Daily Tildes discussion - move comment vote counts to the bottom?

Deimos
Tue, 22 May 2018 19:36:33 +0000

We've had a few discussions already related to the voting mechanics (mostly about whether we should change the name, which is still definitely a possibility). Something that came up in one of those that I think is an interesting idea is moving a comment's current "score" to the bottom of the comment instead of the top. I'm a little uncertain about this, so I wanted to see what other people think.

Some thoughts:

I do think that having the vote button at the bottom of the comment is the correct placement. People shouldn't be voting before they've read the comment, and (especially if you're on mobile), needing to scroll back up to the top of the comment to vote after reading it is strange.

Because of that, if we move the score to the bottom it could even just be on the vote button itself, similar to how it already is for topics.

I do also think that having the comment tags at the top of the comment is correct. They're generally meant to be informational, and it's useful to get that information before reading the comment. For example, if I can see that a string of jokes is coming up, I may just want to collapse the thread and skip it, instead of needing to read them to recognize that they're jokes.

Comment scores are useful information overall and I don't think we should totally hide them, but some other sites have tried to de-emphasize or hide them in various ways (some of that is also related to the possibility of negative scores, which can't happen here). For example, Hacker News doesn't show comment scores at all except to the comment's author, and many subreddits on reddit hide the comment scores initially for a few hours to try to reduce biased voting from seeing them.

Let me know what you think. This is a pretty minor decision overall, but even little things like this can have significant effects, so I'm interested in other opinions about it.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/ox/daily_tildes_discussion_move_comment_vote_counts_to_the_bottom

Votes: 25

Comments: 8