Voting for forum posts

[RazvanN]

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 12:18:33 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 01.04.21 10:05, RazvanN wrote:

> Most of them with additional text.
>
> If we had a voting system, your comment would have been voted
>
> The post that got so much support _literally_ said that a 
> voting system would be a bad idea, and why.
>

Yes, people that wanted to understand the flow of the 
conversation without going through all of the messages would have 
seen the initial comment which would have been voted by a lot of 
people and maybe my comment which may have been supported by 
people who agree with me. This way you read 2 comments and you 
understand the general debate. If you want to zoom in to the 
details, you can just select the normal, currently used, 
algorithm where votes don't count. I see it as an optional 
feature which you can use if you want to.

>
> If that's a problem for web interface users, improve the web 
> interface.
>
I don't see how the interface would solve the verbosity problem.
If you have 200+ messages in a thread, how can the interface help
you without having some filters?
>
> Downvotes are worse than useless. Just upvote the rebuttal 
> instead; at least it will be clear what you voted for. E.g., if 
> I just downvoted your post, that would not have helped you 
> understand why.

I am not fixated on a specific proposal, I was just stating that
a voting scheme, however we choose to implement it may bring some
benefit. I agree that downvoting isn't very useful, but upvoting
could be used as a mean to find the comments that were mostly
appreciated by people. If you don't care about that, you can just
use the old interface where posts are presented in a 
chronological order.