality of the comment and adding to a discussion when voting on things, as it doesn't feel as natural and requires more critical thinking.
If I had the option to agree/disagree in addition to voting, it would make it easier to separate the idea of contribution to the discussion from whether I agree or disagree with the author's point. This allows for differing views to still get recognized for contributing without necessarily triggering my default reaction of wanting to vote more for the comments I agree with. It removes little mental hurdle by presenting the agreement/disagreement as a separate question from whether the comment is contributing to the discussion.
Just going to throw in a controversial opinion, I'm still for the disagree button which doesn't have anything to do with pushing things down the thread.
I notice so much tension come up and so much repetition of the same arguments because there's this overwhelming feeling that unless you copy and paste and repeat the same interaction that's already happened a million times, you're letting something bad go without addressing it.
Basically, I think that encouraging this kind of conversation in all cases (which having no disagree button does), puts users into conversations they don't want to have and which are much more frustrating and less productive than ones you'd have otherwise. I understand that downvotes as they work on Reddit are broken, but if it's just a value that shows if people agree or disagree, without any karma system or things being pushed away, I think it would be a very positive change.
That's an interesting point of view - after tons of "its downvotes!" comments. I won't discuss with you on this topic right now, as I'm inbetween, I think, it's maybe unnecessary to have diagree button, but... I'll let others discuss with you on this one.
But I have to ask - what do you think about the "I agree" button?
I'd be okay with an "I agree" button. I'm not super annoyed by empty comments that amount to "I agree," but I can understand why it would be desirable to reduce them. As for if it would increase the integrity of the regular vote, I'm not sure. As it is, I think I can pretty comfortably judge a vote to be a judgement that comes both from people who agree and those who think it's high quality, but that might get a bit muddier if we want it to only be high quality and others use it differently. It's really hard to judge if the people misusing it will be significant enough to make the "I agree" button redundant and confusing or not without trying it.
I already suggested something like this a few months ago here and here
Interesting. And @trazac said he made the suggestion even before. Looks like I'm not the first one. Thank you for these links.
The more of us, the higher is the probability of being implemented.
I feel like an "I agree" button is better than a "disagree" button. When you agree there isn't really much to add to the discussion: the button makes sense; when you disagree, you can add your opposing point of view to the discussion: a button would be a lazy way out.
You are right, I've already changed my mind about disagree buttons after this thread discussion, and no longer think they would be useful.
I feel like this would just end up being used as a downvote with a differet name
You are right, and I've already changed my mind about disagree buttons after this thread discussion, and no longer think they would be useful.
It is an interesting suggestion!
Does it depend on what the purpose of the site is meant to be? If you say "tildes is a place for people to come and find people who agree with them" then maybe the "agree" button is a good idea, but if the purpose is more like "tildes is a place for people to have discussions" then it is not clear that these buttons add any value. Might the "agree" (or disagree) buttons encourage lazy participation, and lure users into echo chambers in pursuit of internet points or the quick dopamine response of seeing their "agree" count tick up?
(I am not being critical for the sake of it - I think it is an interesting suggestion and worth discussing! I just didn't see this point of view mentioned above)
Another thing that your suggestion brings to mind is... if/when topic tags can be added by any users, would it be a good feature if users could "agree"(or disagree?) with tags. So for example if a comment is tagged as "off-topic" and most viewers agree, they can "agree" with the tag. Or if something is tagged badly viewers can "disagree" with the tagging.