26
votes
Crazy Idea: What if we remove traditional voting on comments entirely?
Tildes already replaces some of the functionality of downvoting with its tags (troll, flame, off-topic). What if we replaced voting with "positive" tags: helpful, interesting, etc.? This would play off of people's indecision when faced with multiple options. A binary decision is very easy - upvoting vs. downvoting. But if you just want to vote on something because it backs up your political opinion you might pause to think for a second if you need to declare the comment "interesting".
The number of positive tags could still be aggregated into a score. Perhaps we could list the positive tags at the bottom of the comment e.g.: "10 x helpful, 5 x interesting".
I kinda like this idea. Right now I am very liberal with the vote button.
I vote for everything I reply to that isn't inflammatory
Same, which for right now works really well imo. Even if I don't reply, I'll vote most things.
That makes me wonder, why? Do you never see any posts that you consider well-written, in good faith, that contribute to the conversation? Because that's basically what the vote button is there for on Tildes. I understand if your answer is "no," but that might mean Tildes isn't a place you're going to enjoy, because that's the kind of content this site is intended to foster.
Why though?
My reasons for voting everything that does suck is just to add some level of interaction and activity to the site, I guess.
Ctrl+F slashdot.
But some comments are consists of multiple parts, maybe the first half was "informative", the second part is "joking" so it still leave the problem untackled.
Inb4 it causes something similar to the cat tax and people start giving their posts headers|footers
That's not as crazy as you think. Slashdot has had something like this for years.
Hey there, I am a brand new user of Tildes ( new as of 5 minutes ago...). I didn't remember everything I read about Tildes when I asked for an invite so I just spend those last minutes reading the docs and I found the explanation @deimos was giving to your point in the mechanics section.
I think he/she has a point saying that tags should be used for filtering options and that people won't be too keen to filter for "helpful" posts/comments but I may be wrong.
I agree with Deimos' opinion, but my rationale behind the idea on Tildes isn't for categorization. It's to slow down quick judgements on comments.
I do not used the site for long enough to have an educated opinion on this issue. I know that for me, a vote button is enough and I am not sure I would take the time to tag comments on a regular basis but that may come with practice.
Thinking about it as a classification problem changes things though.
The goal is to produce a system which can order comments by how much they add to the discussion.
So just giving people a boolean upvote is... pretty weird really. Do my votes have to take into account the current vote levels? I've certainly done this: that comment is good but this ones better and lower voted if I want to correct that I can't upvote both.
Welcome to Tildes.
Really ? I just checked and it clearly say comment tags, isn't it ?
You're right. It's been a long day.
Don't worry ! I am new to all this markdown syntax and was worried I linked the wrong section of the page !
Thanks !
This would require
finding out which tags are useful, which is prone to causing tags to abound, and it becomes just a loquace upvote
defining what tags are positive, which is unclear in many cases: now I can mark a comment as Joke or Offtopic, among others; is Joke negative or Positive, is Offtopic so? I enjoy nice jokes, and sometimes offtopic discussions make quite interesting reads.
Frankly I don't like the current tags thing, and don't think I'll ever use it, even for positive cases. I don't think it's of much use for the website to get too much between the comments and readers. Often a comment is ~2-3min reading, and one can skim and decide about such a comment in some seconds. All the complication tagging and a sophisticated voting system are not worth the hassle, both for the implementors and the users, IMHO. Just look over to HN with their now byzantine voting system. I think what we have now works quite fine. I look at votes and think "N persons thought that this comment is at least worth a superficial reading". For me, that's good enough.
I think that it's good to keep things simple, so I wouldn't vouch for complicating the voting system by introducing new ways to just leave a "like". It would make posts more noisy and less engaging.
This is an idea that I've been thinking about for a while and am strongly in favor of. Generic "voting" is so easy and mindless; it becomes an "agree" button most of the time. While I don't think simple tags like "interesting" and "helpful" are necessarily the way to go ("interesting" in particular would just become the new generic vote tag), I'd be interested to see how a forum would work with more specific positive tags. Something indicating the comment's sources have been verified; maybe something to do with the rhetorical triangle; maybe tags that have both positive/negative versions (Humorous/Cheap Joke, Substantial/Noise, Focused/Off-topic, Supportive/Troll, Kind/Flaming).
I unfortunately haven't had the time to think enough about the topic (Sorry, Deimos, for never replying to your comment about it!), but I think it's well worth exploring.
I've been thinking why not just remove the vote button on posts. I forget it's there most of the time and it does not really inform my decision to look at a post. Maybe having your account automatically vote on the post when you comment or vote a comment.
Eh that's kind of on you, I think voting is integral to the site. You should try doing it more. No comments are getting more than 20 or so votes but if they're near that number then the post almost has to have some sort of interesting substance.
I think auto voting defeats the purpose. I have replied to a comment here that I didn't think deserved a vote, for sure. This place works better if everyone participates.