Voting for forum posts

[Q. Schroll]

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 08:40:10 UTC, 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.
>
> 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.

I agree that downvotes are not nice to receive. Keeping someone 
in a cushion can be worse in the long run than a clear cut 
message such as a 50%+ dislike ratio they need to hear.

> - Sorting or filtering by votes creates unhealthy incentives - 
> there is now a system which would be advantageous to "game".

I agree, especially if the sorted/filtered view is the default 
one. If you'd have to actively seek it, I guess it wouldn't lead 
to trouble. Defaults matter.

> - Having a way to publicly communicate agreement or 
> appreciation with a post without all the bulky noise associated 
> with a reply might be nice.

Yes. And having a way to publicly communicate disagreement or 
disapproval with a post without all the bulky noise associated 
with a reply might be nice, too.

> Good vibes only!

No. Bad feelings can be healthy. No *toxic* vibes, yes!
I often got bad feelings engaging with people here. I'm always a 
little nervous about what people think when posting. That's okay.

> - 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.

I cannot say anything about that.

> - 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.

Constructive people engage constructively. Toxic people engage 
toxicly. It's really >99% the people (posters and moderation) and 
<1% the system.

I have years of experience with two apps where people could post 
jokes, both with up- and down-votes, in both one could comment on 
posts and vote even the comments.
* One had no manual moderation (posts were deleted on a flag vs 
votes basis) and a really toxic part-community. There were 
(separate) groups who posted spam, extremely offensive jokes, or 
falsely flagged posts of popular people.
* The other has only manual moderation and almost no toxic posts. 
I was a moderator myself for roughly a year. When you get a lot 
of down-votes there, it's a clear indication that your joke was 
unfunny, really bad or stupidly offensive.

Now here's the funny part: The second app was developed as a 
better and less toxic version of the first one, and it worked, 
apparently despite having down-votes.

> - In any case, at the moment we seem to be doing okay, at least 
> as far as people intentionally participating in unconstructive 
> ways.

Agreed. No one here thinks we desperately need votes. It's just a 
cost–risk–benefit analysis. Apart from the 
implementation effort, I think having two numbers below the name, 
photo, "Posted in reply to" in the box on the right will do very 
little harm at worst, but give people information.