Voting for forum posts

[RazvanN]

On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 22:06:38 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:40:15 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe 
> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:26:48 UTC, Andrei 
>> Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> I wonder how difficult it would be to add a voting system for 
>>> forum messages. Votes wouldn't be available in the NNTP 
>>> interface but would be accessible in the Web interface and 
>>> would allow sorting and filtering by votes.
>>
>> I'm sure this wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement, but 
>> I also don't think it is a good idea. Online voting is 
>> emotionally toxic and logically fallacious. We're better off 
>> without it.
>
> I agree
>
> Filtering or sorting by votes usually creates echo chambers. It 
> is a pretty effective way to kill any possibility of fruitful 
> debate: anyone who doesn't *sound* right to the majority of 
> voters at the beginning quickly becomes invisible, largely 
> eliminating the possibility of ever changing the majority's 
> mind about anything.
>
I don't think that Andrei wanted this implemented in a way in 
which
downvoted comments become invisible, but rather the option of
upvoting and downvoting a comment so that people who are 
interested
in the most popular/unpopular opinions would have a way to search 
for
this. Ideally, by default, the forum stays the same, however, if 
you
want to search for the most upvoted comments (which would most 
likely
represent the main points of the discussion) you should have a way
to do that.

There are numerous posts with 200+ replies that are concentrated
around 3-4 key comments. It is really hard to identify them with
the current interface, you really have to go through all of the
posts (some of them quite large). A voting system would basically
select the most important comments that are debated.

> Even without filtering and sorting, voting turns discussion 
> into a popularity contest, attracts politicians, and creates 
> new ones. In general, it's only really good for things that 
> aren't controversial.
>

I think that this thread represents the best argument why a 
voting system
is needed. You just posted a comment and the next 3-4 comments 
were basically
"+1". If we had a voting system, your comment would have been 
voted
and the verbosity of this thread would have diminished.

> All that said, many websites make it worse than it needs to be 
> with bad systems. (Bad for users, that is - maybe not bad for 
> ruthlessly manipulating public opinion.) Up votes and down 
> votes should always be tracked and displayed separately. 
> Combined net counts are stupid and misleading: 0 upvotes and 
> 100 downvotes means something very different from 10_000 
> upvotes and 10_100 downvotes.

What I get from this is that voting can be also good or bad 
depending on how
we use it. IMHO having an upvote/downvote scheme could be 
beneficial in
some situations if it is implemented properly.

Cheers,
RazvanN