Voting for forum posts

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 4/1/21 4:40 AM, Vladimir Panteleev 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.
>>
>> cc Vladimir :o)
> 
> This idea did come up before, and is controversial as others have 
> pointed out. My personal thoughts about this today are:
> 
> - Downvotes are not nice to receive and in general carry bad vibes.
> 
> - Sorting or filtering by votes creates unhealthy incentives - there is 
> now a system which would be advantageous to "game".
> 
> - Having a way to publicly communicate agreement or appreciation with a 
> post without all the bulky noise associated with a reply might be nice. 
> Good vibes only!
> 
> - The only way I can think of to translate the votes to the NNTP/email 
> medium is either converting them to messages which have nothing but a +1 
> (which is very spammy), or not doing it at all. Neither is ideal.
> 
> - Different people engage with the community with different attitudes 
> and expectations. I'm not sure how much sense it would make to flatten 
> this to a single number.
> 
> - In any case, at the moment we seem to be doing okay, at least as far 
> as people intentionally participating in unconstructive ways.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. And also your recent work on post 
formatting is just amazing. Great stuff!

I appreciate your nuanced take as I was a bit taken aback by the blanket 
statement that voting is bad, which I find anachronistic in a "don't use 
cars because accidents" way. Proposal got downvoted as it were :o).

I agree that an upvote-only system similar to Twitter and Facebook would 
be nice to signal content that people find valuable. (Anecdote: A 
"dislike" button has been the top requested feature for Facebook for 
years. And not only casually by the users; entire business propositions 
have been made based on that. I'm glad they were not accepted.)

As to the NNTP integration, I was thinking the voting could be a 
web-only feature. Which is nice because it encourages people to swap to 
the modern web interface (he wrote, typing furiously in his Thunderbird 
window). Perhaps do the converse instead, if a post is just a +1 with no 
other added content, convert it to a vote.

No filtering or sorting by popularity would be needed, probably for 
years. Just a little heart out there with the number of votes would add 
great value.

Thanks for engaging.