21
votes
Voting on the main page discourages discussion
I realize preventing people without first reading the link or text is impossible, but the least we can do is to not encourage it. By that, I mean the vote counts on the right hand side here shouldn't be clickable if discussions are the priority for Tildes.
What do you think?
EDIT: Just to be clear - I'm not against showing the votes on the front page (though @AllMight below has a fair argument for that).
Are discussions the priority?
If the priority is discussion why show votes at all? Allowing users to vote is a great way to collect information about what people may want to invest more time in experiencing. However, displaying votes in a prominent way creates sets of incentives that are not necessarily aligned with generating good discussion. It might improve the whole platform to remove votes from the display and renaming the votes tab to 'Most Interesting' or 'Hot` or whatever would indicate that these are posts that are trending and people should check them out. Maybe just 'trending'. Then the trending tab could include more data than just votes.
Votes help sort through posts and replies, so the better stuff goes to the top, that's their intended purpose afaik.
That's the crux of it right there.
We need to sort the submissions (and comments) somehow. Tagging is one way, groups are another way, and voting is a third way. Those don't have to be the only or even the primary way it's done, they are just the traditional methods of sites that have come before Tildes. The main advantage of voting is that everyone gets it, they've used it before on other sites. If anyone has suggestions for other ways to do this we're all ears, and always will be. It's a giant, relatively unexplored problem space, and while most sites won't try new things out and experiment with ideas, Tildes will, as much as there is developer time to spare for that job. Eventually when the site is more active we'll try out the 'exemplary upvote' mechanics, and that should help highlight the quality better than basic voting does. It's an extension of basic voting.
It'll get better as the site becomes more active. Right now we're pushing towards 7k subscribers. Look at your average 10k subreddit - the posts and scores and number of comments in those places are very similar to ours here. Activity is a function of community size, and while it starts slow it grows exponentially over time - it can take off very fast. We'll start to see that happen when Tildes is around 25k users.
I think we're doing fine. The site is only a couple of months old, after all. Reddit had bots scraping and crossposting everything from other sites to get their userbase off the ground. I'm really glad Tildes doesn't need to do that.
If you want the site to become more active, use your invites. Find other communities (preferably outside of reddit) and bring people in. Building the userbase up is one of the most important jobs we have right now. When we're getting several hundred submissions a day (past the point where one person can easily read all of them) that's the time to start in on the quality mechanics. Right now imo it's premature. There isn't enough content to justify it.
I wasn't implying that we shouldn't vote, I was saying we shouldn't show the counts. Seeing votes on posts and comments changes the way you feel about the posts and comments and causing a biasing effect. Votes can even still be used for ordering just don't show the number of votes.
edit: I replied when AllMight's comment was just the question... but now with his edit my comment looks a bit silly and as if I didn't read the whole thing before answering. :/
Yeah, "Tildes prioritized high-quality content and discussions" (emphasis mine) seems to imply both are the equal priority, not necessarily one over the other. Incidentally, I also suggested something similar to OPs idea ages ago, though I was gradually convinced that it might not be the best idea since with much longer form content that severly disadvantages them over quicker to consume content. So while people voting on content before they fully consumed it is not ideal, it's a bit of a tradeoff. Now, if/when vote weight is added to the site it might not be such a bad idea moving the vote to the comments section, especially if the vote weight is modified based on the time it takes to consume said content but even then there may be some problems with it.
ehh sorry about that. I wrote my question and then it kicked my brain into gear. Next time I will leave a separate comment.
No worries... I am a habitual comment editor myself so I can't really complain. ;) I just usually add p.s. or edit: to my comment when I do.
I think we don't need voting altogether. You can tell what's hot or trending among user by looking at the number of comments on something, that way you know what's being talked about more.
See here for some previous discussion on this topic.
Thank you! I should have searched first. This being my first day on ~, I didn't realize there was a search box...
Don't worry about it, I had a hard enough time finding it myself :)
That makes me honestly curious. Why did you have a hard time finding it? It's at the top-right of the front page, where almost all search boxes on websites are located. It's in the sidebar right at the top, which to me is ideal. Is there a better place it should be located, since the site is in Alpha?
I didn't have a hard time finding the search box itself, just my previous discussion post (couldn't quite remember what it was called)
To be fair, a lot of the time I've already read articles linked here, on a depth hub subreddit or pocket.
Thanks for the depthhub sub recommendation, just checking it out now and seems similar to r/truereddit. Subscribed.
Yeah it's pretty nice. I still miss pre-2016 TrueReddit, but tildes has everything I liked there and more.
I've always thought that if you want to encourage discussion show votes on the main page but do not allow voting from the main page. Only allow "hiding" something from the main page and only allow voting from the main/comments view of a submission.
Well, it would greatly reduce the quantity of votes being cast. A lot of people won't put in the effort for a multi-click process like that. How the votes are cast by those that do we can only know by experimenting. That's what makes social forum design challenging - you can build a tool, but it's impossible to know how people will use that tool until after you see how they use it. Predicting human social behavior at scale is borderline impossible.
Honestly I like the idea of letting the basic 'vote' be mostly meaningless, like a placebo - and introducing other tools built to supplement and enhance it that take time to unlock.
I'm not opposed to disabling voting from the listing pages. I do worry that it'll make threads look a lot less busy/interesting/popular, which might be a bad thing to do on a site that's just getting started. On a site as big as reddit I wouldn't even hesitate, but on a young forum it's generally a bad idea to do anything that makes the place look less lively. People are less likely to come back if they think a forum is dead.
That's a very good point, one that I didn't consider before opening this thread. It probably changes my opinion even. Thanks!
There's another case nobody's considered. What about when the thread has zero comments? Nobody's going to want to open it unless they have a comment to add, which many people probably don't. For example, this thread has 11 votes and 5 top-level comments. By forcing them to uselessly open the thread to vote, they just won't vote at all.
Maybe that's not a bad thing, but if votes are used at all in sorting, then it's probably a good idea to give new topics that are hard to comment on but good a boost up.
A lot of content posted here is also content posted to Hacker News or reddit. So I've often voted on content I enjoyed, but read first from other websites.
Other times it's content I don't even need to click to say "this contributes". An example is the new Metric album that was posted to ~Music, which I've been looking forward to.
There will always be ways around it, but it's certainly possible to build functionality that make more users read the link before commenting.
The simplest way might be to simply disable the comment text field until the user has clicked the link. Maybe even add a timer, so the text field opens for example a minute after they click the link.
Or you could build functionality to let those posting links create a small quiz that users have to fill out before they're allowed to comment.