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votes
Default Post Values and What we call Votes; A potential solution to both of these
Problem Summary
- "Vote" might not be the best word for tildes, since it implies choice
- 0 might not be the best number to start votes at
Solution
- Call the score "Score". It feels really natural: This has a score of 5. My submission has a great score.
- Call the act of voting +. It feels mostly natural: I give this +. I + this post. I got a +.
- Start score at 0. Things start at zero.
- When someone submits something, have them auto+ their own post. + is removable, but see next point - user will never see a 0.
- Hide scores until you have voted on something. This is potentially controversial, but I think it makes sense. Just show a big + in a box for the vote.
I think this checks off most of the concerns around things that were brought up in both of those threads (listed below).
Sources
For posterity, here are both the previous links on this topic:
Not a bad idea, but I do have a few questions/concerns:
-button for collapsing comments. If upvote is+that suddenly seems like a downvote instead of collapse. Also, once comments are collapsed, the button turns into a+, so that's definitely confusing. We could probably change it to the other kinda-standard collapsing icons like these - I already have these for collapsing/expanding text topics from the listing page, so switching probably isn't bad.I envisioned just a + in a box before voting, but it could be a + with "Score: 5" underneath. Then when you vote, you could change to a checkmark or a different alternate symbol.
I would do something like:
Score: 5
I also think it might be worthwhile to put it in the "title" bar area. So you'd have something like:
Deimos 5 minutes ago - Score: 5
If the first piece of information in the line is the name and the last piece is the score, bolded, then I think that bookends the header of the comment nicely and scores will still be very easy to pick out.
@cfabbro this also pertains to your comment.
I think it just shuffles complexity around, and I think there's a sensible reason to be able to do it. If I post something and then someone convinces me that the link I posted isn't good, then right now I can only delete it. What happens if there's worthwhile discussion in there?
You've also spoken about giving the community the ability to edit some aspects of posts. If that's the case, then I think I can conceive of ways for me to submit something that I agree with in one context, but not in another.
If I can un+ my own things, then we can bypass both of these issues. If I no longer agree with what I've posted, I can un+ it instead of just deleting it.
I definitely understand your point here. I'm not passionate enough about my hiding scores idea to spend too much time defending it, but I think that there are a few things to bring up:
One undone vote isn’t going to help that. If that is your concern, valuable comment sections disappearing with deleted posts, then another option between leaving it up and deleting should be the solution. E.g. an ‘archive’ option that keeps the post visible in the group but simply removes it from the front page or something. But allowing people to unvote their own submissions is utterly pointless.
I do like the idea of hiding scores though. Or hiding them for 24hrs at least, like you can do on reddit.
I think that's just not the case. I mean, I think that not being able to vote or unvote your submission is pretty pointless, especially given that we won't have fake downvote trolling here.
I don't understand why you cannot add your opinion about the thing that you've submitted as a vote. It's just a thing that makes sense to me:
I don't understand why I can change my mind about voting on other things but not the thing that I've submitted myself. The only way to have that choice to change your mind about how you vote is to include the vote when you submit, which means that you'd have the option to remove your vote.
I think you're talking about with topics though. How would it work for comments? Right now it would look like this: https://i.imgur.com/vDZiqj5.png
The meaning of the "+" there definitely isn't very clear, and I'm not even sure that I'd realize that it's not part of the "Tag". The design would probably need to change so that each button had a border on it or something, but even then I'm not sure it would be very clear.
Also, if I just use a + symbol I still need to give it some sort of text label for screen-readers and such, so what would I use for that? If the reasonable label is something like "vote for this post" (or some other word, not necessarily "vote"), then it seems like we could just use the word. Describing it as something more like "add score to this post" feels a bit weird.
The main reason that the score isn't currently in the little header bar is that the comment tags go next to the score. We're not really using them yet so it's been very unusual to see them, but they do need some space, especially if something gets multiple tags. The score doesn't necessarily have to be next to them and it could probably move into the header bar, but space would probably also be pretty tight up there on mobile when you've got all of the collapse button, username, score, post timestamp, edit timestamp in one line (edit: and when we add something similar to user flair, that will need to go there as well).
Couldn’t you just write “+1” or something? Maybe right next to the displayed score (sorry if misread that or if it was covered in the “space for tags” part of your post, btw). Like, write the score below the comment (which might be a good idea in general to de-emphasize readers pre-judging comments) and have a line like:
“Score: 5” “+1”, “Tag”, “Reply”
I definitely see a problem with a raw + sign. It’s used for so many things already. I also would have thought it might add a reply, from a quick glance.
For comments, I'm picturing + as an outline button. Tag / Reply could still be links, or very de-emphasized buttons. I think that attributes importance to +ing things.
As for screen readers - JAWS reads "+" as plus, but that's the only screenreader I've tested with. I think it could just be "plus" as the word if there are issues with how it's said otherwise.
I understand just using the word for things, but as was pointed out by others "Vote" doesn't feel right, but that's probably because of my time spent on reddit where there are options to voting.
With respect to the score in the header, I feel like it belongs more with that type of meta information, and the tags for comments belong closer to the content, but that's just because that hierarchy feels right to me. I haven't really given it much thought beyond that. I guess the score looks a bit orphaned whereas tags don't seem like they would.
It could get pretty packed in that header on mobile though, especially if there's a lengthy username.
I think this is an excellent solution. I especially like the idea of hiding score for everything until you vote on it. It helps avoid the issue of "This person has a lot of upvotes, therefore they deserve more!" that's so prevalent on Reddit.
Agreed. All aggregators seem focused on the numbers. I'd rather not see them, they are a silly distraction.
@Deimos has a great rebuttal against hiding scores for everything until you vote on it, just above here.
Hmm, he makes a good point.
I think that hiding the score on the main page is a good idea, similar to how reddit has the option to hide comment scores until a particular amount of time has passed. I think that we don't need to see the score of something to see if it is potentially interesting to us.
Something has always bothered me about users being able to unvote their own stuff. It serves no purpose and while there will be no issue like that here, at least on reddit is very very exploitable for generating "I'm being downvoted" sympathy. I still think it's a bad idea though.
Where does the claim for the strong, psychological impact of having a “0” next to your post come from? Doesn’t that say “early” rather than “worthless”? Isn’t it rather trivial to adjust?
If it’s really such a problem, you could change the displayed value to always show the score+1. So it would start at zero, for maths/statistics purposes while always showing 1, minimum. I assume there’s no way for Tildes posts to get negative scores?