Staff —

Comment voting now shows the vote split!

And some more thoughts on opinions versus trolling.

The top-voted post this past week was a user requesting that we show the voting split on posts. So we just pushed out an update about 30 minutes ago that does exactly that. Now, when you see a score of zero, you can easily tell if it has received no votes, if it has received +10/-10 votes, or whatever the split may be.

We decided to rush this out because interest was so high. We're still not exactly sure how this might look in a more permanent form, including where it might be located on posts. Right now we're focused mostly on building confidence in the system, and we think exposing this data will ultimately increase that confidence.

At present, the current thresholds of -15 for graying a post, and -20 for collapsing the posts, will remain. We will continue to collect data on voting trends and consider various approaches to preserving unpopular opinions which are nonetheless worthy of protection against collapse.

But I did want to take a brief second to explain that there is a difference between unpopular opinion and out-of-context trolling. In a discussion, whether in real life or online, context is important. Popping into a NASA thread to decry the exploration of space in favor of feeding the world's hungry is almost always going to be viewed as a troll instead of a worthwhile opinion to express. Those that want to express such an opinion will have to work extra hard not to come off as trolls. This could mean laying off the hyperbole, sarcasm, and holier than thou attitude, but even then, it's going to be a major challenge. Such a poster should hardly be surprised to find themselves voted down. A person who is eager to discuss such matters would be better off taking it to The Soap Box, where freeform political discussion happens every day.

Context matters, but it's not the only thing. Substance counts too. Although we are each taught in kindergarten that we are unique snowflakes, the reality is that on a site with 8 million readers, what you personally think probably doesn't really matter to many people… not unless you can explain why, and what's relevant about your opinion. Popping into a thread about a new Android phone and saying "I will never buy one of these Android phones" is going to get voted down, because this has nothing of merit to it at all. No one cares whether or not you're going to buy an Android phone. The only way such a post is going to survive down votes is if it adds some meaningful substance to the discussion, and that takes more work than just dropping some rage or haterism on a thread.

In all honesty, we continue to look for examples of collapsed posts that were expressing meaningful opinions or arguments without engaging in otherwise trollish behavior. Please point us to them. It's our number one priority to build a system that does not stifle unpopular opinion. But what we cannot do is build a system that supports unpopular opinion laced with trolling, sarcasm, and extreme hyperbole at the expense of quality discussion.

425 Reader Comments

  1. Quiet Desperation wrote:
    All I learned was people are way to serious and everyone hates me. :-(


    lol I learned that Al Franken has a lot of fans on Ars. (And down it goes)
    397 posts | registered
  2. I'm also back to thinking that a post doesn't need anything more than the badges shown by default- the score should be irrelevant at low vote numbers (vote on the merit comment itself, without outside influence) and at sufficiently high vote numbers the badges highlight the particularly reader-worthy. I do believe a high vote count with a neutral position may be almost as important as a highly upvoted post. Let me see my own scores so I can react to that as well (was I being an ass, or was I trying to make a point and not being clear?) and make adjustments (after all, constant feed back isn't a bad thing for self evaluation).

    Also, am I wrong in up voting on well written posts as opposed to ones I support? Mr. Bright has often made posts I absolutely disagree with, but often does so in well reasoned posts. To me that's an upvote-it adds to the commentary even though he is-so-obviously-wrong. I would much rather read good arguments than vitriolic ones (and even when its other people going at it, that's where I learn a lot-eg Peter=usually informative, Dawn Falcon=usually spew [I feel safe saying that since I believe that poster was banned]).
    4740 posts | registered
  3. Hm. I think they should have done the split display as a colored bar showing percentage, Red/Green. Do we need to know the absolute totals?
    56 posts | registered
  4. Two more functional issues: It appears that if a post gets back above the -20 threshold it is still hidden.

    I just checked one listed above (I linked below) and after expanding and collapsing, the "Click to hide/show" message was reversed. [just went back and refreshed and it's fine now, but it definitely was reversed before, using Safari 6.0.1]

    http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012 ... t-23377627

    Last edited by Demani on Thu Oct 18, 2012 10:15 am

    4740 posts | registered
  5. Arsification wrote:
    The easiest way to clean-up the community is to limit flame bait articles about the smartphone industry. I suppose it's a balancing act of site hits between articles about Apple or Android vs. articles covering science news and journal articles. If you want the traffic, you have to live with the fanbois articles and the fanbois commentary.


    One man's flamebait is another man's interesting story. I prefer to find a way to improve the discussion that focuses on individual responsibility to not write bad contributions.
    19293 posts | registered
  6. Hack-n-Slash wrote:
    What are the odds of/thoughts on us having access to user-based vote totals? Not necessarily on the already-cluttered threads screen, but perhaps on the user screens, in the "user statistics" section?

    This could go either way: Vote counts made by the user, or votes on posts made by the user.

    If Hack-n-slash has 3 upvotes and 500 downvotes against him, or is he's downvoted 500 posts while only upvoting 3.... it says something about him, eh?


    We've thought about it. It could happen, but no immediate plans right now. It might be a little safer to make that only viewable to the user, though.
    19293 posts | registered
  7. Aurich wrote:
    dbmarketing wrote:
    Actually this is becoming an issue at my workplace as well. We have a number of internal systems that were declared to be non-compliant due to the ADA. So we've all been working to change spreadsheets, training manuals, etc to better mixes. I've learned a lot about color because of it, which is good as I want to get more into graphic design and web design in my department.

    This software is what I use to help Ars be color-blind friendly, and in fact I fired it up make sure I was being accurate about my arrow color comment before I posted. :)

    This is a rough model of what orange/blue arrows look like to common color-blind folks: Image


    Not to beat this too much, but while I understand the color issues for text links and such, don't the arrows imply that information more than the color? I mean, traffic lights work because of position right? that's less info than an arrow.

    And why blue? Why not Green for up voting (because the site needs more green, and more importantly that's the Reader Fav banner color) and orange for down voting (orange being a color usually associated with Warning or Danger)?
    4740 posts | registered
  8. I am indeed using the down arrows to express strong disagreement with posts discussing what I consider to be important topics.

    For example, as an iPad user, I downvote any suggestion of using mouseover aka hover to reveal the votiing breakdown.

    Also, I downvote any poster that has enough time to come and write a lengthy opinion or suggestion but by their own admission did not read the previous posts. It is often redundant and basically says that you think your ideas are so unique and special that they must be presented immediately and do not need to be weighed against all the posts of those who did in fact read the entire comment thread.

    I also up and downvoted most of the staff posts to express agreement or disagreement. Many will say that I should instead compose a substantive reply. Fair enough, but I suspect that I am nit the only person using the voting this way.

    Ultimately I believe that their needs to be a distinction between downvoting and flagging troll posts.
    1473 posts | registered
  9. Ken Fisher wrote:
    Hack-n-Slash wrote:
    What are the odds of/thoughts on us having access to user-based vote totals? Not necessarily on the already-cluttered threads screen, but perhaps on the user screens, in the "user statistics" section?

    This could go either way: Vote counts made by the user, or votes on posts made by the user.

    If Hack-n-slash has 3 upvotes and 500 downvotes against him, or is he's downvoted 500 posts while only upvoting 3.... it says something about him, eh?


    We've thought about it. It could happen, but no immediate plans right now. It might be a little safer to make that only viewable to the user, though.

    Maybe some kind of leaderboard rather than public details for each user? Could be for both posts and users, though some topics attract more votes than others. And a leaderboard for downvotes would give the trolls something to strive for! (Remember trolls, that if you are so irritating that you get ignored, you won't harvest as many downvotes. This calls for precision!)
    2361 posts | registered
  10. =) I knew that my post stating "I'm going to get voted up" would get voted down (that's just how the Internet works) but you all amazed me that it's more than 60 negative! That means even with it starting hidden (when it got to -20), more than 40 additional people expanded it and down voted it.

    You rock, Arsians!
    2798 posts | registered
  11. small_furry_spider wrote:
    Having looked at this new option, I think it is a bit confusing. I must admit that is seemed like a good idea to me before I saw it implemented, but now it takes a second to understand the (0|+0/0) format, and that is a lot of time when reading a long comment thread and deciding whether to read an individual post.

    Maybe there is some way to emphasize the total over its constituent parts?


    On a related note, I wonder if I find myself more likely to up vote a comment because others have upvoted it already, not because it is good. On one occasion I did not down vote a comment because it was on -19. It was not a good comment, but I would not have been just down voting it, I would have been hiding it, which seemed worse. Unfortunately, I have no suggestions to get around either of these.


    Perhaps we need a "meh" button, it gives no points up and no points down, doesn't judge, and doesn't hide. It... does absolutely nothing.
    post | registered
  12. I know this is page 8 of the comments, and the format of up vote/down vote display has been discussed quite a bit on the first few pages, but I just wanted to add my own thoughts.

    I think that showing explicit counts of the +# / -# is a bit too much information and promotes 'fiddling' or voting just to play with the numbers rather than expressing an honest like or dislike of the comment.

    Maybe it's just the way the comments are written or the poster that posted them, but a number of the comments on the very first page (like this one: http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/10/co ... t-23392658) always seem to be nearly exactly equal in +/- votes. Maybe it's coincidence, but there are a few on the first page like that.

    My humble suggestion would be to put either the total number of votes (+/- combined into one sum) or maybe a percentage of positive votes. That way you get the same 'information' (whether a comment was voted positively 100% by a few users, or voted positively 60% of the time by many users) for why a comment is a READER FAV or collapsed, but it would require just that much more thought and math to figure out the split if you want to 'game' the system.

    For example, I would like to see:

    +20 (80%)
    or
    +20 (120)

    Or something similar to that. The extra numbers and separators as currently shown just seem like too much, and also make things look more cluttered.
    680 posts | registered
  13. man do I want a "i read the whole damn comment thread before i posted badge"
    I used this as a test bed for how I want to think about up and down voting: I voted up and down on my agreement with the posts. As I moved on, I voted less -- should I continue to upvote posts that were duplicates of posts I already upvoted? When I bumped into a post that was -19 I didn't downvote, since it woudl vanish (I disagreed, but respected the argument).
    I like the voting
    I like the format +X (N Votes)
    I'd like to be able to sort by "most votes" (up or down)
    Might be interesting to include a XXX votes with the YYY posts info. (since my vote count probably approaches by post count now)
    I think there needs to be a troll flag, since there are a number of posts I thought were off-topic/baiting, that I wished I could indicate without the implicit disagree of a downvote.

    kudos. I really appreciate Ars.

    funny how the voting dropped off in pages 7+ and then staff started popping up again. :)

    Last edited by cp1919 on Thu Oct 18, 2012 10:30 am

    216 posts | registered
  14. Demani wrote:
    Not to beat this too much, but while I understand the color issues for text links and such, don't the arrows imply that information more than the color? I mean, traffic lights work because of position right? that's less info than an arrow.


    Going a little off-topic, but here's something that confuses me about traffic lights: When they're horizontal. It can easily be said that the outer two lights are red, but then on the inside, it's much harder to remember position for yellow and green, especially when arrow lights are introduced (I'm talking about when those arrows are off).

    I used to see the following system: Square for stop, diamond for yellow and circle for green. I have no idea if this was used anywhere else, but I'm seeing less and less of it in my area and I must wonder... why? Position helps, but what about shapes? Arrows help immensely, but why is everything else on the traffic light a circle?
    15524 posts | registered
  15. effgee wrote:
    I have not written anything that could even remotely be construed as inappropriate and/or a personal attack - but you continue to not only attach fallacious meaning to my words, now you also presume to know what I was thinking at the time I wrote them.

    Rude and/or presumptuous, definitely. Knowledgeable and/or calm in discussing the matter at hand you certainly are not.


    I stand by my reading. It is clearly a negative word.

    Someone asked me why you were getting downvotes, and that was part of my theory. As for being calm, I'm not the one getting worked up because I chose to use some word from another language that some readers don't (surprise!) understand just exactly what you're getting at.

    Sorry, but the best I can offer you is that we can agree to disagree. And I don't think you're doing any favors by descending into personal insults, like you just did. It greatly undermines the argument that you weren't trying to be insulting in the first place.
    19293 posts | registered
  16. Ostracus wrote:
    And no issues with 4% influencing the comment voting for the other 96%?


    By and large, the only people reading the comments are people with accounts. There it's probably the reverse: those reading the comments without accounts is around 4%.

    Comments are one of my most favorite things at Ars, but they are not heavily trafficked compared to the rest of the content.
    19293 posts | registered
  17. Shiimiish wrote:
    jrjolley wrote:

    <snip>

    Etc. You can see this gets old really fast. I understand that VoiceOver is parsing the punctuation like that because of how the formula is shown, plus the up/down buttons are clickable hence I understand the intention there. I'd imagine that VoiceOver is working as expected with regards to how webpage elements and structure should be read from an accessibility perspective because this is the only site with commenting that has all the formatting broken up like this. Anyway, something to turn this off as a preference would fix it. Some users may want all the info but it's certainly distracting for me. It's taking me a good 15 minutes per comment page as opposed to 5/6 before to listen through the discussion.


    Thank you for your patient second explanation, this cleared things up for me now. I can see now how the new format is hard to process.
    I hope this can be addressed in some way.

    I'm glad the explanation was good enough. It's very difficult conveying how some sites can be made very difficult to use with screen readers, simply by changing the layout or the interaction with the site. The old commenting system was great because there was the commenter's name, reply, ignore, spam links then the comment. I don't mind skipping over a couple of links now and again but having to navigate a comment thread with numbers all over the place is a little bit difficult.
    51 posts | registered
  18. Demani wrote:
    Two more functional issues: It appears that if a post gets back above the -20 threshold it is still hidden.


    It has to make it back to -15 to get uncollapsed in the current system.
    19293 posts | registered
  19. I like the new digs. But I'm wondering if we're going to lose some of the snark and fun that I'm used to seeing here. I know sarcasm is unappreciated in a lot of cases. But sometimes, it's funny.

    I like some funny along with my intellectualism.
    293 posts | registered
  20. Ken Fisher wrote:
    Sorry, but the best I can offer you is that we can agree to disagree.[emphasis mine]


    No comment, just an interesting flashback of another poster's position on "agree to disagree".
    27189 posts | registered
  21. effgee wrote:
    And now we've arrived at a "community policing" system that:
    1. Will (in my strictly subjective, personal opinion) turn the discussions into an echo chamber where the majority opinion rules, political correctness will be rewarded, and dissent (or perhaps even critical thinking?) discouraged. Apple mobs are going to "downvote" Android folk in discussions about Apple-related content and vice versa.
    2. Is equipped with a UI for the voting elements (buttons, stats) which has now become the dominant visual element for each single comment. Meta information (functional elements) has become more important than the information (the comment) itself. And *that* (information architecture) is not subjective - it is objectively a bad way of implementing said functionality.
    I realize that article comments have been a problematic area for some time, but I sincerely doubt that this system is going to provide a meaningful solution. Sure, it'll help solve/alleviate the immediate problem - silence the worst trolls with minimum expenditure/staff time. But as a means to make Ars a better place in the long run... I remain convinced it will fail.

    The German term "Verschlimmbessern" comes to mind.



    This comment being on the borderline of being greyed and/or collapsed is exactly why voting systems in comments are a bad idea. This is a reasoned and explained comment that doesn't agree with a large majority and so they down vote it, which reinforces the comment.

    I am seriously disappointed that Ars decided to go with a comment voting system. Why are you trying to emulate slashdot and it's behavior. Everytime I see a collapsed comment I have to click it to find out if it was a bad comment or just a contrary position.

    if I dont' want to see a troll I'll put them on the ignore list. There is already a method in place for handling the trolls, because people don't want to use it isn't a reason to institute high school/HotOrNot politics with a voting system. It's childish.
    206 posts | registered
  22. I know I'm kind of late to the party... but, with exposing a voting mechanism, might it also cause certain amounts of group-think and group-agreement? This in a sense that people might end up down voting important, critical posts that appear as trolling but might still have merit?

    Of course, as the article suggests, context has merit. If you go to a Twilight fan group and honestly critique the writing style, no matter how honestly and valid your points are, you might still get down-voted. Not because you're trolling, but because you're voicing an unpopular opinion.

    I think that might pose a certain danger towards open, critical thinking.

    (and yes, you could voice your opinion on the forums, but I think the front page articles is where all the action, and all the reading happens)
    379 posts | registered
  23. Demonicume wrote:
    I like some funny along with my intellectualism.

    That's the thing about being funny, though: It's hard to do well. Really hard. I'm sure most people think they're the life of the party with their complex sarcasms and rapier wit, when really they're just being an off-topic pain in the ass (I should know; I have a huge weakness for sarcasm. I've had to tell myself repeatedly, "you know, would it be such a bad thing to not hit 'Submit Post' after that?") So I've toned it down, and the Fora I spend most of my time in on Ars are likely better for it. :)
    8411 posts | registered
  24. small_furry_spider wrote:
    Having looked at this new option, I think it is a bit confusing. I must admit that is seemed like a good idea to me before I saw it implemented, but now it takes a second to understand the (0|+0/0) format, and that is a lot of time when reading a long comment thread and deciding whether to read an individual post.

    Maybe there is some way to emphasize the total over its constituent parts?


    On a related note, I wonder if I find myself more likely to up vote a comment because others have upvoted it already, not because it is good. On one occasion I did not down vote a comment because it was on -19. It was not a good comment, but I would not have been just down voting it, I would have been hiding it, which seemed worse. Unfortunately, I have no suggestions to get around either of these.

    Actually it's not that confusing. It's rather straight forward basic math dude.

    The first number is the current difference between the positive count (2nd #) and the negative count (3rd #).

    As for your 2nd comment - that just leaves the premise open for another form of spamming / trolling. For example - someone could crack a joke and it might be slightly off-topic - but it's funny enough for people to vote it up and it becomes popular - then ends up being the opposite of what Ken mentions as for something relevant and on-topic but unpopular. Then you come along and since people voted it up - you add a +1 just to go with the crowd = Fail. Defeats the point of the system.
    3011 posts | registered
  25. Demani wrote:
    Two more functional issues: It appears that if a post gets back above the -20 threshold it is still hidden.

    This is by design, once a post is collapsed it has to climb back to -15 before it will expand again. Same with being greyed out, pass the threshold and you have to climb back out a bit higher to regain normal status.
    23589 posts | registered
  26. Posting in a thread 300+ comments long.

    Useless!

    No one will EVER read this.

    Unless I add these words "Obama, Romney, Global Warming, Windows 8 and Kittens!"
    2428 posts | registered
  27. Demonicume wrote:
    I like the new digs. But I'm wondering if we're going to lose some of the snark and fun that I'm used to seeing here. I know sarcasm is unappreciated in a lot of cases. But sometimes, it's funny.

    I like some funny along with my intellectualism.


    I haven't seen any evidence of that so far.
    19293 posts | registered
  28. A comment with many negative votes should trigger a mod/author review. If upon review, it is deemed that the comment is not trolling, but just has an unpopular opinion which could be discussed, then the comment should become visible again, with an addendum to the comment stating as such (and no further downvotes can hide said comment).

    With the promoted comments system, authors have to read the comments anyway, so this shouldn't cause any significant burden on the staff.

    Last edited by Zanshin on Thu Oct 18, 2012 11:15 am

    4460 posts | registered
  29. Demani wrote:
    nd why blue? Why not Green for up voting (because the site needs more green, and more importantly that's the Reader Fav banner color) and orange for down voting (orange being a color usually associated with Warning or Danger)?

    Because this is Ars and we like orange? :) What would green and orange mean? Orange = hot, blue = cool. It fits our color theme and is still logical. As you said, the arrow is the obvious indicator, so ultimately as long as the system is consistent, color-blind friendly, and fits the look of the site it's not all that vital that it match whatever color metaphor you might prefer. We're definitely never going to a red/green system, that's just a non-starter.
    23589 posts | registered
  30. whitetigersx wrote:
    if I dont' want to see a troll I'll put them on the ignore list. There is already a method in place for handling the trolls, because people don't want to use it isn't a reason to institute high school/HotOrNot politics with a voting system. It's childish.


    I disagree. I only have one person on my ignorelist, and it's because I've been pissed off at every single one of his posts over the past 5+ years. But there are plenty of posters who I feel post crap *some percentage of the time* that I'm still willing to read, but would like to object to individual posts.
    216 posts | registered
  31. cp1919 wrote:
    whitetigersx wrote:
    if I dont' want to see a troll I'll put them on the ignore list. There is already a method in place for handling the trolls, because people don't want to use it isn't a reason to institute high school/HotOrNot politics with a voting system. It's childish.


    I disagree. I only have one person on my ignorelist, and it's because I've been pissed off at every single one of his posts over the past 5+ years. But there are plenty of posters who I feel post crap *some percentage of the time* that I'm still willing to read, but would like to object to individual posts.


    I agree with cp1919. Posters that are infuriating in some aspects, can still post thoughtful, helpful information on other topics. By putting them on an ignore list, you can miss content that you might have wanted to read.

    Last edited by Zanshin on Thu Oct 18, 2012 11:19 am

    4460 posts | registered
  32. Zorro wrote:
    Posting in a thread 300+ comments long.

    Useless!

    No one will EVER read this.

    Unless I add these words "Obama, Romney, Global Warming, Windows 8 and Kittens!"


    You forgot evolution, God, and rounded corners.

    Seriously, a little bit of "self moderation" is probably a good thing on the internet.
    42398 posts | registered
  33. OrangeCream wrote:
    Zorro wrote:
    Posting in a thread 300+ comments long.

    Useless!

    No one will EVER read this.

    Unless I add these words "Obama, Romney, Global Warming, Windows 8 and Kittens!"


    You forgot evolution, God, and rounded corners.

    Seriously, a little bit of "self moderation" is probably a good thing on the internet.


    And hence we wouldn't have three threads full of comments so far.
    27189 posts | registered
  34. VulcanTourist wrote:
    Would you agree that the staff has a considerable degree of emotional investment in their work spaces? Is it possible that the emotional reaction of you and the rest of the staff to that incident, and having your personal work spaces ridiculed or maliciously dissected, might have been the primary motivation to implement this voting system, as opposed to concern for conversational flow or the quality of that conversation for others?


    The real points are:
    1. The comment threads had become so laden with nasty, ill-thought-out, ignorant, and/or irrelevant posts by those who frequently could not be troubled to read the article or the comments, that I was close to giving up on the site.
    2. The Ars staff perceived the state of discourse on the site, considered it a significant problem, and instituted a process of improvement of which this article and comment thread constitute a continuation.
    3. There is already palpable improvement in the comment threads, perhaps if only because commenters now have had their attention drawn to the fact that others read their comments and judge their worthiness.

    What may or may not have been the motivating factors for the staff, rational or irrational, individual or collective, is irrelevant next to the facts that there was a response to a real problem, that the response is working, and that the current form of the response is seen as a state of an evolving process that takes reactions of the participating readership into account.

    Ascribing the origin of the mechanism to purported trivial personal motivation is not an effective means of guiding that mechanism's evolution, IMHO.
    19 posts | registered
  35. david_a wrote:
    Would you guys consider a user option to not collapse -20 posts? This is for the same reason that I never use any "ignore" feature on forums - I'm compelled to expand it to see if it was really that bad, which ends up taking more clicks.


    It is on our list of things to consider. I'm not a big fan of the idea at first blush, however, because I feel like the system should ideally collapse things that are truly unworthy, and more importantly, will not be further engaged with.

    If users end up arguing with the content in collapsed posts, it will ultimately reduce the utility of collapsing them in the first place. If we do ever make that an option, we are likely still to remove the quotation buttons from the content, and we may very well make it a community rule that this stuff is not to be engaged with.

    As a result, my first focus is on the collapsing system, and how to make it really only target universally or largely downvoted comments. It is our preference that gray area stuff would stay safe to engage with.

    At this stage, we are fairly certain that we will stick to a strict -20 thresholds, but will instead come up with some kind of mathematical formula that takes into account up votes, and perhaps some other features such as a user's history. The idea is that positives should always count more than negatives, to a certain degree.

    None of this is set in stone, so I hope no one takes this as a prophetic proclamation of the future or our plans. It's what I am thinking right now at 12:30 PM Eastern time on October 18, 2012. It will probably change in 30 minutes. :)
    19293 posts | registered
  36. Zanshin wrote:
    A comment with many negative votes should trigger a mod/author review. If upon review, it is deemed that the comment is not trolling, but just has an unpopular opinion which could be discussed, then the comment should become visible again, with an addendum to the comment stating as such (and no further downvotes can hide said comment).

    With the promoted comments system, authors have to read the comments anyway, so this shouldn't cause any significant burden on the staff.


    I deeply respect and trust my staff, so what I'm about to say is not a reflection on them, but more a reflection on human nature.

    I think it is unwise to put authors in a position of having to make judgment calls on whether or not something is a troll or just an unpopular opinion. Sure, 90% of the time it's probably obvious. But that 10% of the time when it's a gray area issue, I think an author might simply be too close to the story, or know too many details about the background (which may or may not have been included in the story itself) to make a fair call. More importantly, if we were to go that route, readers who didn't like the judgment calls that were made would simply make hay of the situation.

    Of course, that doesn't rule out the moderators, who are by and large independent volunteers. And we may, in fact, do something like this down the road. But I am taking a very patient approach with this, with the understanding that as each week goes by, we can learn a little bit more about how it's being used, and what we can do to improve it.

    Already we are pretty convinced that we have some solid ideas on how to protect unpopular opinions, at least unpopular opinions that are scoring right around the threshold. It gets significantly harder if something gets a ton of negative votes, but were very much approaching this with baby steps.
    19293 posts | registered
  37. I'm a canary. I get lots of hate on all the Apple and copyright articles. I'm sure we'll see how successful this ranking system is soon enough.
    42398 posts | registered
  38. LoneBagel wrote:
    I am indeed using the down arrows to express strong disagreement with posts discussing what I consider to be important topics.

    For example, as an iPad user, I downvote any suggestion of using mouseover aka hover to reveal the votiing breakdown.

    Also, I downvote any poster that has enough time to come and write a lengthy opinion or suggestion but by their own admission did not read the previous posts. It is often redundant and basically says that you think your ideas are so unique and special that they must be presented immediately and do not need to be weighed against all the posts of those who did in fact read the entire comment thread.

    I also up and downvoted most of the staff posts to express agreement or disagreement. Many will say that I should instead compose a substantive reply. Fair enough, but I suspect that I am nit the only person using the voting this way.

    Ultimately I believe that their needs to be a distinction between downvoting and flagging troll posts.


    I do understand much of what you've said, but I don't believe a post in this kind of discussion which might be used to help build consensus is the best place for that Not-reading-the-whole-thread bit. An upvote is an anonymous and non-directed way of indicating something (and that something isn't even an accepted standard). A post, regardless of what was said prior, indicates that both someone was thinking about the issue (and came up with a possible solution), and was adding to it as a potential guided, directed comment.

    Heck-I had a question about restoring visibility answered twice by staff. I didn't read all of this thread, but I certainly read a bunch before posting. Even then, if some posts are hidden I may not even see something that went before and that was intentional from the system itself. cp1919 posted with multiple reiterations of what was said before, but that post didn't necessarily add anything new, yet it is a clear vote in a particular direction. Whether or not he read all posts prior doesn't change the clarity of his statements.

    I guess the question we come back to is "Is it possible to have a system that fosters discussion but doesn't suppress dissent?". I think that's the hardest part to get right. I disagree with what you wrote, but I down think I should downvote since you are adding thoughtful comments to the discussion. For example, I disagree that hover is bad as long as there are accommodations made for other platforms-but if the computer is the predominant method of access, it does make sense to cater to that first (and give mobile it's own layout). It doesn't need to be a binary decision. But bringing up the hover issue for iPads is worthwhile, and the discussion is better for it. So you got upvoted.
    4740 posts | registered
  39. FrankM wrote:
    Ken Fisher wrote:
    Hack-n-Slash wrote:
    What are the odds of/thoughts on us having access to user-based vote totals? Not necessarily on the already-cluttered threads screen, but perhaps on the user screens, in the "user statistics" section?

    This could go either way: Vote counts made by the user, or votes on posts made by the user.

    If Hack-n-slash has 3 upvotes and 500 downvotes against him, or is he's downvoted 500 posts while only upvoting 3.... it says something about him, eh?


    We've thought about it. It could happen, but no immediate plans right now. It might be a little safer to make that only viewable to the user, though.

    Maybe some kind of leaderboard rather than public details for each user? Could be for both posts and users, though some topics attract more votes than others. And a leaderboard for downvotes would give the trolls something to strive for! (Remember trolls, that if you are so irritating that you get ignored, you won't harvest as many downvotes. This calls for precision!)


    I know that I wouldn't want to be on a list of posters ranked by up/down votes. Your posts really should be able to stand on their own, without past history telling someone if my posts are worthy of being read.
    22085 posts | registered
  40. If you erroneously vote a comment, can it be undone? In my experience, if a post is at 0, if you upvote it and then try to remove your vote by a down vote, it doesn't return to 0 but to -1.

    Is this correct? Intended? Likely to change?
    706 posts | registered

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