14
votes
Suggestion: only allow users to vote on thread after they opened the thread or article
I don’t think the ability to vote from the front page without even looking at the content makes much sense. People should vote on content they access.
This doesn't mesh well with Tildes' ideas on privacy. I do not want the links that I have clicked on to be tracked.
This doesn't actually solve any problems. Clicking on an article does not mean that someone reads or understands it.
There are so few votes happening right now that any additional barrier to voting would be very unhelpful.
Just make it a user-side UI change. Hide the link on the front page. Done. To vote, open comment thread, upvote there. See also OPs text body.
Indeed. Additionally, if a thread has no comments yet, I might want to vote without having visited the comments, because, why??. And tracking whether the user has opened the article is hard without being invasive, I imagine.
This doesn't solve the problem, though.The proposed problem is "users should not vote on articles if they have not read them". Making the UI change you suggest only obfuscates voting, it does not actually promote reading. Plus, if I see, for example, cfab post a video that I've already watched because we subscribe to a dozen of the same YouTube channels, why do I have to jump through hoops to vote for something? This will only make votes go down and the votes aren't going to be worth more as a result.
Not saying we should do it, in fact, see point 2. I was just pointing out that there is a solution to privacy concerns (that OP already pointed out).
To be clear, I agree that the point you raised meets what OP said, 100%. This is a way to implement the fix that he proposed. However, I'm not sure that the fix that he proposed actually does anything to mitigate the problem as was stated, which was that people should be prevented from voting unless they have read the article.
So no problem with anything that you've written, I just don't think that the solution that was outlined relates to the issue that has been raised, or that the issue that is raised is actually a problem.
Maybe it’s possible to do that without breaking privacy. IDK.
Perfection is not a requirement for a policy to be successful, it only needs a positive outcome.
In other words, the fact that a course of action may only partially meet its goals is certainly relevant, but not enough to discard it. There are murders every day, but no one thinks it should be legal.
Maybe that’s an idea more suitable for the future.
It's not evident to me that your base idea - users should read articles before voting - is particularly worthwhile. Why should you be allowed to dictate how or why I vote for something? I vote for things based on an internal set of decisions, and not all of them are going to match up with how you decide to vote for things, so why should my voting process be governed by how you want to vote?
Also, why should I have to go through extra steps to vote if someone posts a song that I know well to ~music, or someone posts an article that I've previously read to ~science, or an article that I've written to ~code?
Seeing who has clicked on what link is actually a relatively privacy invasive thing. Here's a bit of history on "visited" and making decisions on who can do what and why. While this is not explicitly about this exact issue, it's close enough to show that it's difficult to see if an article has been clicked elsewhere (difficult / impossible) and to accurately see if someone has already read an article. The only way to do it is by internally tracking through Tildes if a user has actually clicked a link, and that is no bueno for privacy.
I think comparing this to a murder is not particularly fair. I don't know what's a more worthwhile comparison. Maybe "people walk on the left on sidewalks all the time, but it shouldn't be legal to do so." You are making up rules to suit a perceived problem that is much more difficult to enforce or deal with than you have considered, and I'm not sure that the perceived problem is even an actual problem.
The comparison was valid for the purpose of demonstrating that that criticism was weak because it assumed an excessively narrow scope of success. As a consequence, you now presented much stronger objections, that I will answer in another comment.
Well, maybe, but in some cases, I already read the article somewhere else, so I know it's a good article.
I do this relatively frequently. Often I'm going to tild.es to post an article only to find it already posted, so I vote for it but it would be pointless for me to reopen the link.
Yup, this is the same with me. My routine is usually to browse reddit and my core news sites first and finish here.
I often upvote stuff I already know is good and just go into the comments section to read the discussion.
Or I often upvote things I like but don't feel like participating in like ask.survey stuff.
There are plenty of times that I feel comfortable voting for a topic without having read further. Weekly threads, good questions, links to articles I have already read, etc. Additionally, there's no clear cut metric that determines why one should vote for a topic, and as such I'm not sure it makes sense to impose restrictions on how that voting is done. For example, one user may only vote for topics that either discuss or link to an article they feel makes sense and is "worthwhile". For a site full of users like this, a feature like the one you're proposing would probably make sense. Other users may vote for any content they feel was posted in good faith, even if they personally don't know anything about the topic or have no desire to interact with it further. For this user, a barrier to voting would not be good.
I think it's probably better to let users decide on what a vote means to them. If there is concern of low effort posts being voted up (which I'm not sure is an issue atm), then that is something that should probably be addressed by the community.
You may be interested in Readup, where you can only vote and comment on articles you've read. You can either use their iOS app (Android app in the works), or install a browser extension you can use to track your reading activity.
I honestly can't decide whether I'm excited to sign up or terrified because of privacy concerns.
I would personally go with terrified. There is no way that those guys are not using the data they track for their userbase for other reasons.
It's worth mentioning that the browser extension only tracks your activity after you've clicked the extension button (which opens the article in reader mode).