What if replying to a comment forced upvoting of the comment being replied to?
This would help, but not completely fix, two issues that seem to be inherent in the Tildes design:
\1 Voting is mostly treated as an "I agree" button. You'll see this in pretty much any thread where there's back and forth discussion. When you reply to a comment you're implicitly saying "this comment is worth engaging with," in which case an upvote is warranted.
Same thing for topics: leaving a top-level comment should force an upvote for the topic.
\2 It encourages non-engagement with comments that maybe shouldn't be engaged with. For example, one hot topic of this week has been the calling out of low-effort posts and how the community ought to chill out a bit. By forcing an upvote, it discourages replying to said posts, which makes it more likely that such comments will be ignored and drift to the bottom of a topic.
Edit: Whether this idea is implemented or not, as long as Voting = "I Agree" this site will become an even bigger echo chamber than Reddit because there are no downvotes to balance out the "I support the message of this topic/comment" crowd.
This is a suggestion that gets made fairly often (on reddit and elsewhere), but I disagree with it. Replying to something doesn't imply "I think other people should read this post", so it works in some cases, but not others. For example, if someone posts something that's just plain wrong, now anyone that replies to correct them also ends up voting up their post.
Comments that are particularly inciteful tend to draw more replies, which will cause them to rise above quality content. Lengthy replies which address all the problems often sit at the top of a thread with plenty of votes and no replies. I completely agree here, voting should be a conscious decision and based on quality of the post, not whether it draws people to reply.
I don't think that would be much of an issue due to the general ratio of 90:9:1 for lurkers:commenters:submitters. A vitriolic comment might get 5-10 replies (and thus 5-10 votes) but a genuinely good comment at the same tier of conversation could get way more votes just from lurkers who click Vote, putting it above the vitriolic comment.
I think you're overestimating how many lurkers actually vote on comments
Well we can agree to disagree, but I think that'd be great. I've learned a lot on Reddit through highly visible "wrong" comments that were "corrected" by others in replies. Being forced to upvote something you disagree with (if it causes you to engage with it) would serve the Tildes mission as it deters echo chambers and hiveminds.
The problem with that is that if a bunch of people reply to that incorrect comment, providing more accurate information or context, then folks that only see the incorrect comment will see that it is highly upvoted and assume it is correct.
I have seen plenty more times on reddit where a user will make a ststament and get a few upvotes, then someone replies with a more accurate one that may include a source or two and gets much more upvotes.
Another issue of replies = upvotes is that more controversial comments or posts will be more upvoted in general, which could encourage bad behavior.
Exactly - I imagine it would somewhat encourage (or at least fail to discourage) bad-faith arguing to keep your comments getting voted up, even though at some point in such an argument, nobody's really learning anything.
I don't think removing user agency is a great idea. For instance, if someone posts something factually incorrect, your options would be to ignore it, thereby possibly letting others be fooled, or reply with a correction but also give the false statement increased visibility. Neither of those sounds good.
I think the idea of "vote as agree" has been discussed before and the overall sentiment was iirc that for the most part people were okay with it... but this might be factually incorrect.
As a downside, this would act as an incentive to spam, short meaningless replies; on reddit, this would almost certainly translate into sock-puppet armies leaving comments like '.' or 'saved' on whatever post or commend they were trying to game.
Yeah, which is why we shouldn't do that for the submission itself. Commenting on it shouldn't upvote it, just bump it in the activity sort like it does now.
On the comments themselves, though... it might be interesting.
The clickable "Vote" button would still be there, so no need to spam just to upvote something. This is more about addressing the tendency to not upvote a comment/topic that one disagrees with even though it was important enough to engage with.
The method you are proposing will just cause the most vitriolic comment to naturally rise to the top.
I don’t think this will ever be an issue on Tildes, due to both the culture of the website and the future reputation system.
I hope it won't be either, but I imagine there will have to be fairly extensive planning / reactivity in order to ensure that it doesn't. Culture can be overwhelmed by new users, and training the rep. system itself to identify sock-puppeting would be a huge step forward.
The way I see it though, the entire point of Tildes' existence is for quality discussion. If people posting noise comments like the examples isn't heavily moderated, I don't see much reason for Tildes to exist.
I think we're in total agreement on that point, I merely think we need to have a very pro-active approach in shaping the system / rules / code of Tildes itself to achieve that goal while (crucially) maintaining the scalability of moderation; we've seen what happens when you don't do this (reddit)
This means that considering potentially deleterious knock-on effects of core site-implementation changes should be part and parcel of their proposal.
I don't think replying to a comment equates to believing it should be upvoted.
I think this is an interesting idea actually.
Thanks!
I think the drive to bury the visibility of ideas is what's wrong with Reddit, and I was under the impression Tildes was trying to address that. To me, high-quality discussion means visibility and exposure to ideas you don't agree with (unless inciting hate or violence or whatever, in which case delete the comment altogether). Seeing votes as "support" is generally what I think is wrong here.
I personally agree that downvoting can be useful for reducing visibility of outright bad comments, be they inaccurate, in bad faith, etc. but it's a tough line to walk, because on one hand you have no method of reducing visibility of bad content - on the other, you have reddit, where it does just become a disagree button for the majority of users. I do kinda like your idea of having a hard limit, but even that would still allow people to "punish" the comments they disagree with down to 0 - just not any lower.
Yeah, the lack of a downvote kind of spurred this thought for me and I wanted to throw it out there to see if it's worth anything. I do think the current Tildes system is doomed if no changes are eventually made, which is sad because the site has grown on me despite its flaws.
I mean I'd say let's take an example that happens very often on reddit, of a joke with a bigoted bent to it (see the countless awful jokes on /r/jokes where the punchline boils down to "Haha this straight guy thought a trans woman was attractive") - Now, is the joke like, outright inciting hate or violence? I mean it could be argued, since it is a transphobic/homophobic (in many cases) joke, but it's not openly inciting violence - but now you have a situation where if anybody comments on it to say "Hey, that's not okay" or "This joke is hurtful for these reasons" or whatever, the joke itself is still getting highly upvoted. A situation where that kind of thing would (if evading outright removal) just kinda sink to the bottom seems preferable than making it highly visible, and the same can be said of things such as bad-faith arguments, where one person's view is clearly not going to change, or largely exists just to antagonize.
I think it's a fallacy to assume that any discourse that warrants engaging with now is going to be valuable in the future, or that a parent comment is inherently more valuable than its children, as those are the sorts of decisions that require human curators.
I don't quite understand what you mean, like posting this comment would automatically vote on the post?
Yes, and my reply would automatically vote your comment. I wouldn't be able to take it back and unvote.
hmm IMHO that is dumb, i can reply to you but not like your content, vote, afaik, is to say that i liked something.
Then comment count would be redundant, because comment count would be similar to votes (maybe not, if it becomes a really famous post)